EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2021

To Climb Out of the Same Abyss We Have Put the People of Syria In

May 10, 2021 (EIRNS)—The Schiller Institute has expanded in numbers and influence again this weekend with an international conference that grew out of the decision by Schiller Institute President and founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche taking up and amplifying Apostolic Nuncio to Syria Cardinal Mario Zenari’s call to end the murderous sanctions imposed on the population of Syria. Her passionate insistence that barring reconstruction investment after war, blocking and stealing food, and even preventing imports of medicines—punishing a people to overthrow their elected government—must be ended, led to the conference with 20 international speakers and greeted by additional institutions: “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” It is here to be watched or re-watched and circulated to recover the social and political origin of morality, the belief in the “general welfare” and the common good of humanity.

It begins with the presentations and extraordinary dialogue among Mrs. LaRouche, Syrian Presidential Political and Media Advisor Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, and retired Army Colonel and former Virginia State Sen. Richard Black, who called the U.S./British/NATO treatment of the Syrian population “worse than the My Lai massacre” during the time he fought with the Marines in Vietnam.

The conference had a second session, “The Method of the Coincidence of Opposites: Only a United Worldwide Health Effort, Without Sanctions, Can Reverse a Worldwide Pandemic”; presented by active leaders of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, formed last year by Mrs. LaRouche and Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon-General of the United States. “Opposites” as, for example, in the apparent opposition between the “superpower” United States and the nations it is presuming to sanction—which, when looked at in a different way, turn out urgently to need exactly the same thing.

COVID-19 has shown that the deterioration in standards and conditions of life in Africa, South Asia, Ibero-America in recent decades has meant that Americans or Europeans cannot escape, and have not now escaped from a pandemic which ravages developing countries. Above all, the great majority of all the world’s nations which do not have modern public health and healthcare infrastructure, in sufficient quantity and quality of treatment and disease monitoring, means pandemics will rage indefinitely until we build those healthcare facilities, everywhere.

Already in February 2020, Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed that a modern healthcare delivery infrastructure must be built rapidly in every nation to fight the coming pandemic. She urged an emergency summit of the leaders of at least the United States, China, Russia and India—or, of the five permanent United Nations Security Council member nations—to plan to build out those health systems.

That meant new, modern hospital/clinic capacity on the order of 10 million beds, with intensive care and isolation capabilities. Hospitals are extremely electricity-intense, freshwater-intense; therefore, tens of thousands of megawatts of new electric power capacity to be built around the world; freshwater management systems, new housing for staff; above all training and “youth corps” recruitment for public health service and medical staff. Almost immediate new productive employment in this mission, of more than 100 million people worldwide, more than 5 million in the United States alone, as Mrs. LaRouche commissioned it to be worked out in a major study last May.

Such a productive mission was desperately needed by hundreds of millions in the advanced and underdeveloped countries alike who lost their work under the blows of the pandemic; but it has still not been undertaken. It is the kind of mission the United States, from FDR to JFK, gave its people. Now it has been replaced by the murderous folly of sanctions, including sanctions heaped upon the same major powers, Russia and China, with which America must collaborate to rebuild nations like Syria, Yemen, or Iraq, destroyed by war.

And the people of the United States, especially, have reaped poverty, even widespread hunger, now ominous inflation from the collapse of its economy with no productive mobilization to recover it.

Given the impact of the Schiller Institute’s May 8 conference on those who participated and watched, Helga Zepp-LaRouche on May 10 proposed a dual thrust to follow it up. Escalate the campaign to undo the inhuman “Caesar Act” sanctions, putting pressure on Congress to revoke that machine of impoverishment and hunger. This is indistinguishable, she said, from the continuing campaign for a modern healthcare system in every country, which must also be escalated and draw in many more active leaders. The aim is the moral fitness to survive.