EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2021

October 1962, or November 1989: Which Strategic Dynamic Will Drive Current History?

Dec. 1, 2021 (EIRNS)—There is no such thing, either in nature, in politics, or in culture (particularly in good Classical composition,) as “equilibrium.” There is no such thing in successful global policymaking as a “balance of forces,” a “balance of terror,” or an “Earth in the balance.” There is also no such thing as “peace,” if one means by that, the “absence of tensions.”

There is peace through development. The idea “peace through development,” as manifest in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, or the slain American President John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 American University speech proposing a joint American-Soviet exploration of space not even one year after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, represents a type of “isochronic” action, that can take the form of a physical force, as with the technologies based on new physical principles, that were the true goal of the “beam weapons” program of LaRouche in the 1980s. Such “heavy ideas” may proposed as a policy statement, whereby a leader and the society he or she represents, upshifts, or proposes to upshift the development of the entire human race, through some specific action, in that instant in time, which is “infinitely dense” with the potential for permanent change.

Those conscious of their responsibility to discover, propose and implement the specific measures that can link that society’s momentary actions to the permanent survival of mankind, can allow “average citizens” to discover, with increasing perfection the historical necessity and reason for the existence of that nation, that leader, and that society. Lacking such, that society is morally unfit to survive, and will not survive for long. Is that to be the fate of the present day trans-Atlantic world, including the badly misguided United States?

Speaking in an interview on November 22, regarding the 30th anniversary of his film “JFK” and his recent release of an hours-long documentary, “JFK Revisited,” filmmaker Oliver Stone noted that had it not been for JFK and RFK, unhinged military factions in the United States would have, in Stone’s view, launched, or attempted to launch, nuclear war against Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just over a year later, President Kennedy was slaughtered in Dallas. Not only is there no way, according to Stone, that the official “narrative” of those world-shattering events can be true; it is also true that, despite the existence of laws that had required the release by now of all or most of the files related to that assassination, that was, once again this year, not done.

Some, probably including President Vladimir Putin of Russia, might persuasively argue, that at this moment, the danger of thermonuclear war is either as close now, or even closer, than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Specifically, Putin stated recently that Russia developed hypersonic weapons in order to efficiently counter the emerging danger of thermonuclear attack. “The Russian Federation is concerned to an extent over major military exercises carried out near its borders, including in the Black Sea just recently, when strategic bombers were flying just 20 kilometers away from our border, armed with precision weapons and potentially even nuclear weapons. All this poses a threat to us,” he said Nov. 30. Today Putin has also said that he now must “insist on the elaboration of concrete agreements that would rule out any further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of weapons systems posing a threat to us in close proximity to Russia’s territory. We suggest that substantive talks on this topic should be started. I would like to note in particular that we need precisely legal, juridical guarantees, because our Western colleagues have failed to deliver on verbal commitments they made.”

The possibility of, as well as opportunity for strategic miscalculation, or the eruption of an unchecked “flight forward” impulse from another nation, like Ukraine, could, even in the short term, trigger a form of confrontation that would spiral out of control far more quickly than the credulous would expect. As dangerous, the still-prevalent idea, that “international affairs” are incidental to the day-to-day life among citizens of various nations, who think they are “faced with more pressing problems,” is the debased quality of thinking that prevents the trans-Atlantic world from mobilizing the moral fitness to survive in the face of well-known threats, let alone the unusual challenges of the pandemic, including the unknown mutations and evolutions of the coronavirus.

China has given the world extraordinary good news, thanks to researchers who have identified an invariant part of the virus found in all presently-known mutations of the virus strain. An antibody called monoclonal antibody 35B5 appears to neutralize COVID-19 without mutations as well as “variants of concern” (VOCs.) This potential breakthrough may turn out to be as important in its ability to inspire a crash international program of joint research in order to resolve the coronavirus problem, as it may be in treating the disease. This is the sort of effort, given our campaign “calling all virologists and epidemiologists” as announced in the Joycelyn Elders letter, that would radiate as a form of cultural optimism. That would do more to reverse the rise in drug overdoses, suicides and serial/mass murders in Europe and the United States than multiplying those nations’ police and detention capabilities a hundredfold.

Speaking of isochronicity: Operation Ibn Sina, named for a renowned Islamic scholar and genius who saved countless lives through the radiating influence of his medical ideas and solutions over more than 600 years, also challenges insipid popular-cultural stereotypes, for example the caricature of the “violent, angry Muslim bomber.” The idea of an international health platform; the building of tens of thousands of hospitals and 10 million hospital beds worldwide; the creation of 10 million doctors, physician’s assistants and nurses; the emergency construction of the necessary water, sanitation and transportation infrastructure to supply medicines and food to those that are most in need; the provision of power by an additional 200 gigawatts of energy-capacity, largely nuclear, and largely provided to the poorest areas of the world, since they are those most likely to be the source of origin for lethal, treatment-resistant undetected infections, demonstrates that the eradication of poverty, something pioneered recently most successfully in China, is the world’s true first line of defense. But the inner life of that proposal is the change in the identity of each of us toward “the other,” a change in the mind of each and all of the ostensible adversaries that must drop their mutual animosities in order that the human race mutually prosper.

That is the spirit that was seen in the November 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall, which was not merely “political realignment,” but the sudden evaporation of “the impossible.” Words failed the pragmatic politicians of the time all over the world. Only Beethoven and Schiller, and ideas of that type were able to speak to the hearts of the world’s people.

In her Wednesday webcast Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, “I think the most important news, in this respect, is coming from the World Health Organization. They just announced that they are working on a global accord for pandemic prevention and response, and that should be announced by 1 March. Now, that is very late, but it means there is time to influence the global record, and that has been our concern from the very beginning.” Forty-five years ago, Lyndon LaRouche said:

“Our approach depends absolutely upon applying our energies, on very short notice and in a concentrated way, at certain momentarily crucial points of current developments. Without the conceptual approach we employ, it would be more or less impossible to pre-determine which such points of access for intervention have the potentiality of translating a very small amount of concerted physical effort into a relatively massive shift in the overall political economic situation. Without that same specialized method, it would be virtually impossible to predefine the kinds of intermediate results which are the short term, direct goals of such interventions.... We have developed the capability ... to direct our relatively tiny physical resources for activity to crucial points of the political-social process to such a fact that—with increasing scale and influence—we are frequently able to so alter the course of events on a national and sometimes a global scale from the course events would have otherwise followed. Because we are essentially alone, entirely dependent upon our own resources, because we have learned that there exists no other force which would duplicate our rule if we did not exist..., every major development within nations of the world as a whole forces us to place that on the agenda as a matter whose outcome will be significantly affected by either our effective intervention or failure to act.”

Not October 1962, but November 1989, is our choice, not because we have the resources, or the “connections,” but because we have the isochronic power of creative reason, as that is expressed in the Operation Ibn Sina approach to “peace through development.”