EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY JULY 26, 2023
‘What Art Thou, Freedom?’
July 25, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The 1 billion people of NATO nations are a relatively small portion of the entire human population, yet those NATO nations and closer partners account for the majority of military spending on this planet. Although Anglo-American-directed NATO lies that it is a “defensive alliance,” its involvement in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya tell a different story.
Its global ambitions are manifest in the July 11 Vilnius Summit Communiqué. China challenges “our interests, security, and values,” the document reads. The alliance expresses outrage about the “deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order.”
Whose rules? When did NATO supplant international law? Why should 31 nations be allowed to write the “values” and “rules” of the “international order”?
“I am God, and king, and law!” says Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Anarchy.
“I am God, and rules, and law!” says NATO.
The crimes of the current Anglo-American hegemony are manifold. Many commentators, emotionally unprepared to shake that system and put in place another, limit themselves to cataloging its evils. “[Y]e can tell / That which slavery is, too well,” Shelley remarks in his Mask of Anarchy. One of his examples: “ ’Tis to work and have such pay / As just keeps life from day to day / In your limbs, as in a cell / For the tyrants’ use to dwell.”
But what is the new world that we must create? Shelley: “What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves Answer from their living graves This demand—tyrants would flee Like a dream’s dim imagery.”
This question we must answer! What sort of peace must be created?
Will Afghanistan, deprived of central bank reserves, stripped of food aid, be plunged into poverty and misery? What will create the conditions for development? Consider the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan rail project in light of the Trans-Afghan Railroad and the International North-South Transport Corridor. These projects can transform land-locked regions and countries into land-linked areas of expanded potential.
Will the United States continue to thumb its nose at the potential to cooperate with China in space? Or will shared endeavors speed humanity’s access to the nearby Solar System and create a shared defense against asteroids and comets?
Will humanity be dragged into the abyss of nuclear war by the foundering Anglo-American “rules-based order” and its insistence on maintaining hegemony?
Or, can a new paradigm, coming into sharper existence nearly every week among the Global South, find purchase and expansion among NATO countries that throw off the yoke of servitude to an oligarchical system?
The answer lies in our hands.
By initiating and building for the upcoming Humanity for Peace events of August 6, we take a promising step towards a better path. In providing guidance and dialogue, along the lines of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, we determine where it leads.
For Shelley, the future is up to us. Our oppression and liberation are both of our own making: “And these words shall then become Like Oppression’s thundered doom Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again—again—again —
“Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.
