EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY JULY 10, 2022

Scientific and Cultural Optimism Must Defeat Malthusian War Policy—The Roles of Krafft Ehricke And Percy Shelley

July 9, 2022 (EIRNS)—The economies of the trans-Atlantic nations are entering a process of free-fall collapse, as the tripling of electricity costs and the mandating of insane Green mandates are causing a shutdown or severe cutbacks in U.S. and European industrial and agricultural production. Rather than taking steps to reverse the unfolding disaster, Western governments are instructing their populations to prepare to suffer weeks-long blackouts, to eat less, to drive less, to heat and cool their homes less. Famine is spreading unchecked in developing nations. And yet, President Joe Biden proudly announced that in the past three weeks the U.S. has sent $2.2 billion of military hardware to Ukraine, to continue a war already lost “down to the last Ukrainian.”

This madness is totally unnecessary. There is no justification for shortages of energy or food or manufactured goods. It is not “Putin, Putin, Putin,” as the Western politicians and media repeat ad nauseam, nor does the climate have anything to do with it. It is purely ideological—the Lords of the City of London and Wall Street are facing the collapse of their nearly $2 quadrillion international speculative bubble. Rather than calling the world’s leaders together, as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1944 at Bretton Woods, to prepare a new financial and development architecture which puts the bubble economy through bankruptcy reorganization and directs credit to the development of all nations, they have decided instead to destroy any alternative. The vast majority of the nations and peoples of this world were represented in the June 24 meeting of the BRICS-Plus—the nations of Southeast Asia, of Central Asia, of the African Union, of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States—rejecting absolutely the NATO war mobilization against Russia and China, and calling for international cooperation in transforming all countries into modern agro-industrial nations, as China has achieved over these past 40 years.

Why have the citizens of the U.S., Canada, and Europe not risen up to stop the madness, to join with their fellow human beings in the rest of the world to establish a new paradigm based on peace through development? This can not be answered solely on the basis of immediate self-interest, since it is clear that self-interest would wish to prevent thermonuclear war and an economic collapse. It is cultural. The optimism that once filled the hearts and minds of Europeans in the age of Beethoven, Schiller, Marie Curie, de Broglie; and Americans in the age of Ben Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy—that optimism has been crushed by a perverse nihilism in our political bodies, universities, media and social institutions.

The Schiller Institute’s petition for the formation of an Ad-Hoc Committee for a New Bretton Woods System is intended to galvanize leading figures, backed by hundreds of millions of informed citizens, to take the required action to stop the descent into a dark age and to build a new Renaissance. This appears to those who are mired in pessimism as an impossible task. Two events this past week demonstrate that pessimism can be overcome, and optimism restored.

Paul Gallagher, the economics editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, appeared on the weekly Symposium of the LaRouche candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York Diane Sare, on Friday evening, July 8—the 200th anniversary of the death of the English poet Percy Shelley. The title of his presentation was “Shelley: The Poet Who Discovered the Political Mass Strike.” Shelley was referenced by Lyndon LaRouche throughout his life, in particular the argument in his essay A Defence of Poetry, that in moments of political and economic crisis and transformation, that people become quite suddenly capable of “imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature,” and that such moments of transformation demonstrate that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Gallagher demonstrated further that Shelley was a potent political organizer, pamphleteer and strategist who was under surveillance by a hostile political oligarchy from the time he was 19 years old. The discussion following the presentation demonstrated the uplifting impact on the participants, who recognized the similarity to the nature of the current moment and the task we face, and the need for beauty to inform that process.

A second event took place on July 7, when Helga Zepp-LaRouche was invited to speak at the three-day, July 7-9 “Space Renaissance Art and Science Festival” in Berlin, an annual gathering of the leading scientists, engineers and industry leaders in the various space programs around the world. Her topic, “The Actuality of Krafft Ehricke’s Vision,” began:

“What makes a life rich, is when one has the good fortune to meet and work with a number of the outstanding great minds of one’s time. One such person in my life was the great German-American space pioneer, Krafft Ehricke, whom I accompanied on a lecture tour through Germany in 1981 and who was on the advisory board of the Schiller Institute during the last year of his life. He was one of the greatest visionaries concerning man’s identity as a space-species, and he expressed that limitless optimism about the future of mankind, which only the great geniuses of human history portray. Given his extraordinary prescience of the fundamental challenges in space science, which are only becoming obvious today, he deserves to be more recognized by several orders of magnitude.”

And in closing, Zepp-LaRouche said:

“For Krafft Ehricke the idea of space travel was the most logical and lofty consequence of the ideal of the Renaissance, which put man in the context, and in an active context, with the Cosmos, building on the most noble traditions of the ancient classics. He showed the way—how by lifting the eyes to the stars and by working to make them the home of humanity, man can realize both his innate dignity and the age of reason.”

This is our task: To convey to men and women in a state of fear and confusion from the onrushing disintegration of Western civilization that by “by lifting the eyes to the stars,” and reaching inside ourselves for that creative, poetic capacity of reason, we can achieve the impossible.