EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY JULY 14, 2022

The Webb Telescope Helps Us Look Back—and Forward—in Time

July 13, 2022 (EIRNS)—The best way to put the current strategic situation in focus is by training the James Webb Telescope back on Planet Earth, so to speak. With the Webb Telescope, we have become able to see over 13 billion years back into our universe’s existence, while looking at a tiny arc of the sky which NASA has explained is the equivalent of holding a grain of sand up at arms-length! On the one hand, this accomplishment serves to underscore how incommensurably minuscule we each, as human beings, are on the scale of the universe. But at the same time—since we are capable of conceptualizing our relationship with the incommensurably large, with the enormity of continuing creation—it reminds us that we are also possessed of an immense, and apparently unique, power to participate willfully in that process of creation of the universe.

A single individual in fact has the potential power to be a geological force on this planet—and abroad. So too a sovereign nation, no matter how small, weak or poor it may be today.

And yet, even as we gaze upon the stars with the Webb Telescope’s help, our planet is careening towards nuclear warfare and an induced New Dark Age—from which it will likely never recover. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko has just issued a sharp, accurate warning that U.S. and NATO policies are leading to an “unwinnable general war”—i.e., a nuclear war. At the same time, a tectonic meltdown of the physical economy is hitting Europe so hard that leading nations are planning for drastic energy and other belt-tightening in the months ahead. And weaker Third World countries, such as Sri Lanka, are being plunged into chaos and economic disintegration that threatens their very existence as nations. All of this is the result of the insane sanctions policy against Russia, on top of a half-century of financial policies favoring speculation and drugs, and penalizing productive economic activity.

Shall we really allow our species to destroy itself? Who will then gaze back at the universe in wonder, and then move out to explore and colonize it? Will the Webb Telescope become just another wind-swept monument like Shelley’s Ozymandias? Will we allow Johannes Kepler and Krafft Ehricke and Lyndon LaRouche to simply disappear without a trace? How dare we!

But as much as the world despises the current war and looting policies emanating from the United States, equally do they hope for a return to the earlier approach of Washington, Lincoln and FDR—the true representatives of the American System that Lyndon LaRouche most recently championed. This desire was exemplified in the remarks of visiting Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who met with President Biden in the White House and then visited the FDR and Martin Luther King memorials to state that there have been periods of excellent relations between our two nations, such as between Lincoln and Juárez, and FDR and Cárdenas, to which the two nations must now return.

At a June 18-19 Schiller Institute event, founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche had posed to those present what she said might seem like “mission impossible”: to get the United States to join China, Russia and other nations in the construction of a New Bretton Woods system of economic development and sovereignty for all. Is America equal to that task?