EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2022

To Build a New Security and Development Architecture, Ending War, Think Like Brunelleschi

May 20, 2022 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Thursday Schiller Institute Webcast was titled, “This Is ‘The Most Dangerous Moment’ In Human History.” If a crucial minority of citizens in the trans-Atlantic sector do not now find a way of reversing their respective nations’ public policy direction toward total war, the world will soon stumble, or be dragged into a thermonuclear confrontation from which there will be no last-minute escape. The Anglosphere’s march to self-destruction is presently being orchestrated using intelligence agency “bots” and other cyber-frauds on various “asocial media platforms” to manufacture the aura of consensus. Also involved are other more traditional forms of mass media, all watched over by the “disinformation governance board” of multiple intelligence agencies that operate under the alias, “mainstream media,” including “mainstream social media.” A bolder note must sound from those that value truth more than the dying Wall Street/City Of London financial-political “governance system” that cannot be saved in any case.

“What does this all have to do with me?” That latter fact—that the system cannot be saved—is not clear, or is not faced by many that could still act to prevent their own immolation in a fiery “Götterdämmerung” (“twilight of the gods”) that need not follow from that fact. The “new security architecture” expressed in the real Ukraine proxy war of all of NATO against Russia, is a proposal for perpetual, permanent war, war for the rest of our lifetimes, no matter how long, or short, that might be. As for the poorest one-third of Americans and Europeans, and one-half or more of the citizens of South and Central American nations, and the majority of the 54 nations of Africa, their doom is being assured by a war of a different type, most clearly depicted in what is being done to the poor in the “most advanced nations” first. The General Welfare? How do you pay a $5,000/year gas bill for your car to get to work, if you are from what is termed a “lower class” American household, for which the median income was $25,624 in 2016 (that was for 29% of all American households)? Even in rare cases where wages increased in the last six years, they have clearly not kept pace with inflation, even before this past year, and that doesn’t even factor in losses of jobs (and job-earners through disease and death) because of the pandemic.

No one, or nearly no one, speaks any longer for the forgotten. It took Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene—not AOC, not “the squad” (all of whom voted for the war funds), not the “women’s rights caucus”—to state on the floor of the Congress that America would not even secure baby formula for its infants, most of them the children of the poor, before funding nameless NGOs and secret intelligence programs through the $40 billion Ukraine bill, which was $7 billion higher than even requested. Is that how little America thinks of its posterity, and, therefore, its own Constitution?

One thing can be counted upon: In the latter stages of the collapse of all empires, the arrogant idiocy of the “ruling elite” will display itself, involuntarily hold itself up to ridicule. In a recent speech, former President George W. Bush just indicted himself—or was it Dick Cheney?—even as he sought to denounce Vladimir Putin, saying, “Russian elections are rigged. Political opponents are imprisoned, or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process.... The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq—I mean, of Ukraine... Iraq, too.” Meanwhile, President Biden, briefly appearing with the President of Finland and Prime Minister of Sweden before being wheeled off by his treasonous State Department to confront China with the prospect of a new confrontation called the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” proclaimed NATO “the strongest, most powerful defensive military alliance in the history of the world.” (Somewhere, in a smoky crypt in Dante’s Inferno, the ghost of East Germany’s Erich Honecker winces.)

“But what can be done?” Certainly, merely complaining won’t do anything. Commentators upon history are rarely the people that change it. A new development and security architecture is needed, but where are the architects to build it? If they do not seem to be at hand, then what about from history? It would be wise to consult someone confronted with a similar problem to that of our time—the great artist/scientist, Filippo Brunelleschi. In the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century, a miracle was needed to reverse the cultural death of Europe’s, exemplified by the effects of the bubonic plague (also known as the Black Death), and the thinkers of Florence, led by Brunelleschi, provided that miracle.

Is the great dome that still stands more than 500 years later as the crown of the Florentine Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and constructed over 16 years by Brunelleschi and his inspired workforce, actually composed of one continuous, complex spiral, rather than the apparently perceived eight different walls? No wooden frame to hold the dome in place could be constructed, because of the vastness and magnitude of the proposed church it would crown. Brunelleschi’s insight into using non-algebraic curves, particularly the principle of the catenary (“hanging chain”), in the organization of the rope lines that guided the free-standing ascent of the walls of the great cupola, creating a self-sustaining continuous spiral rising upwards from the octagonal base, represented a conceptual breakthrough whose truth was as demonstrable and elegant as its complexity was profound.

There are often silly commentaries upon what motivated the persons, such as the city committee of Florence that first commissioned the great cathedral in 1293. A more serious and intrigued commentator has said, “today in the 21st-century, it would be difficult for us to cover, to roof, such a vast space. In the 14th and 15th centuries, theoretically it should’ve been impossible ... to me, the most extraordinary thing about the construction of the cathedral is undertaking a project that you knew fully well you did not have the technology to complete.” What the early Renaissance architects did know, however, was the creative problem-solving state of mind required, and the mind’s potentially infinite capacity for self-perfection. Both the cathedral design of Arnulfo de Cambio, who began the work in 1296, and the cupola design of Brunelleschi, who completed the work in 1436, 140 years later, required that they each be, ultimately, not only complementary, but resolved in a higher order concept of design, invisible to the eye, but producing the solution as a shadow cast by that higher realm, a “temporal eternity” within which both architects worked. Though the two would never meet, these two unique minds, linked through nearly one and a half centuries, and their working associates must find a unique solution, never before existent. This successfully completed miracle of construction would host the 1439 Council of Florence, organized by Brunelleschi’s friend Nicholas of Cusa, whose On Learned Ignorance would give birth to the modern scientific era. That 1439 Council is the model for the new security and development architecture conference for which Helga Zepp-LaRouche is now fighting.

That, and nothing less than that level of thinking, is required for the human race to extricate itself from its present calamity, truly “the most dangerous moment in the history of all humanity.” It is necessary to leave behind the pagan notions of the “will to power” which have characterized the Geopolitics of the trans-Atlantic world, of the “Anglosphere. We must replace that with a new conceptual architecture as revolutionary as was the breakthrough of Brunelleschi in the construction of his dome. From the vantage point of Brunelleschi’s dome, the complex domain, we can see why the idea of a simultaneous security and development architecture is the necessary, but still missing solution-concept without which humanity cannot hope to survive this present, most dangerous moment.