This article appears in the November 25, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this article]
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The Right to Development: Every Human Being Is Made in the Image of God
The following are video excerpts from Mr. LaRouche’s June 18, 1997, address to an EIR seminar on Africa in Washington, D.C., “The Evil We Have Tolerated in Africa, Has Caught Up with Us.” The edited video clip followed a live performance of the African-American spiritual, “He Has the Whole World in His Hands,” sung by soprano Michelle Erin, and moderator Daniel Burke’s introductory remarks for Panel 2 of the Schiller Institute’s Oct. 15, 2022 conference, “Build the New Paradigm: Defeat Green Fascism.” A transcript of LaRouche’s entire speech is available here.
The video of this excerpt is available here.
People are clinging to the delusion of something they’re going to lose. And, they are unwilling to accept the reality, that we—as a soldier in war sometimes has to face the reality—that we must choose a new road. So, what must we do? We must use the precious little time available to us, to organize around alternatives which we may not yet have the political support to implement, but which will work, and when there is obviously no other alternative, masses of people will rally around these things.
But if they don’t know about these ideas, if we don’t organize around these ideas, then, when the time of crisis comes, they’ll just go crazy because they don’t have a clear conception of an alternative.
That is the world situation today. An immoral civilization is going to its doom, a self-imposed doom. We’re well rid of it, because it would kill us, sooner or later, anyway. The question is, have we the courage to adopt an alternative, and do we know what the alternative is?
We must establish the axiomatic rule—not a do’s and don’ts list, but an axiomatic rule—that no policy must be made, which is not consistent with the fact that every human being is made in the image of God, and that their life is sacred on that account. Not only their biological life, but their right to development, and their right to participate in society on the basis of that principle.
That relations among states, relations within states, laws passed by governments, must submit themselves to those principles. The only hope we have, is to look at this horror, and turn this horror of Africa, horrors which are similarly represented in other places, and turn that into a lesson, quickly, and say, this is what we are seeing: We are seeing a great civilization which is destroying itself, because it has denied the right of human beings, in Africa, and elsewhere, the right to be treated as persons created in the image of God. Has denied them the right to participate in their society, the right to honor their ancestors, for what the ancestors gave them. The right to give their posterity what their posterity has a right to expect of them.
And we must restore law, that principle of law. We must use the crisis, which discredits this enemy of ours within—this great financial crisis, this collapsing system.
We must intervene in that; introduce a new dimension of passion into that, and say, we need a new civilization. We need the right turn in the road, as we go from the broken past to the hopeful future.
