When the various species and subspecies of establishment figures met in Davos last week to debate how to rearrange deck chairs on the sinking imperial system, one thing that did not emerge from the chest thumping, threatening, whining, and delusions parading across the stage was any alternative to the currently collapsing imperial paradigm. Unsurprisingly, the primary motivation of the desperate ruling elites is to try to claw back their hegemony over the world system. “The fact is that the political system has been ruled by empires,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in her webcast of Jan. 28. “My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, always said that if you go back to the old empires—the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Venetian Empire, and then finally the Dutch-British Empire—he said these empires are like a slime mold. They may change their color, their form, their personalities, but they remain in essence a slime mold. I think that is what we are seeing right now.”
If citizens were more clear on the history of humankind, on the millennia-long fight to bring humanity out of an imperial mode, perhaps they wouldn’t fall prey to a lower-level view of who the enemy really is, and, more importantly, what they should do about it.
Take the immigration situation in the United States, and the inhuman, bloody disaster that is the ICE occupation of the streets of Minneapolis. Much of the population is in an uproar, on both “sides” of the conflict, and many even in the Trump MAGA base are speaking out in protest as the Gestapo-like deployments escalate into violent violations of basic, Constitutionally-guaranteed rights—like the right to life. And still, many rail against the illegal immigrants who are “destroying our country.”
One of the most important questions to ask is this: What is it that is being tested, what trial balloon is being floated, in Minneapolis? And what are the implications for, not just the domestic, but the international strategic situation—one in which a US attack on Iran may be in the works? There may be more than one answer and more than one level to that question, and elements of it may be in better or worse control of the various players in the situation.
Contrast the way most are playing their assigned roles in that and other scenarios, to the view expressed by Alberto Viscarra, a leader of the National Front to Save the Mexican Countryside, in a Jan. 20 interview with EIR: What is driving millions of Mexican refugees to the US border? The fact that the Mexican agriculture sector has been decimated by decades of free trade policies, which have allowed the multinational grain cartels to dump cheap products on the Mexican market, making a profit while destroying the country’s food self-sufficiency and reducing its food production and consumption.
The enemy of us all—in Mexico, Venezuela, the United States, and beyond—is the over-bloated Wall Street-run monetary-financial system that puts ravenous speculation before the needs of the population.
What is to be done? One must have a vision for a post-empire mode of development for the world. Viscarra points to Lyndon LaRouche’s call for the US and Mexico to work together to build great infrastructure projects such as the NAWAPA and PHLINO water projects: “As our friend Lyndon LaRouche always, always emphasized, he viewed these projects as exemplary… He called for making the U.S.–Mexico relationship an example of what North–South relations should be, where the economies are measured in terms of mutual benefit, and not that someone has to lose so that the other can win.”
To achieve that end, Zepp-LaRouche put out the clarion call for action from the citizens: “We absolutely have to put solutions on the table in light of the pending financial crash. The need for a new global Glass-Steagall law, to have a national bank in every country, to have a new credit system providing countries with cheap, long-term credit for development, to build a Eurasian Land-Bridge into a World Land-Bridge connecting all continents through infrastructure and tunnels and bridges—all of these things need to be discussed in a new security and development architecture conference, which we are aiming to organize…. In the recent EIR are all the speeches [from a Jan. 12 EIR Emergency Roundtable) in written form, which are absolutely an historical document because it is the highest level of discussion on what is required to reestablish international law…
“Get that around; contact people with it; contact think tanks, universities, civil institutions. Because we plan to continue this process; we plan to have another big conference at the beginning of March where the idea to…have a new security and development architecture will be the topic with even more institutions and speakers. So, become part of this movement, because if the governments don’t function, then citizens have to take responsibility.”
