At the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact held in Paris June 22-23, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa raised the fact that 600 million Africans are still living without access to electricity. His comments came during a conference, sponsored by French President Emmanuel Macron, which proposed a global $1 trillion/year tax that would go towards a “green energy” transition—somewhat of a poke in the eye considering the crushing poverty still existing in much of the world’s Global South.
If one looks at the world from the standpoint of a peasant—a powerless and oppressed cog-in-the-wheel, looking grimly out into a seemingly bleak future—then you are used to thinking small and wishing only for slight changes. Perhaps you will protest to your local politicians, or try to rid the world of those dangerous plastic bags. But no matter what, you will complain bitterly and endlessly about all the ills going on in the world, and yet feel ever more distant from being able to change any of it.
However, in the case of South Africa’s Ramaphosa, the President of a nation whose region has perpetually been given the short end of the stick, he refused to think small or complain: He thought big! Ramaphosa’s response to the proposed climate tax was to instead propose that the world commit to building Africa’s Grand Inga Dam—the mega-project that would see a series of hydroelectric dams built on the Congo River, generating at least 40 gigawatts of electricity and becoming larger than the current two largest hydroelectric projects in the world combined. And this in the heart of Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest part of the world.
The South African President is not alone in his thinking, either. His comments reflect a dramatic shift taking place across the whole world, which no longer sees that grim and bleak future of poverty and second-class status, but rather has decided to throw off the shackles of pragmatic small-thinking and see with the eyes of the future. Similar comments were made at the summit by the President of Zambia, the President of Congo, the President of Kenya, and the President of Brazil, who himself went so far as to throw out his prepared remarks after hearing the earlier comments from African leaders, and declared that a new financial architecture is needed which will “make investments in structural things which change the life of countries.”
On the contrary, Western nations today continue their failed proxy war in Ukraine, insisting that nuclear-powered Russia must be defeated militarily in a show of psychotic bravado. Poland has become only the latest example of this suicidal insanity by insisting that U.S. nuclear weapons be deployed to Poland. Expenditures for ever-larger weapons are meanwhile sent to Ukraine, accomplishing nothing except the liquidation of the nation and the further impoverishment of Western nations themselves.
The glaring hideousness—and abject failure—of this policy is becoming obvious for all to see. Noted independent journalist Seymour Hersh, citing insider reports following the disaster of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive,” warns those around the U.S. President and in the Democratic Party in a recent article that the “looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call.”
A sober response to this glaring failure, and the enormous danger of nuclear war it is causing, is needed urgently. All support for the war must cease, and instead peace negotiations should be convened immediately. However, the true organizer for peace should not stop there, as today’s crisis does not come from local or kinetic events, and therefore cannot be solved through such either. Instead, he or she must think big, from the standpoint of the future, and confront the fact that the world is undergoing a historic transformation unmatched in modern history.
Only from this qualitatively different and higher vantage point can one see the importance of the LaRouche movement’s call for a new global security and development architecture as the pathway to retire forever the geopolitical games which are behind wars such as the one today. More and more of the world are finding the courage to see this clearly. Will enough leading organizers emerge in the West to remove the blinders of war, and spark a different idea?
On Friday June 30, the fourth meeting of the International Peace Coalition occurred, discussing and advancing ideas on this topic. Let us turn this ferment into an infectious movement worldwide.
