EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY MARCH 8, 2023
Make the U.S. Great Again—By Becoming Good Again
March 7, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—A general strike took place across France today. Police authorities estimate 1.3 million participants. The government’s attempt to grab back pensions initiated the protests, but governments in Europe are widely seen to have sacrificed their population’s welfare. A second round has been called by the CGT confederation and other unions for Saturday, March 11.
In Greece, mass rallies verging on a general strike are scheduled for mid-day on March 8. The genuine anger over the austerity conditions and privatizations leading up to the Feb. 28 horrible train tragedy in Tempi has grown into demands for more than an honest investigation of the head-on crash, killing at least 57. The public sector union has focused their mass rally in downtown Athens upon the privatization mania. They are joined by the Primary Teachers Federation and others.
The Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche appeared again today on China’s CGTN in a panel broadcast, making the connection between the West’s war drive and the financial cancer driving West into breaking down and looting nation-states. Meanwhile, Beijing’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang, in his anticipated press conference on the margins of the National People’s Congress today, laid out a clear strategic perspective:
“The United States claims that it seeks to ‘out-compete’ China but does not seek conflict. Yet, in reality, its so-called ‘competition’ means to contain and suppress China in all respects and get the two countries locked in a zero-sum game. The United States talks a lot about following rules. But imagine two athletes competing in an Olympic race. If one athlete, instead of focusing on giving his best, always tries to trip or even injure the other, that is not fair competition, but malicious confrontation and a foul! Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.... If the United States has the ambition to make itself great again, it should also have a broad mind for the development of other countries. Containment and suppression will not make America great, and it will not stop the rejuvenation of China.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has refused to save any of his forces in Bakhmut, calling for a last ditch fight to the death—apparently because of the fear of a political blowback from allowing even a tactical retreat. Zelenskyy muscled his Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi into signing on to the military insanity, despite weeks of signals from Zaluzhnyi that it would be disastrous. And, in general, there’s a severe emergence of the neo-Nazi element in Kiev these days, exemplified by the “Kraken” paramilitary unit of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence invading Russia, including the Bryansk Region, last week, in tandem with neo-Nazi Denis Nikitin’s “Russian Volunteer Corps,” shooting Russian citizens and students in cars—all supposedly to inspire Russians to begin shooting their neighbors and triggering a violent coup against Moscow.
Nikitin is also the prime suspect in the attempted car-bombing of Konstantin Malofeev, the CEO of Russia’s nationalist Tsargrad TV. The modus operandi is similar to that carried out in Moscow on Aug. 20, 2022 that killed journalist Darya Dugina. And Nikitin’s sometime colleague Ilya Ponomarev, besides holding conferences in Europe on breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, is the same individual who claimed credit on behalf of the questionable “National Republican Army” for the assassination of Dugina. The Kiev regime, if it ever had plans of standing up a regular army, is turning more and more to their neo-Nazi roots, employing terror and assassinations. President Zelenskyy vowed on his nightly show that retribution would be had, by legal means or otherwise.
In the United States, on March 8 at 5:30 p.m. EST, it is expected that the House will vote on the Syrian War Powers Resolution (H.Con.Res.21) of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to force the President to remove U.S. troops occupying Syria. Gaetz began on Feb. 21 with the simple mission of forcing his colleagues to take a position and stand on it. It is now reported that the Congressional Progressive Caucus has finally come out urging all of its 100 members to support Gaetz’s resolution. It is just this refusal to be pigeon-holed into “left” and “right” small-minded identities—or worse, “identity” politics—that holds the potential for breaking the mental and moral logjam in the country.
Then, with a possible outbreak of public sanity, what is to stop the United States from becoming great again? One step in the direction of becoming good again is a happy start.
