EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY JULY 27, 2022

Prometheus or Zeus: Whose Side Are You On?

July 26, 2022 (EIRNS)—Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gave it to mankind, for which he was tortured by a jealous Olympian, Zeus, whose identity lay in his superiority to the masses.

A modern Prometheus is needed today, as the pathetic institutions of NATO and the EU, especially those of the U.S. and U.K., demand deadly policies of agricultural destruction, energy scarcity, economic collapse, and mind-deadening intellectual conformity, in order to maintain an untenable, Zeusian world order.

They try to win your support for their disastrous policies by blaming the equally disastrous outcomes on variously Russia, China, climate change, or some cultural transgression.

Russia is engaged in “a deliberate attempt to use food as a weapon against the most vulnerable countries in the world,” exclaims EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell. But the EU demands a 30% reduction in key agricultural inputs and its sanctions have prevented export of Russian food and fertilizers. Hunger is the goal of agricultural policies like 30-by-30.

“We can’t allow Russia to threaten us with a cutoff of natural gas supply,” reasons an EU bureaucrat, before arriving at the conclusion: “Therefore, we should shut off gas ourselves!” But as EU members look for LNG imports to substitute for Russian gas, they drive down the availability and drive up the price around the world, making it inaccessible to countries like Pakistan that rely on it. Putin didn’t make energy scarce; decades of green policies have done that. Energy poverty is the goal; Russia is the excuse.

“Putin’s price hike causes pain at the pump,” report the nation’s newspapers. But gas prices were already soaring, along with the cost of nearly everything, before February. Although exacerbated by supply-chain disruptions caused by sanctions, the galloping inflation is a natural result of a policy of reckless monetary creation divorced from—indeed in opposition to—physical productivity. Did Putin force the Fed and ECB to create money? Did Russia ruin America’s infrastructure? Concentration of financial wealth and the impoverishment of the general population have been the goal of economic policy.

A livable future requires that the U.S.-U.K.-NATO abandon confrontational policies that drove Russia to take military action in Ukraine, and which seek to drive confrontation with China before its growing strength makes an imaginary victory yet more impossible.

But it requires much more than that. Evil, murderous foreign policy is paralleled by evil, suicidal domestic policy: anti-human, Malthusian environmentalism, financialization of the economy, and tribalizing fixation on “identity” differences. These trends must be rejected, in favor of a renaissance of science (with cooperation including the three major space powers of the U.S., Russia, and China), physical economic development (with more regard for human beings than red-bellied salamanders), and an impassioned commitment to reach, in varying ways, towards the unifying Beautiful that is the subject of great Classical art.

As Lyndon LaRouche and his movement—now led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche—have demanded for decades, we must create a new Promethean era, banishing Zeus and his oligarchical outlook to eternal scorn, as we take on the joyous tasks of exploring space, developing nuclear fusion, eliminating poverty, and crushing the power of Wall Street and the City of London.