What the World Needs Now

by Tony Papert

[Print version of this editorial]

Jan. 3—As all the world now knows, Chang’e-4 touched down yesterday on the far side of the Moon for mankind’s first-ever controlled landing there. As Lyndon LaRouche had correctly forecast even before the Chang’e-4 mission was formally announced in December 2015, a new era has opened for mankind. Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist and father of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, was interviewed today on CGTN television, and discussed his discovery that the Moon’s Helium-3 will provide fusion energy to power Mankind for the next 10,000 years. At the same moment, the great promise the Lunar Far Side offers for low-frequency radio astronomy—of which LaRouche’s science team has written—was already being exploited as early as yesterday, when the Chinese lunar lander was coupled with their Queqiao relay satellite, to make a compound low-frequency radio telescope reaching out far beyond our galaxy, while sheltered by the body of the Moon from the Earth’s interference.

Meanwhile, the Lunar lander is measuring the local water concentration, towards a future manned landing.

But still more important is Chang’e-4’s role in our species’ historic progress from Earth, and out into the Solar System, the Galaxy and beyond, which was begun, against tremendous odds, by heroic Germans, Russians and Americans of the 20th century. But then it was cruelly shut down by Britain after the American manned Moon landings of 1969-72. Now at last, that great mission of humanity has finally been resumed again after two lost generations.

We recall the words of the great Soviet space scientist Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov to his team at Baikonur on Oct. 4, 1957, when Sputnik was successfully launched: “The dreams of the best sons of humanity have been realized—the assault on space has begun.”

A new era has opened, If. . . . If and only if we properly take advantage of it. If, instead, we miss this last chance, mankind can fall back into the darkness of the last century or worse.

On the same day that Chang’e-4 landed, January 2, Donald Trump enraged the British foe with a televised hour-and-a-half Cabinet meeting, in which he placed responsibility for peace both in Afghanistan and Syria, on the cooperation, with U.S. support, between those countries and their neighbors, including India, Pakistan and Russia in the case of Afghanistan; and Turkey and Russia, perhaps with Iran, in the case of Syria. The President said that the Soviet Union had been right to intervene militarily into Afghanistan, from which terrorism was flooding into their country. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has noted, President Trump is opening the door to a Westphalian solution for Southwest Asia—one which Henry Kissinger, speaking for his British masters, excludes. Those British masters will never forgive Donald Trump for this as long as he lives.

But, once again, what is supremely important about this great change is not the facts in themselves (still less the commentary about them), but rather what we do with them—or fail to do.

The Jan. 4 EIR, which went out to subscribers Jan. 2, included a March 1998 speech by Lyndon LaRouche titled “Toward a New Bretton Woods.” He was speaking, among others, to officials and advisors of then-President Bill Clinton, and effectively to the President himself. After vividly pulling together the total idea of the New Bretton Woods System from its elements, including such features as the Machine-Tool Principle and the Eurasian Land-Bridge, LaRouche said, in effect, “You respond that those are all good proposals. Indeed, you admit that they are beautiful ideas. But, you say, they are ‘not in the cards.’ Well, let me say something to you: Lead or get out of the way!”

Dennis Speed’s article in the same issue opens with what he says is a Chinese proverb, very much to the same effect. “Those who say it is impossible, should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

In his referenced speech, LaRouche tells the unvarnished truth about what is leadership and what is not. Is the leader the one who painstakingly reads and rereads the instruments (or the sacrifices) to minutely weigh the odds of success or failure? Will Trump be impeached? Will this or that terrible thing happen (i.e., to me)? Or, does he boldly mark out the previously unseen critical path, and throw everything into the scales for victory, as von Schlieffen did? Fight relentlessly to turn the flank, sparing nothing, even if—as is often the case—the future progress of the war cannot yet be foreseen. This is the way we must fight on many fronts for LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods.

Why worry? Each of us is going to die anyway.