EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY OCTOBER 15, 2022

To Walk the World Away from Armageddon, Think Like Schiller!

Oct. 14, 2022 (EIRNS)—There is rank opportunism, there is criminally insane opportunism, and then there is British Prime Minister Liz “Nuke ‘Em” Truss. For the past three weeks, Truss insisted: “We will decrease taxes, and we will not be deterred.” Down, down, down went the British pound. As of 48 hours ago, she says now, just as energetically and self-confidently: “We will increase taxes, and you can take that to the Bank of England!” The London Telegraph reported: “Ms. Truss had pledged not to raise the tax from 19% to 25%, which had been scheduled for April next year by (her PM election opponent) Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor [of the Exchequer]. That rise will now go ahead as planned, scrapping one of the key planks of her campaign for the Tory leadership.” Oops!!

The Telegraph then supplies a link to the more than 20 times that the indomitable Liz Truss “railed against the plans she is now scheduled to adopt.” Stiff upper lip on that, though: perhaps the power to demand and require consistency in complex matters of policy from heads of government, especially matters that can determine the life or death of nations, is a luxury afforded only to members of free societies. We cannot accuse Great Britain of being that.

Remember how, back in April, then-U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss bragged, “This week we will announce that we have frozen over $350 billion of Putin’s war chest, making over 60% of the regime’s $604 billion foreign currency reserves unavailable.... Our coordinated sanctions are pushing the Russian economy back to the Soviet era”? How well has that “financial nuclear war against Russia” worked out? The London Economist story reads: “As Europe Falls into Recession, Russia Climbs Out.”

Never fear, though. When it comes to matters even more complex and emotionally demanding, such as launching global thermonuclear war, Truss replied to interviewer John Pienaar of Times Radio during her campaign, when he asked, “I won’t ask you if you would press the button, you’ll say yes, but faced with that task I would feel physically sick. How does that thought make you feel?” that: “I think it’s an important duty of the Prime Minister and I’m ready to do that.” She repeated it for emphasis—“I’m ready to do that”—garnering applause from the Tory faithful for her “Thatcher pose.” The absurdity, not only of her willful disregard for the deeper implications of that question, but of the equally dismaying Tory reaction to Truss on that occasion, shows what sort of “Ship of Fools” presently steers the once-free nation-states of the Anglosphere. The mental breakdown calls to mind the etching “Bravissimo!” from Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos, no. 38: A monkey serenades a donkey by playing on the back of a guitar, to the wild applause of an onlooker.

The Tin Man, as everyone knows from folklore, or The Wizard of Oz, did not have a heart—but at least he wanted one. “Tin Lizzie Truss” may fashion herself to be the second coming of Margaret Thatcher, but judging from her recent 9% popularity rating, the only “Second Coming” she seems to remind anyone of, is that recounted by William Butler Yeats in his eponymous poem:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand....”

The gory details of the financial digital bloodbath now taking place worldwide, vaporizing billions of dollars/pounds in nominal values, and which may well result in several people taking unplanned as well as unintentional dives from the ledges and rooftops of several world high rises, among other events, are recounted in the accompanying reports. In contrast, the former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl proposed a higher vantage point from which to view the past months. “Ever since the start of Ukraine’s military conflict in February 2022, we have essentially been watching the Western-led financial industry waging its war against the Eastern-dominated energy economy. The momentum will always be with the latter, because as stated above, in contrast to money, energy cannot be printed.” [Emphasis added.]

Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and others have begun to speak out, though late, in America against the insanity of even discussing the option of thermonuclear war. Internationally, mainly journalists, academics and bloggers are now emboldened by the actions in the last months taken by Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s International Schiller Institute to fight back against the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation’s black list/kill list, which seems to have, at least for a brief period of time yesterday, extended even to Elon Musk. The actions and the examples of independent candidates, Texas Congressional candidate Joel DeJean and United States Senate candidate Diane Sare, are now being emulated. They must also be supported during the next crucial days and weeks. All would do well to virtually attend today’s Schiller Institute International Conference, “Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism.” That conference will inspire in all, optimism, a bolder note than that of Yeats. The poet of the future is Friedrich Schiller—for example, his poem, Columbus:

Steer, courageous sailor! Although the wit may deride thee,
And the skipper at th’ helm lower his indolent hand—
Ever, ever to th’ West! There must the coastline be present,
Lies it yet clearly and lies shimm’ring before thine own ken.
Trust in the pilot God and follow the silent ocean!
Were it still not, ’twould climb now from the torrents aloft.
Genius stands with Nature in everlasting union:
What doth promised the one, surely the other fulfills.