EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2022

Going on the Offensive: Demand the Good!

March 22, 2022 (EIRNS)—Bad news abounds! U.S. and NATO officials issue stern warnings of Russia’s supposedly imminent crossing of the “biological or chemical weapon attack” red line (of Iraq and Syria fame)—a red line designed as a trigger for military escalation. Prices soar with no end in sight, blamed variously on Vladimir Putin, a purportedly wicked human thirst for material abundance, or “climate change.” Social media giants and nations themselves ban accounts and viewpoints. Even science, sport, and culture become contentious. “Choose a side!” we are ordered.

The world as a whole is largely rejecting this demand of the Anglo-American establishment to take sides against Russia—and China (and economic growth). The majority of human beings on the planet did not vote to condemn Russia or to sanction that nation. The majority of people do not want to spend double on their groceries, or to starve by poverty, in order to “defend [Anglo-American-NATO imposed] democracy” in Ukraine.

But people of good will need not remain on the defensive!

A new paradigm is emerging. It is taking real form in China’s soaring economic growth. It is seen in the refusal by such nations as India, Nigeria, South Africa, and Russia to submit to “green” suicide. It is heard in the worldwide responses to the intense weaponization of the dollar, the theft of national reserves, and the beyond-hypocritical invocation of such terms as “war criminal,” “human rights,” or “freedom” as propaganda weapons, rather than words representing a living meaning.

The financial unraveling, the centrifugal forces tearing apart the economies of the trans-Atlantic, the throes of monetary upheaval—these cannot be calmed with interest rate adjustments, or even by stealing the foreign reserves of all the nations of the planet. They represent the failure of an imperial paradigm that must be banished from civilized practice, replaced by the leaders and people of those nations with a truly human approach.

This perspective was brought to Pakistan’s PTV on Tuesday, March 22, by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who praised the initiative of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to work with China to achieve a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine. Coming one week after the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution against Islamophobia (presented by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC), the host of the PTV broadcast asked Zepp-LaRouche to speak to her views on Islam in the modern world.

Islam has a role as participating in a special dialogue as one of the three Abrahamic religions, and as a potential force for peace, as exemplified through the proposed OIC-China efforts to bring a peaceful end to the military conflict in Ukraine. Zepp-LaRouche denounced the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington, and the replacement, following the fall of the Soviet Union, of an East-West conflict with a North-South conflict, of Christianity against other religions.

But rather than act defensively against the vilification of Islam, the Schiller Institute founder pointed to her Operation Ibn Sina as an example of going on the offensive, to achieve a goal—world health—through affirming the best historical triumphs of Islam as a world-historic force, exemplified by the physician and polymath Ibn Sina. Without Haroun al-Rashid, she added, the resurgence of great thought in Europe sparked by Charlemagne could not have occurred. It is through affirming the best of what mankind has achieved, and will achieve, that victory is possible.

Resistance movements come to be defined by what they oppose. But the unbounded future of the human race can inspire a sense of committed urgency to implement policies and create cultural change that affirm the uniquely, and universally human identity of being made in the image of the Creator—capable of discovering wondrous new physical principles, powerful new technologies, and increasingly beautiful works of art.

It is to achieve that end—and to avoid the cataclysmic danger of general nuclear war that could put a permanent end to that human potential—that a new security and development architecture must be fought for and achieved.

The Schiller Institute’s April 9 conference to establish “a new security and development architecture for all nations” shall, through joint efforts, become an inflection point in making that future a reality.