EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY AUGUST 19, 2023
The Choice: Humanity, or Oligarchy
Aug. 18, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—In the midst of the NATO-orchestrated war that was launched, in fact, to destroy the Russian nation-state and its economic power, Vladimir Putin on Thursday, Aug. 17, spoke of building three high-speed rail lines: one between St. Petersburg and Moscow; one between Minsk and Moscow; and a third, connecting Sochi and Moscow. This internal improvements approach, echoing that of both Alexander Hamilton and Franklin Roosevelt, will require other internal changes, including financial changes, which, if implemented, will serve as an example to other nations, including developing economies in Africa, for how to end colonialism once and for all.
High-speed rail does not exist between Washington and New York, or Boston and New York, or Chicago and New York, in the United States, the birthplace of the Trans-Continental Railway. It should. Some 50 million new productive jobs for this nation, reversing the outflow of financial and other resources deployed for constantly, and perhaps intentionally failing wars, is something that “adversaries” of the United States would, in fact, support.
Putin’s announcement, and intention, represents the world of not only Russia’s but also the planet’s future. As Ghali Zbeir, Moroccan president of the Saharawi Oil and Mineral Authority, told RT on Aug. 17, “A new world order is being shaped before our very eyes ... the old world order which followed the interests of Western countries is no longer valid.” “The New World” was a phrase that was synonymous with the very-Western-oriented post-American Revolution United States.
Was the spirit of the American engineer George Washington Whistler, who built, at the request of Czar Nicholas I, the St. Petersburg to Moscow railway between 1842 and 1849, and who was buried in St. Petersburg two years before the project he designed was finally completed in 1851, present in the mind of Putin when he made his high-speed rail speech? Truly, Whistler is an historical ancestor of that Russian advanced rail project. The Vladimir Putin who donated the Teardrop Memorial to the City of New York and to the people of the United States after 9/11, is mindful of the deeper history and connection of the two nations, as he has shown in his remarks on Franklin Roosevelt on several occasions over the years.
Yet he, and other world leaders, like the Xi Jinping who studied in and lived with the farmers of Iowa, must ask, as must the American people: Where is the United States which George Whistler once so nobly represented? Is the United States that now builds $100 million drone bases in Niger, instead of power plants for the 85% of their people—over 20 million of their 25-plus million citizens—who lack electricity, despite their being rich in uranium—is that the same United States as the United States of Whistler, and Friedrich List, and Henry Carey, and Erasmus Peshine Smith, and Anson Burlingame, and Wharton Barker? Is this, can this any longer be, the United States of FDR, JFK, Martin Luther King, and Lyndon LaRouche?
The answer to that question should not be given, or taken lightly. The answer is also a choice. The answer, either way, is burdened with far-reaching consequence. For the choice before us, in a higher sense, is now between humanity or oligarchy. Both will not survive the present century, or perhaps, even, the present decade. A sweeping change is coming fast, more fundamental and irreversible than most could ever fathom—until it comes. To wait, however, to act until that change is obvious, may mean that we are too late, and “caught below the level of events,” as the late diplomat and LaRouche associate, Fred Wills, used to warn. We can lose civilization for centuries, even millennia. Worse, we can even lose humanity itself. We have that power, in our choice.
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her Friday briefing to the eleventh meeting of the International Peace Coalition, stated something that everyone needs to understand. The totally predictable (and predicted) failure of the Ukrainian “counter-offensive” against Russia can no longer be hidden from the deluded public by the military-media establishment. Their “full spectrum Hollywood dominance” of the social media “battlefield of the mind” of the trans-Atlantic’s populations, has run up against the knowable, predictable physical reality of the never-even-penetrated, let alone breached, Russian defense lines. “Bad-actor” Zelenskyy, his Nazi and Nazi-influenced associates, and their controllers have to now face what even some of their own commanders told them from the start. “Triumph of the Will” was, after all, only a movie. The death of hundreds of thousands—Russians, Ukrainians and others; the displacement of millions; the wanton waste of life and wealth; and the comprehensive World-War One-scale failure, is real, objective, undeniable.
But that does not mean that it is over. Zepp-LaRouche warned that only the conventional phase of the NATO/Russia war in Ukraine is about to be exhausted. Now, either the war will end with diplomacy and negotiation, or there will be an escalation to the thermonuclear dimension. It is not now clear which will occur. Statements that have been floated from certain circles in Germany and France, including former French President Sarkozy, whatever one may think of the messengers, indicate attempts to propose a sane, if pragmatic, way out. Insanity, however, in the form of British imperial policy, and British operatives—including Zelenskyy himself, as Scott Ritter has recently and plausibly proposed—keeps insisting on the continuation of war.
There is another process vigorously under way. The Aug. 22-24 Johannesburg meeting of the BRICS-Plus Nations is prefaced by a level of enthusiasm and fight, particularly from African nations, not seen since the 1970s, when Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for an International Development Bank electrified the “Third World,” as it was then called. That proposal was presented to the United Nations in September of 1976 by the late aforementioned Fred Wills, and was adopted in Colombo, Sri Lanka in late August. It was also the foreign policy of the first LaRouche Presidential campaign of 1976. Nearly 30 years later, in 2005, in his essay, “The Global Option for This Emergency: Beyond Westphalia Now,” LaRouche said:
“As I have argued on earlier occasions, the world, as a whole, has reached the point of development, at which the assured continuation of civilized life on this planet requires us to reject the follies of experiments in so-called ‘globalization,’ in favor of a system of respectively sovereign nation-states which would have established a form of planetary system of cooperation. This would be the establishment of the form, which is most fairly described as a realization of the same aims and principles which were implicit in that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which brought to an end both the inherent evils of ultramontane feudalism, and ended, for that time, that impulse toward religious warfare, which has returned to much of the world today: an impulse presented under the twin lunatic guises of so-called ‘religious fundamentalism’ or racism, a moral degeneration, presently integral to those follies of so-called ‘globalization,’ which threaten the continued existence of civilized life on this planet today.
“As I have emphasized on earlier occasions, the pivotal challenge to be recognized today, is the fact that we have reached the point that civilized life requires a forceful suppression of efforts to establish an ultramontane or other mode of imperial control over the planet as a whole, a control being attempted now through a rise in the roles of speculative monopolies in control of essential so-called ‘raw materials.’ There is no intrinsic shortage of necessary raw materials, if sovereign nations cooperate to develop the raw materials of this planet in ways which ensure an increase in organized supply adequate for the inevitably growing requirements of all nations.”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche will in the next days release a statement addressed to the Johannesburg BRICS assembly, accompanied by a “package” containing her Ten Principles for a New International Strategic and Development Architecture; the “LaRouche Plan for 1.5 Billion Productive Jobs,” which addresses, among other things, the real origin of the misnamed “world immigration crisis”; and 1975’s “How the International Development Bank Will Work” by Lyndon H. LaRouche. All, particularly those from the United States and Europe, who have wondered what the principles and method of implementation of a “Development Architecture” would be, are encouraged to read and master the concepts for which LaRouche became known, almost 50 years ago, to the people of the developing sector, and for which he and his movement were unjustly persecuted.
These ideas not only never died; they were prepared for this moment. If studied, mastered, and deployed, they represent an efficient, violence-free way out for the human race. The choice, to resurrect the spirit of Revolutionary America, and the universal ideas of the Constitution’s Preamble, particularly the devotion to the General Welfare of ourselves and our posterity, can place the United States and Europe back on the side of humanity, instead of oligarchy.
