EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY JANUARY 23, 2023

Acknowledging Failure as the Door to Recovery

Jan. 22, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Has the U.S.-U.K.-NATO system failed? Would its controllers know?

The once proud United States, formed in a revolution against what was then the world’s most wicked empire, sees its economic might evaporating, its currency losing its preeminent place, its life expectancy decreasing, and its efforts to work with the U.K. and NATO to crush Russia and contain China floundering. The financial slime mold, with its greatest density in the City of London and Wall Street, refuses to release its parasitical grip upon the physical economy, demanding ceaseless monetary printing and exploding debt levels, to service its demands.

The U.S.-U.K. alliance is now like a lunatic menacing Russia: “I’m crazy enough to launch direct warfare against your territory, and I think you’ll blink. You won’t really use nukes!”

Is the lunatic correct? Is Russia bluffing?

More importantly, should the entire world be held hostage to a dispute over who administers the small portion of the globe at issue here? Who gets to decide the outcome? Are the people of NATO-land rising to the challenge?

Some express deep commitments to overcoming sexism, white supremacy, transphobia, and so forth, but where is the uprising against a nuclear war that would exterminate all human life on the planet, and most other life as well?

In some areas, straws and plastic bags and gas stoves are illegal, while marijuana is A-OK. You may not be allowed to spend your money on menthol cigarettes, but $45 billion is sent to Ukraine in a heartbeat.

Transportation disasters can’t be helped and nuclear fusion research is woefully underfunded, but we have all the money in the world (or that we can print) to antagonize China, the leading motor of economic growth globally, alongside our barreling towards a nuclear exchange with Russia.

Facile World War II analogies abound—must we hear again about “appeasement” and “Munich”?—but the most dramatic parallel, that of German tanks heading to Russian territory (as in a mad attempt to take Crimea) seems to be lost on commentators.

In some situations, people must stick to their principles; let practicality be damned! But the question of who administers the Crimean peninsula is not such a case.

This madness—if it remains unchecked, unchallenged and unchanged—will mean the horrible death of all people on Earth and for no one else ever to be born again.

But that is the future of us all if those in power—who refuse to consider a world over which they do not rule, who deny the shift of world economy to Asia and the Global South, who shut out the truth encircling them, that their system, their reign has ended—if these people are not stopped. And that will only be through a mass of impassioned expression of dedication to a world committed to peace through development, to the proposition that all men are created equal, endowed with the creative faculties that set our species apart from all other known life, in our power to transform our relationship to nature, to each other, to the future.

See The LaRouche Organization interview with Steven Starr for the depths of the Armageddon we face, and the upcoming interview with Paul Gallagher on the epoch-making transformation of the economy that will come from fusion power.

And on February 4, be sure to attend, with your colleagues, the Schiller Institute conference “The Age of Reason or the Annihilation of Humanity?”