EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY JANUARY 28, 2023

Not ‘90 Seconds to Midnight,’ but One Week To the Age of Reason or the Annihilation of Humanity

Jan. 27, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—“Pentiti!” “No!”...”Ah! tempo più non v’è!” “Repent!” “No!”...”Ah! Your time is up!” But the Doomsday Clock still read 90 seconds to midnight! What had happened? The explanation was simple. The clock-time was not physical time. They had all precisely miscalculated. Anglosphere geopoliticians and “strategic realists,” take heed. “Pentiti!”

“The Age of Reason, or the Annihilation of Humanity?” is the “To be, or not to be” question for those that choose to recognize that the time for change is now, in this instant—not 90 seconds from midnight.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in his opera Don Giovanni, in its climatic scene, depicts how the arrogant oligarch, a serial killer and rapist (based on a real historical death-merchant of Venice), dooms himself to destruction, by refusing to recognize that a higher law has visited him in the form of “the stone guest,” the ghost of one of his victims, the murdered commendatore. The apparition appears to him, as Hamlet’s father appeared to Hamlet. The stone guest does not come for revenge, but for Giovanni’s atonement. It is a terrifying act of love, that will indeed avenge the murdered man’s death, whatever Don Giovanni decides. It is a choice that requires a metanoia, a moment of total upheaval, a moment of “hellish” self-recognition required for his own salvation.

But Don Giovanni chooses “No!” not once, but three times, with no idea that he is sealing his own fate. Like the sophists and predators of today’s City of London, Wall Street, the State Department, the pseudo-governments of the EU, and especially British intelligence, in his “infinite world-wisdom” and boundless hubris, Don Giovanni miscalculated. He, too, thought it was only “90 seconds to midnight.”

January 27, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthday, was memorialized in 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Though today, Russia, whose Red Army liberated the death camp at Auschwitz, was excluded from the official ceremony held there, President Vladimir Putin, meeting with a group of Jewish leaders in Moscow, observed that “Out of all the Jews exterminated by the Nazis, the majority were citizens of the Soviet Union, and this is a source of our common pain.... And we are doing this, we are pursuing a policy aimed at ensuring that nothing like this will ever happen again in the history of mankind....”

But how will this be ensured, “not only in our time, but for all time?” In Don Giovanni, Mozart and his librettist, the American Revolution partisan Lorenzo Da Ponte, supplied a polemical, tragic conclusion to their drama: After Don Giovanni is dragged down to Hell by the forces of natural law, those most adversely affected by him come together on the stage, and make it clear that they are essentially unchanged by his self-demise. They are as susceptible to his oligarchical evil as they were before. Consider the fact that right now, before our eyes, persons from all over the world that have sworn “Never Again!” to the atrocities of World War II, including in the nation and government of Israel, are now launching, less than a century later, a World War III that would dwarf that war’s 100 million deaths, and possibly eliminate the entire human race.

Even with this threat, the fear of association with the late Lyndon LaRouche, and with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, still listed as “Number 1” on the published Ukrainian kill lists, is being used to bludgeon people into silence, but to less and less effect. This has been done in the case of an upcoming Washington, D.C. rally against NATO’s war against Russia scheduled for Feb. 19, at which Independent Senate candidate Diane Sare will be speaking. This is being done in restricting the access of International Schiller Institute representatives and members of The LaRouche Organization to social media platforms.

The countervailing force against this suppression, however, is the reliable and apparently inexhaustible stupidity of our opponents. Take Germany’s foreign (as in “extraterrestrial”) minister, Annalena Baerbock’s “we are at war with Russia” remark. The fool Baerbock, like many of the hapless Greens of Germany and elsewhere, is probably unaware of the fascist roots of her Malthusian outlook, and therefore incapable of knowing that the reason she could be so stupid as to make the statement, “we are at war with Russia, not with each other,” is the same as the reason for her and her compatriots’ insane energy policies concerning nuclear, oil and coal. A foreign ministry is precisely the location where the slightest imprecision in stating the policies of one’s nation is often, and correctly, met with the sternest of consequences, precisely because misunderstandings between nations leading to war can so easily arise.

The self-righteous Greens, ever the stewards of Mother Earth, have, in the form of Baerbock and Habeck, in their advocacy of the war against Russia, whether intentionally or not, revived the policy of “the Austrian hippie,” Adolf Hitler, on behalf of their British sponsors. It is not a German phenomenon—we see the same mentality in Poland, the Baltic, and of course, Ukraine—but a NATO-wide one, a project for an “Allgemeine SS” de-industrialization and de-population of “today Germany, tomorrow the world,” including through war. How Green Were the Nazis? is now no longer merely the title of a book, but is a legitimate question to pose to today’s Malthusians of the Great Reset all over the world.

Let us remember that this is the same Baerbock who said, in September, that she would support Ukraine “no matter what my German voters think.” Does Baerbock also support what Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said, during testimony in front of the Congress: “Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” Is that the administration on whose behalf Baerbock is speaking? Does she support the blowing up of the pipeline by, not Russia, but an “ally-enemy” of Germany, “no matter what my German voters think?” Isn’t that called treason?

When historian Barbara Tuchman pointed out that “Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense, and available information, is less operative,” she was only partially correct. Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Don Giovanni knew that he was confronted by a unique circumstance, which he “saw before his eyes,” but he did not have the wisdom to “change into his opposite,” a true human being. Changing one’s axioms of thought, renewing the mind, requires what Martin Luther King referred to as “the strength to love.”

“Be not conformed to this world, but rather be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Paul’s admonition to the church at Rome, poses a problem, but as a thought-experiment. It is Socratic-Christian. It does not say, “transformed by your faith,” or “transformed by hope.” It says “by the renewing of your mind.” That practice of thought-experiments with truth, is the only reliable and reproducible method by which policy can be made in and for all societies, and with respect to, and for all people. Principles Eight and Nine of the Zepp-LaRouche Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, excerpted here, pose the solution concept for this current situation, and in this time:

“Eighth: In former times, one civilization at one corner of the world could go under, and the rest of the world would only find out years later, due to the length of distances and the time needed for travel. Now, for the first time, because of nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and other global effects, mankind is sitting in one boat. Therefore, a solution to the existential threat to humanity cannot be found with the help of secondary or partial arrangements, but the solution must be found on the level of that higher One, which is more powerful than the Many. It requires the thinking on the level of Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites, of Nicholas of Cusa.

“Ninth: In order to overcome the conflicts arising out of quarreling opinions, which is how empires have maintained control over the underlings, the economic, social and political order has to be brought into cohesion with the lawfulness of the physical universe. In European philosophy this was discussed as being in character with natural law, in Indian philosophy as cosmology, and in other cultures, appropriate notions can be found. Modern sciences like space science, biophysics or thermonuclear fusion science, will increase the knowledge of mankind about this lawfulness continuously. A similar cohesion can be found in the great works of classical art in different cultures.”

This is the idea of the higher hypothesis which is made concrete for this particular moment in world history. It defines a physical space-time different from the clock-time of geopolitics, in which it is not only not 90 seconds to midnight, but probably 90 seconds after. It operates as the stone guest does in Don Giovanni. It comes from the complex domain, beyond the realm of what is presumed to be possible, to solve an otherwise insoluble problem through the beautiful idea that the human species is inherently good, no matter what crimes its individual nations and members have committed.

In one week, on Saturday, Feb. 4, the Schiller Institute will pose this “penitent” question to all those with ears to hear. “The Age of Reason, or the Annihilation of Humanity?” How will you answer?