EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 18, 2021

Saving Lives: The Broadest Approach

April 17 , 2021 (EIRNS)—U.S. military adventures have killed over a million people since the 9/11 attacks. American sanctions continue to starve, deny healthcare to, prevent the development of, and generally immiserate broad swaths of people around the world. And it could be far worse. Ongoing provocations against Russia threaten to unleash the kind of war that could lead to the nuclear-armed elimination of society as we know it. Why? To what end? Is Russia’s crime simply to exist as a powerful, independent force? What crimes has China committed that its very growth is seen as a threat?

Hunger now menaces tens of millions of people, over a hundred million people have found themselves impoverished over the last year of COVID-19, and 1 billion people lack reliable access to clean water and sanitary facilities. Every year, some 800,000 children die of diarrheal diseases, themselves almost entirely preventable through sanitation and water infrastructure. Malaria claims the lives of 400,000 annually. Smoking and its effects are the cause of 8 million annual deaths. The confirmed death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has surpassed 3 million.

But these figures exist only as comparisons against a base level of population and well-being that is itself far too low.

Had the economic, scientific-technological, and cultural reforms proposed by Lyndon LaRouche (such as his “Woman on Mars” proposal of 1987-88) been adopted, we could today be enjoying a world in which poverty were a thing of the past, a lunar colony could be confronting humanity with the issue of the citizenship of those born on the Moon, and once-impoverished nations would be world leaders in fields of particular expertise.

To take a narrower (and, as it may appear to most people in the world, a more parochial view), consider the United States, where in a recent year there were roughly 47,500 suicides and 19,000 homicides, of which 14,000 were murders, and 1,000 were people shot and killed by police.

Can a country that commits violence abroad achieve peace within?

And can anything less than an impassioned commitment to bring our policies and culture increasingly into coherence with the creative dignity of the human individual bring justice to those deprived of their lives, or the opportunity to live in a way that contributes meaningfully to all of humanity?

There’s a whole universe out there, full of beautiful mysteries, eager to share its wonders. Will humanity dethrone the currently leading powers of the trans-Atlantic world—primarily in the Great Britain and the U.S.—to abandon the adolescent, anti-human geopolitics that guides prevailing “Western” policy, to adopt instead the promise of cooperation among governments each committed to the general welfare, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to discovery and progress?

Lyndon LaRouche and his movement have warned for decades that the calamities inherent in the policy choices made since World War II, particularly since the assassinations of the 1960s and the undoing of the world order Franklin Roosevelt helped to shape, would confront the world in the form of economic fascism (today’s Great Reset and Green New Deal) and the threat of warfare to impose it. Charting a path out of the Dark Age we live in demands great things of us all. Will you rise to the challenge?