The Lead

Human Beings Don't Make Silk Purses from Sows' Ears

by David Shavin (EIRNS) — Feb. 18, 2024

An ingathering of defense secretaries, pro-war thinktankers, and a motley assembly of warmongers spent three days at the annual Munich Security Conference, attempting to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Ukraine’s rout at what is perhaps their most highly-fortified area, Avdeyevka, occurred on the opening day—but it was presented as the shame of the West for not providing enough armaments. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy explained to the assembled that Russia had won nothing, had been weakened, and the West can now come to its senses, can repent—and send lots more money and weaponry.

Put aside that the de-industrialized West can’t actually accomplish a lot of things, such as producing sufficient ammunition, what remains is the obvious point that Ukraine has had massive manpower losses in 2023, in particular during their meatgrinding operations in Bakhmut and in their glorious “counter-offensive.” The reality is that their forces are massively outnumbered, including at the heavily fortified Avdeyevka. Sending more weapons and ammunition in doesn’t make up for the lack of soldiers to use them.

The narrative in the U.S. is that isolationist, Trump-fearing representatives in Congress are holding everything up, for the sake of having billions more spent on defense against illegal immigration on the U.S.’s southern border. However, it more than strains credibility that a Biden administration holds a principled line on the issue, delaying their billions for Ukraine, leaving them in the lurch. Beyond the incompetence and venality of Washington is the reality that the war in Ukraine (and also in Gaza) has no popular support.

For that matter, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has minuscule popular support, both before and during the Gaza military operation, and Zelenskyy’s ratings have been on a serious downward trajectory. Netanyahu calculates that permanent warfare (Gaza, Lebanon, Iran) keeps him in office and out of prison. Zelenskyy has cancelled elections in Ukraine under martial law, while the autocratic hater-of-democracy, Russian President Putin, enjoys massive popularity and is expected to easily win next month’s election. So, billions in funds and weapons are to be sent to countries that are allergic to elections, the “defenders of democracy,” to try to end the “dictatorship” of Putin. None of this is thinking like a human.

“But I want to tell you that there is actually a completely different world happening, and a tectonic shift in history where totally different dynamics are going on which are actually very promising and much more optimistic than anything you can come to as a conclusion if you are just looking at it from the U.S. or even Europe for that matter.” So, stated Helga Zepp-LaRouche today at the Presidents’ Day Conference, “America’s Next Fifty Years,” of the Diane Sare for Senate campaign. She continued: “Most people in the West have no inkling how gigantic this tectonic shift which is taking place actually is already, and how far it has developed. This does not only pertain to the building of a new economic system, because the countries of the Global South have undergone a whole series of developments whereby they are now in earnest developing a completely new economic system. It also involves a completely different outlook, different values, and not necessarily worse values, but more likely values which used to be common for Americans, for your grandparents or even further back during the time of the American Revolution, Lincoln, and so forth.”

Those values, once embodied in the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers, and revived by Lincoln’s efforts, are alive and well in what much of the underdeveloped world has witnessed in China’s war on poverty, bringing over 800 million of their population out of severe poverty over three decades. That model has brought together the BRICS countries, with dozens of countries wanting to climb on board. Zepp-LaRouche knows this first hand, from her work with her husband, Lyndon LaRouche.

There’s no need to try turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse. All that has nothing to do with thinking as a human being. Lyndon LaRouche explained years ago how to turn the “American System” into a “Silk Road” project for the world. A candidate for the U.S. Senate, Diane Sare, explained at today’s event LaRouche’s radical method—where one begins not from merely re-arranging the pieces of one’s present situation, but from the human capacity to assess where society needs to get to in the future. Having started from principle, one can then figure out what would have to be made possible to get there. It is called thinking as a human being.