EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 31, 2023
Declaring Independence
Sept. 30, 2023, (EIRNS)—It is time again for the United States people to declare independence! Not independence from the world hegemon, as we did in 1776 against the British Empire, but from attempting to be the world hegemon through an Anglo-American alliance.
It is time to declare independence from being cowed by what you perceive to be popular opinion.
It is time to declare independence from the destructive monopoly that runs U.S. policy by polarizing people along a two-party axis, while the worst policies are roundly endorsed by the leadership of both parties. Because that duopoly leadership is so committed to maintaining its absolute unwillingness to consider Moscow’s legitimate security concerns—even after months of a Ukrainian counteroffensive with no results besides death and destruction—Russia may see no way to achieve peace outside of military victory.
“Standing at a crossroads, humanity is faced with two opposing options. One is to revert to the Cold War mentality that deepens division and antagonism.... The other is to act for the common wellbeing of humanity.... The tug of war between these two options will shape the future of humanity and our planet in a profound way,”
assesses China in its Sept. 26 publication, “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions.”
Actions taken around the world can help decide the outcome. Will the Global Majority speak with its moral authority, not just as the center of world population, but as the locus of the greatest (and most needed) potential for growth, to demand an end to the pointless conflict? Will expanding discussions prompted by the peace proposal of four eminent Germans cause a change of heart among NATO countries?
What about the United States?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is soon to announce that he will be running for President not as a Democrat, but as an independent. His choice to leave the party could significantly increase the potential for independent candidates—and independent thinking—around the country.
While Americans are eager to support independent campaigns—Gallup polling shows an increase in people identifying as independents—the Anglo-American elites hate the idea of independent candidates, whether they run from within a party (as Trump did and as RFK has so far been doing), or as total independents (like U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare).
Trump is under ongoing and desperate legal attack to prevent his re-taking the White House. RFK Jr. is campaigning without Secret Service protection and, up to now, under the threat that the DNC would simply rig the nominating process against him.
Diane Sare shocked the country with her astounding success in achieving a petitioning goal in New York State that had been increased threefold specifically to prevent independent candidates from being on the ballot. Her team of over a hundred volunteers got well more than the 45,000 valid signatures required for her 2022 U.S. Senate run in New York.
Kennedy’s most important and useful stances are on the issues of war and peace.
“I’m speaking to you today, because the world is at a very similar crossroads to my uncle’s time,” RFK Jr. told an audience in New Hampshire in June, speaking in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of his uncle JFK’s American University speech.
“Nuclear tensions are at an extreme and dangerous level. As in his time, we have a unique opportunity not only to defuse those tensions, but to take a radically different path, a path towards peace.
“My uncle’s commitment to peace bore fruit in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of August 1963,”
he continued.
“But his assassination that November turned the nation down another path. His successors have launched one war after another, along with the ceaseless expansion of our military. Some call it the ‘Forever War.’
“Americans used to identify herself as a peaceful nation. In fact, at our founding, the Framers of our Constitution said that democracy was inconsistent with an imperium abroad; that if we tried to make ourselves an imperial nation abroad, that we would turn into a surveillance state, a garrison state, a security state at home, and that we would also destroy our economy, as happens with every empire.... John Quincy Adams spoke for all of [the Founders] when he said, ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Today ... this ‘forever war,’ which has so drained our nation’s vitality, now threatens to plunge the world into the unspeakable horror of nuclear Armageddon....
“Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”
Will our organizing, in conjunction with the Global Majority’s demands for peace, Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy’s opposition to the threat of nuclear war that were inevitable in a dragged-out Ukraine conflict, and calls for negotiations from within NATO nations, succeed in creating an American—and global—culture capable of responding to the need to act now to drag the U.S. off the trajectory toward nuclear war with Russia, China, or both?
The answer is in our hands.
