EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY, MAY 3, 2021

‘The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm’

May 2, 2021 (EIRNS)—Anyone who is not sleep-walking is aware that madness has taken over strategic planners in the trans-Atlantic region. The major Western banking system, squatting on trillions of dollars printed up by subservient governments to keep them afloat, is not investing in anything productive, and has declared that it is cutting off credit to fossil fuels and carbon-emitting industry and agriculture to “save the planet,” while killing off much of the human population. The Biden administration has declared Russia and China to be “existential” threats, while also declaring that nuclear war is no longer “unlikely,” but has become “likely.” NATO is moving into military positions directly on the Russian and Chinese borders. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are declaring that they want global cooperation, but also assert that NATO is crossing several well defined “red lines,” challenging their sovereignty, and forcing them to prepare for war. It could not be clearer that the world is on the brink of a thermonuclear holocaust.

But the reality is that many people—even most people—are sleepwalking. There are signs that the level of economic and strategic insanity is so great that some people are beginning to throw away their delusions, recognizing that the evil is taking place in their name, by their governments, and an “anti-Malthusian” movement is emerging, to save mankind from its own folly. The Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization are the primary organizing force for that critical effort, and are holding a conference of leading speakers from around the world on May 8, under the title in the headline of this report, which all people of good will should register and attend.

The fundamental question, then, is, how to wake up the sleepwalkers, to get people to consider their purpose on Earth, to create a force capable of stopping the holocaust and building a new paradigm for mankind, based on Classical scientific and cultural ideas. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, speaking to The LaRouche Organization Manhattan Project town hall on May 1, addressed this directly at this link:

“I personally think that this question of the indifference; that people have lost the ability to react—maybe because people are demoralized, maybe because people think you can’t do anything about it anyway, what can I do as an individual. But I think there is a deeper cultural question. I want to refer to something which my late husband Lyndon LaRouche has said many times; namely, that he was convinced that the only way humanity would get out of this crisis would be if a large enough number of people would regain an ability to think in a Classical way. That sounds like a very far-fetched and far-off possibility, because most people today don’t even have a clear idea what Classical means. They think Classical means the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or something like that. But it is, in my view, one of the most important questions; to regain a knowledge of what scientific thinking and Classical thinking in art really is. Because otherwise you are in the situation where opinion reigns, and in a liberal world every opinion is as good as the other one, and therefore you end in a complete chaos and non-action.

“I want to very briefly look at something which may be a little bit not your daily thinking. But I want to say that the West in general is clearly in a moral crisis. If you look at the suicide rates of young people, if you look at the drug addiction, if you look at the number of people dying by violence, mass shootings. The fact that we tolerate so many things, that we don’t have an impulse to try to make the world better. Many people may debate what I’m saying, but I do think that the most important underlying axiomatic problem is that we have a moral collapse. There are some people who know that, and we are talking to them. But the question people should ask themselves is, how did we get here? What was the process of undermining the beautiful principles of the American Revolution, of the American Constitution? Given the fact that we in Germany have had the horrible experience of plunging from the absolute height of Classical culture, of the Classical period between Bach and Mozart, to Beethoven, Schubert, Schuman, Schiller, Humboldt. We in Germany had a Classical period which expressed the highest conception of humanity in terms of universal history.... So, the question naturally is, how was it possible that such a very high culture could plunge into the depths of the 12 years of National Socialism? Obviously, this is a very complex question, and many factors went into it. For example, in this same period, the German Classical period and the American Revolution happened almost at the same time....

“What they did when the German Classical thinkers—everybody from Winckelmann to Schiller to Lessing to Goethe—they had revived the ancient Classical tradition. Like the Italian Renaissance, they went back to the highest forms of thinking of philosophy, of culture, which had existed before, and they tried to reconstruct the idea that the truthful beauty and the good are actually a unity. Art is only art when it is beautiful, and when it serves the good, and when it’s truthful. All of these elements have to come together.

“What the Romantic poets did was, they immediately replaced this return to the Classical period of Greece to turning to the Middle Ages. They glorified the Middle Ages, and they replaced the Greek reference with the Nordic myths, the Nibelungen saga, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, and some of you may recognize that these were also the subjects which were then used by Wagner for his compositions. He was getting very close to the National Socialists. They started to turn all the notions of the Classical period and softened them....

“And while I don’t want to go into all of these people’s work in detail, they were crazy!

If you read their novels, they all are schizophrenic, the behavior of people who have fantasies, who have death wishes, dreaming, who want to turn the day into the dream, and everything should vanish into some fantasy....

“So, the challenge today is how can we rediscover our humanity, so that we are able to cope with this incredible strategic situation? In that sense, dealing with Classical art is not a waste of time or a deviation. It is the precondition, because if you don’t listen to Beethoven’s music and you don’t think in terms of Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Schiller, Dante, Petrarca, you cannot mobilize this quality and clarity of thinking.”