The “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” including a just-published “recent revelation” contained in a 9-page report (see slug) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saying that “China and Russia are working together much closer than we thought,” shows how deeply detached from reality the once-competent leadership of the trans-Atlantic world has become. If 17 intelligence agencies have “gotten wrong” what was entirely clear, months ago, to American reporters, and to this organization and its supporters, about the Russia-China relationship, how can one realistically presume that the split-second decision-making required to keep the world safe in the thermonuclear age is now present in Washington? Has “Sundowner syndrome” seized Washington and London overnight?
This institutional crisis goes far beyond the recent correctly-concerning incidents that have occurred, involving Sen. Mitch McConnell, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Jerry Nadler, and President Joe Biden. An image, a metaphor for the actual state of affairs, and its species-threatening danger, is required.
Review the recent photo image, just over a week ago, of the 100-year-old Henry Kissinger meeting in China with the 70-year-old Xi Jinping. See, then, the contrasting images of their respective nations, the United States and China, today in July 2023. Look especially at their urban centers, and their respective industrial and economic capacities. Let us call this contrast “Sunrise, sunset.”
“Sunrise, sunset.” Compare the image of centenarian Kissinger, 2023, with that of the 49-year-old Kissinger, speaking with the 79-year-old Mao Zedong, in 1972. The same age difference between Mao and Kissinger then, is the difference between Xi Jinping and Kissinger now. Compare the state of China’s cities and farms then, with the cities and farms of the United States in 1972. Compare their then-respective industrial capacities.
Were the “fortunes” of the two nations reversed by some nefarious, extra-planetary force? Neither process was inevitable; both processes involved a departure from the earlier, apparent direction of each nation. To these images, add another additional factor—the February 4, 2022 China-Russia memorandum, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” (http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770) As journalist Patrick Lawrence and Marshall Auerback said about this agreement in a Feb. 9 article last year, “It is always difficult to understand the present as history for the simple reason we are living it and cannot see it historically without great effort. But we are living through a passage of the 21st century whose long-term significance is hard to overstate. The future is arriving, to put the point another way. Who would have guessed it would come to us by way of the ongoing morass in Ukraine?” [https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-world-just-turned] The Belt and Road Initiative, the BRICS process, the “de-dollarization” assault on the international financial mafia and their International Assassination Bureau, as dangerous and uneven as it is, does presage “a global order most of humanity has awaited throughout the postwar decades—all seven of them.This is immensely positive.” Did the “omniscient, omnipotent” trans-Atlantic world simply miss this?
“Sunrise, sunset.” Vladimir Putin’s amazing work-schedule over the past days of dialogue with a score of fellow Presidents and heads of government from what will soon be the most populous continent in the world—Africa—was not mere diplomacy. His speech, and the speeches of other African nations came from a drive toward a better future. The Presidents and Prime Ministers of Ethiopia, Egypt, Mozambique, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and many other nations spoke to him one-on-one. Discussions took place, regarding potential space launches and new applications of space technology; nuclear power, including modular reactors, to be deployed in abundance throughout the continent; and establishing a cargo and freight terminus of the International North-South Trade Corridor in the waters and land area of the Horn of Africa. In a different realm, discussions together with the former President of Brazil and New Development Bank president Dilma Rouseff that took place, regarding establishing the necessary national credit and monetary measures, including the use of national currencies appropriate to realizing this new, more just, international economic order, are causing the most intense excitement, as well as panic, in the international sphere, since the mid-1970s discussions catalyzed by Lyndon LaRouche’s International Development Bank proposal.
For any of this to be realized, however, there must be peace—a just peace—established all over the world, “a peace that makes life worth living,” a peace worth dying for, should even that be necessary. In a long essay on January 23, 2000, written in commemoration of the 80th birthday of Grigori L. Bondarevsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “The Issue of Mind-Set,” Lyndon LaRouche began:
“Those among us still active, after fighting in political wars for the past half-century or longer, have access to a relatively unique and invaluable store of personal experience. To us, it is all too obvious, that ours is an experience commanded by virtually none among those, mostly a generation or two younger than ourselves, who occupy most of the leading public and private positions today. Today’s still-active elder statesmen, born during or shortly after the great war of 1914-1917, have lived through such times as: the onset of the Great Depression and the ensuing wars; the needless dropping of two nuclear bombs on the helpless civilian population of Japan; the prolonged threat of global nuclear conflict; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and, now, an Anglo-American-dominated world, which is toppling, like some self-doomed Ozymandias, at the brink of the worst, most awful financial collapse in more than a hundred years.” (https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2000/eirv27n09-20000303/eirv27n09-20000303_012-the_issue_of_mind_set-lar.pdf)
Consider that image of Ozymandias, from Shelley’s poem: “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Consider what the continent of Africa looks upon, as the suggested “great projects” required for Africa, such as a “north-south,” as well as an “east-west” transcontinental railway and high-speed rail network; the Inga Dam, and more ambitiously, the Transaqua water projects; mass nuclear power production, including floating nuclear plant complexes—"nuplexes"—and small modular reactors, as well as large-scale plant production. What happens when Africa compares what is being offered by China and by Russia, in contrast to what is even being discussed with them—besides threats—from London, Washington and Paris?
The contrast is the imperial, neocolonial mind-set. Consider the mind-set of the Henry Kissinger of 1972, who foolishly, luridly proclaimed to Mao that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Now, in 2023, nothing beside, and little beneath remains of Kissinger’s silly boast. The silly State Department objects: “But the U.S. is still the most powerful nation in the world!!” President Biden, CIA analyst Ray McGovern points out, seems to think it suffices that he has decreed, on several occasions, that Russia has lost the war in Ukraine, and that because he says it, that makes it true.
This disengaged imperial mind-set brings to mind the story, perhaps apocryphal but nonetheless psychologically true, of Caligula’s campaign against the sea. Caligula, having misconceived a campaign he had thought to launch against Britain in 40 A.D., stopped at the coast of Gaul. Since it was inconceivable to return to Rome without a victory, Caligula decided to declare war on the sea, and on Neptune, and decreed that the waves should be whipped. He then had his military gather up sea-shells as treasure and evidence of their victory for the triumphal return to Rome.
And now, an Anglo-American gerontocracy teeters toward the grave of its conceit, its inadvertent slogan perhaps not “Après nous le déluge"—"after us, the Flood"—but, rather, “après nous, le feu"—"after us, the Fire.” This is no time for mad slogans. In its place we must erect a new security and development architecture, for which we have the ideas and the leadership. What we need is the will, not to power, but to reason, to succeed.
