EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY JANUARY 17, 2023

Has World War III Already Started?

Jan. 16, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Tensions continue to mount, and the danger of civilization-ending thermonuclear warfare grows on both major fronts: the Ukraine front that has been active, not since February 2022, but since 2014 at the latest, and the efforts to isolate and contain China, to hinder its development by force. This week sees the meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Ukraine Defense Contract Group at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany—one devoted to a green, great reset of the world’s systems to consolidate Synarchic control, and the other to the military means considered required to prevent any threat to that order, by crushing Russia.

China has put the policies in perspective.

In response to claims from the U.S. and Japan at their 2+2 defense and foreign ministerial, that “China’s ongoing and accelerating expansion of its nuclear arsenal” is threatening the world, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin reminded the world that China is the only one of the five nuclear-weapons states (which happen to be the UN Security Council Permanent Members) that has made an absolute commitment to never, under any circumstances, be the first to use nuclear weapons. Regarding the supposed “threat” China poses the world, Wang, at the same press conference, held up a mirror to remind Japan of its “militarist past, marked by devastating wars of aggression and brutal crimes against humanity.”

China’s message for Japan? “Anyone seeking to jeopardize and risk the security and stability in the Asia-Pacific will be rejected and pushed back by countries across the region.”

On the U.S. and the British-centered “rules-based order,” Wang was direct:

“The U.S. preaches the so-called ‘rules-based order,’ but is second to none when it comes to undermining the international rules and order. From unwarranted invasion of other countries to arbitrary unilateral sanctions, from owing large arrears to the UN’s regular budget, to deliberately impeding the appointment of new judges to the WTO’s Appellate Body, from coercive diplomacy to piecing together exclusionary blocs, from muscle-flexing in the Asia-Pacific by deploying warships and military aircraft to opening Pandora’s box on nuclear proliferation, facts prove time and again that the U.S. does not really care about rules or order. It cares about only one thing—the perpetuation of U.S. hegemony. Any existing rule that stands in the way of U.S. interests will be ignored, replaced or even thrown out of the window, even if it was proposed and written by the U.S. itself.”

Meanwhile, U.S. inflation is in the double-digits in nearly all sectors, and Oxfam calculates that of the $46 trillion in new “wealth” (additional claims on production) created over the past two years, two-thirds was captured by the very richest 1% of the planet!

The destruction of physical economic productivity is seen in the imposition of intermittent (foolishly called “renewable”) energy on entire nations, attacks on the basic physical inputs to agriculture, such as fertilizer, and the demand that the trans-Atlantic financial bubble continue to be propped up through hyperinflationary monetary creation.

Have the people of the West really chosen these policies? What do we fear will happen to us if we oppose this sea of troubles?

Consider the new U.S. scandal now erupting—seemingly to knock Biden out of the running for a second term—based on secret documents. But it is not the spreading of such secrets that is the real problem. It is the existence of such secrets!

The way out involves ending the power of the international assassination bureau, which kills presidents, leaders, intellectuals across the world, which imprisoned Lyndon LaRouche and dozens of his collaborators, and which has placed Helga Zepp-LaRouche in the number one spot of the Ukraine presidency’s Center for Countering Disinformation.

The way out involves policy, culture, science.

Breakthroughs at the National Ignition Facility in the U.S.—fusion breakeven—and the EAST tokamak in China—long-term plasma confinement—point to the profound physical economic implications of creating the power of the sun right here on Earth.

The series of interventions, discussions, provocations by the LaRouche movement over the past years has made possible an improved form of discussion, and a growing commitment to overturn the power underlying the threat of physical and character assassination used to ensure social control.

Let us conquer that threat, that we may conquer the atomic nucleus, make huge strides in biology, and develop a better understanding of our universe as a whole. That’s the human thing to do.