EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2022

LaRouche, Rapallo, and the ‘Long Arc’ of Universal History

April 15, 2022 (EIRNS)—Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Rapallo Treaty, an act of reconciliation that sought to heal, like the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the post-World War I “irreconcilable rift” between Russia and Germany. The Rapallo Agreement signed April 16 1922 by Georgy Chicherin (Russia) and Walther Rathenau (Germany) stipulated that Germany and Russia canceled all financial obligations between the two adversary nations. Rapallo was done in such a way as to provide Germany an economic means to regain its identity as a sovereign nation state, out from under the murderous “reparations international” of the Versailles Treaty. Rather than be merely looted for coal, potash, sugar and other commodities, as a young Hjalmar Schacht, who was later to become finance minister of Nazi Germany, had proposed to John Foster Dulles in a letter dated March 20, 1922 (less than one month earlier), Foreign Minister Rathenau’s Germany would conclude a treaty to deploy its productive powers in conjunction with Russia’s newly-formed Soviet state. That state, just emerging from an unconsolidated revolution, a civil war, and withering famine, had been isolated by the world diplomatic community and was desperately in need of industrialization, especially nationwide electrification, something that Walther Rathenau’s father, Emil Rathenau, an early collaborator of Thomas Edison who had built AEG into the largest power company in the world, had helped prepare his son to well understand. Three months after the happy consummation of the Rapallo treaty, Foreign Minister Rathenau, not only an industrialist, physicist and engineer, but an artist, musician and writer as well, was assassinated on June 24, the treaty scuttled, and the world plunged into hell as a result. Perhaps the deaths of over 60 million people in the Second World War would not have occurred had Rapallo succeeded. The effort we are embarked on now for a new security and development architecture is as important to history; the consequences of failure, far more dire.

While it may be true that “on such a full sea are we now also afloat,” the standpoint from which we should approach this mission has to be with the intellectual optimism required to propose solutions designed for the durable survival of mankind. This method was well described by Lyndon LaRouche in his September, 2000 article, “Jesus Christ and Civilization:”

“Consider the fact that history, as we presently know it, has been dominated by cycles of collapse and, sometimes, at best, recovery. Therefore, how might we be assured, now, that even if we were to rescue humanity from the effects of the presently onrushing global financial and monetary collapse, by the measures which I have proposed, that our thus-revived civilization will not begin to slide back, a generation or two later, into a new round of collapse, a collapse perhaps even worse than that which menaces us at the present moment...? Is it possible, that even the mastering of the immediate financial crisis, requires that we must also act now to overcome the more distant threat of a new dark age? In other words, although I have shown how the world could recover from the presently onrushing global financial collapse, perhaps the world will not adopt that option I have given it. Is there, then, some deeper, longer-range sickness within the world’s presently leading institutions, which, as seems probable at this moment, would prevent the world from accepting such a workable, near-term recovery program?

“...I shall leave it to your conscience, to estimate, whether or not even the bare, presently continued existence of our civilization, depends upon our solving that worrying, longer-term challenge. This would mean, that, at the least, we would adopt an efficiently conscious commitment to solving it, to a significant degree, over the course of a generation or more immediately ahead.”

Neptune Provides a Guide for the Self-Perplexed

An unexpected present was provided to the world this Holy week (in which the seasons of Ramadan, Passover and Easter coincide) that provides a momentary respite from the trapped discussions about geopolitics and military strategy that show no way out, and conclude only in civilization-dooming tragedy. News from the outer regions of our solar system has just intervened, in the form of an astronomical report regarding the planet Neptune released earlier this week. That planet merrily calls into question the self-destructive “science” axioms of those caught in an otherwise-inescapable conceptual trap “down there” in the lower circular orbit of the doomed trans-Atlantic “Anglosphere.”

Neptune had already made things irritatingly difficult some 30 years ago, when the Voyager spacecraft in 1989 recorded temperatures that demonstrated that it was warmer than its closest neighbor, Uranus, despite the fact that Neptune is over a billion miles more distant from the Sun than Uranus, and should therefore have recorded cooler temperatures. Now, recent observations have demonstrated that, halfway through its 40-year-long summer season, which began in 2005, Neptune’s southern hemisphere had gotten cooler by 8° Celsius, or 14° Fahrenheit, between 2003 and 2018. That’s like the temperature cooling in an “Earth summer” between late June and the first week of August. But wait!—There’s more. In that same hemisphere, and in a period of only the next two years, 2018-2020, Neptune’s South Pole temperatures rose by 11° Celsius, or 19.2° Fahrenheit. Delightful!

While fools and enraged textbook writers will attempt to say that this has no implications for anything going on on the Earth, what accounts for this? How, for example, might the changes be related to solar activity? How might these new observations compare with other anomalies on other planets or their satellites over the same two-decade period? What happened on Neptune has implications for Earth precisely because it has just changed our ideas of the possible, whether we admit it or not, and of what must be considered to be “scientific certainty” on matters of astronomy, including climate, which some will be dismayed to learn is also astronomy, not “political science.”

Physical economy, however, does allow for a higher order resolution of apparently insoluble international problems. Just when it might have appeared that the arbitrary, capricious and ultimately self-destructive power—otherwise termed “the rule of law”—wielded by the Anglosphere against Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and, indeed Ukraine as well, might only be checked by risking thermonuclear war, the ideas of and actions by this association, for example in the deliberative process expressed in the April 9 Schiller Institute Conference for a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations, have now become an essential part of the international strategic discussion. The role of the Southwest Asia segment of our “The New Silk Road Becomes The World Land-Bridge” proposal” was highlighted in Beijing this past week, in the immediate aftermath of that conference, by Hussein Askary’s presentation at the recent conference, China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Connectivity and Cooperation Under the Perspective of “Belt and Road,” keynoted by Yue Xiaoyong, Ambassador and Special Envoy for Afghan Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China.

Even as Russia warned the United States that the escalated arming of Ukraine could cause incalculable consequences, and Medvedev stated that if Finland and Sweden joined NATO that Russian nuclear and hypersonic missiles would be deployed to Kaliningrad, the chancellor of Austria met with Putin and established the means whereby that nation will continue to receive gas, paying Russia in Euros, rather than rubles. Sanity can still prevail. And while many have nervously commented about Joe Biden’s latest “sight-gaffe” at the conclusion of his 40 minute-“policy-statement” at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College—where he attempted to shake hands with someone that wasn’t there—it would be well to worry far more about the fact that, when it comes to a knowable durable future, without the work of the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization, the trans-Atlantic world is as empty-handed as Joe Biden was at the conclusion of his speech.