The Lead
Hope or Hell: The Choice Is Still Ours
by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Apr. 23, 2026
Much damage is already done. Not “will be done” if the war against Iran escalates further—though it will if the current occupants of Washington, Jerusalem, and London keep their hands on the tiller—but already done.
Thirty-two million people pushed back into poverty. Half a percent to eight-tenths of a percent of global GDP erased. Fertilizer supply chains severed during planting season, with food insecurity set to peak in a matter of months, potentially to worsen significantly next year. Iran itself has lost an estimated eighteen months of human development progress in eight weeks of war. “Things that take decades to build up, it takes eight weeks of war to destroy them,” UN Development Program Administrator Alexander De Croo told Reuters this week. The strait that carries a fifth of the world’s oil is littered with mines that will take up to six months to clear, the Pentagon has told lawmakers in a classified briefing—and that is after the shooting stops, which it has not. The European Union’s own energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, called the Iran war an economic crisis “probably as serious as the 1973 and the 2022 crises combined,” costing Europe €500 million a day and set to affect prices for years.
This is what the self-styled leaders of the Western world have built. A U.S. Senate that has failed five consecutive times to pass a War Powers Resolution to stop a war it never authorized, while the Democratic leadership stages the vote weekly as theater rather than as a means of actually cutting the war’s funding, which it could do in 24 hours if it chose. A Chancellor in Berlin who announces to the assembled bankers of Germany that the statutory pension is finished and the banks are to take over. A White House that proposes to shred what remains of the American social contract—Medicare, Medicaid, childcare, “all these little scams,” in the President’s own words—so that resources can be concentrated on “military protection.” A senator who, rather than recoiling from the strategic disaster of a U.S. blockade of the Persian Gulf, proposes to make it global.
And against this: humanity itself. In the same weeks the wreckage was tallied, Memorial Sloan Kettering announced that its personalized mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer—one of the deadliest diseases known to medicine—kept nearly 90 percent of responding patients alive four to six years after treatment. India brought to criticality a 500-megawatt fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam, the product of two decades of indigenous engineering and the gateway to a thorium-fueled energy future measured in centuries, not in election cycles. These are not luxuries of a world at peace. They are the patient fruits of the assumption that human reason, applied steadily over long horizons by governments willing to back it, can solve problems that once looked insoluble. They are the antipode of a civilization at war with itself.
This is the choice. It is not between one foreign policy and another. It is between a civilization that invests in lifting human beings out of darkness, and one that, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has put it, “vacillates between hope and Hell.” The International Peace Coalition, meeting April 24 for its 151st consecutive Friday, is for actions that give birth to hope. Its theme this week is a “Break-Out of Reason.” Its speakers—Zepp-LaRouche, Command Chief Master Sgt. Dennis Fritz (ret., USAF), former Mexican Congresswoman María de los Ángeles Huerta, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, former Missouri Lt. Gov. Joe Maxwell, cattle rancher Mike Callicrate, independent U.S. presidential candidate Diane Sare, and LaRouche Organization organizer Tim Rush reporting from Washington—are the living antithesis of the rentier class for whom perpetual war is a path to profit and control.
The wreckage is real. But it is not too late; humanity is not yet condemned to be bestial. At 11 a.m. U.S. Eastern, anyone who wishes to join the organizing center of the resistance is invited to do so.
Contents
Strategic War Danger
- Trump Talks Tough on Hormuz While Quietly Extending Ceasefire (↓)
- Analytics Firm Says Most Iran Oil to China Is Getting Through Strait (↓)
- UN Reveals, Iran War Has Already Pushed 32 Million People Into Poverty (↓)
- Iranian Government Claims Receipt of Tolls from Ships Crossing Strait of Hormuz (↓)
LaRouche movement
Science and Technology
- mRNA Vaccine for Pancreatic Cancer Shows Remarkable Results in Early Trial (↓)
- Indian Nuclear Advance: Fast Breeder Reactor Reaches Criticality (↓)
Collapsing Imperial System
- Israeli Independence Ceremony Honors ‘Bulldozer’ Rabbi (↓)
- Merz Proposes Cuts in Pensions, Deregulation for Banks (↓)
Harley Schlanger Update
Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.
