EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2021

What Ever Happened to ‘Never Again’?

Oct. 27, 2021 (EIRNS)—On February 23, 1982, the inside-the-Beltway law firm of Asher and Schwartz fired off a threatening letter to Lyndon LaRouche on behalf of their client, the Club of Rome and its President, Aurelio Peccei, accusing LaRouche and his associates of “defamation,” “harassment,” “intentional infliction of injury,” and other spurious charges, because LaRouche was campaigning publicly and forcefully against the Club of Rome’s Malthusian policies, which LaRouche described—accurately—as “100 times worse than Hitler.”

In less than 24 hours, LaRouche shot back his extended reply, which famously included the following statement of fact: “I affirm here and now, that according to the standards of international law set forth by U.S. Justice Robert Jackson for the Nuremberg War Crimes Proceedings, the Club of Rome is an outlaw association, an international conspiracy whose principals ‘know or should have known’ that its advocacies would represent in practice of nations genocide on a scale as much as one hundred times greater than the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime.”

Today, nearly 40 years later, we stand on the eve of the international COP26 conference, where the direct heirs of those Club of Rome Malthusians are intent on carrying out that very mission of global depopulation, “by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary,” as Lord Bertrand Russell so cynically put it in his 1923 Prospects of Industrial Civilization. Now, the trans-Atlantic financial Establishment that spawned the Club of Rome and its modern reincarnations, is reeling from the breakdown crisis of its financial system, the stunning defeat of their “forever wars” in Afghanistan, the rise of a global alternative to their bankrupt system in the form of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and restive populations in many countries that are desperate for substantive change.

The response of that desperate Establishment to those countries and people resisting their policies can be characterized simply as the oligarchical battle cry: “Après nous, le déluge.” If—like India, Russia and many Americans—you resist the COP26 program of de-carbonization and deindustrialization, we will use our eco-terrorists to strike at pipelines and industrial infrastructure. If—like Afghanistan—you expel the U.S. and NATO from your country, we will either starve you into submission by freezing your funds and cutting off all finances, or we will leave nothing but scorched earth with tens of millions dead from starvation and disease, just as we are also doing in Haiti. If—like Russia—you warn that Ukraine joining NATO is a red line you cannot accept, we will insist on doing just that and play a nuclear chicken game with you. We will do the same with China over the issue of Taiwan.

It is to address this unprecedented crisis that Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute and Guus Berkhout of the Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) group have issued a joint “Wake-Up Call,” to rally forces around the world to defeat the Malthusian onslaught. As Zepp-LaRouche reported in her weekly international webcast today, that call “begins by stating that we are in an absolute breakdown crisis, a civilizational collapse crisis, with an acute war danger, an acute hyperinflationary blow-out of the system clearly coming, an incredible genocide in Afghanistan and Haiti, and that one has to look at this whole picture as a totality in order to come to the right conclusion. And then we confront that with the most important question, and that is the matter underlying all of these policies vs. what our policy should be, and that is the image of man.”

That “Wake-Up Call,” which is now circulating internationally and is gathering many signatures, presents that concept of man:

“1. Human life is inviolable. Man is the only species endowed with creative reason, which distinguishes him from all other living beings. This creative capability enables him to continually discover new principles of the physical universe, which is called scientific progress. The fact that the human mind, through an immaterial idea, is able to discover these principles, which then have an effect in the material universe in the form of technological progress, proves that there is a correspondence between the lawfulness of the human mind and the laws of the physical universe.

“2. Just as the spatial expanse and anti-entropic evolution of the universe are infinite, so is the intellectual and moral perfectibility of the human mind. Therefore, every additional human being is a new source for further development of the universe and for the solution of problems on Earth, such as overcoming poverty, disease, underdevelopment, and violence. Taking care of each other is key in this ongoing development. It is the combination of creativity and empathy that transcends mere day-to-day exigencies.

“3. Scientific and technological progress has a positive effect in that, when applied to the production process, it increases the productivity of the labor force and of industrial and agricultural capacities, which in turn leads to rising living standards and a longer life expectancy for more and more people. A prosperous physical economy is the precondition for the positive development of the common good, providing not only the elites, but all people with quality food, clean water, affordable and modern health care, quality education, modern communications and, above all, cheap and sufficient energy with high energy flux densities.”.