June 2, 2024 (EIRNS)—The late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche concluded his 1977 document, titled “What Really Are the Labor Committees?—The Lessons of Erasmus and Franklin,” with the following paragraph: “Let it be understood, therefore, that if you are a humanist, the Labor Committees are in that sense your organization—whether or not you are a member. If you are for technological progress in the expansion of industry and agriculture, and define the vital interests of nations in those terms, and if you regard man’s power to create and assimilate scientific knowledge for the perfection of our species as the inviolable distinction between man and the lower beasts, then the Labor Committees are an indispensable aid to the cause you espouse, whatever political affiliation you have.”
Nearly 50 years after that was written, independent candidates that have rejected bankrupt, moribund political parties, such as New York’s U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare and Bronx Congressional candidate Jose Vega, are part of a growing international movement away from the predatory military-financial complex. Those in the trans-Atlantic sector calling for a return to advanced technological progress and an increase in the productive powers of labor, in alliance with the emerging nations of the Global South, are on the cutting edge of world politics today. War, even total war, will not stop this progress, if an international coalition for peace, linked together by a 24-hour “symposium” process, can operate as an intellectual clearing-house for policy deliberation.
To do so, such a coalition must be informed by an “emergency alert service,” through which world-class thinkers—those with and without “terminal degrees”—can reach at least hundreds of thousands on a daily basis. These informed citizens could, in turn, act as the “support base” for, not merely independent candidacies, but independent voices, many of them in their teens and twenties, that will make “good trouble” for the decaying “status quo.”
Why is an “emergency alert service” so necessary? Because a population can sometimes be most effectively brainwashed by leaving them clueless about the implication of humanity’s greatest achievements, especially depriving them of the benefit of the enthusiasm with which such achievements should naturally be met. Example: this Sunday, at 6:23 a.m.Beijing time, the Chang’e-6 spacecraft touched down in the Apollo crater on the far side of the Moon. “The China National Space Administration (CNSA) now has two far-side landings under its belt—this one and Chang’e-4, which dropped a lander-rover combo onto the gray dirt in January 2019. No other country has done it once,” reported Space.com. This means that the Chinese have now accomplished a new feat for mankind, probably the greatest feat in space engineering application since the United States left the Moon in 1972. If the next phase of the mission is successful, China’s Chang’e-6 will scoop up samples of Moon rock and dust, and fly them home in an Earth re-entry module.
Because of China’s achievements, humanity is better, today, than it was the day before, as a result—no matter how people “feel” about that. Chang’e-6 is humanity’s best example, for today, of what LaRouche called “Human practice increasing man’s power over nature.” So everyone should be alerted to that. China’s success should have been prominently featured in the United States, the first and only country to land the human race on the Moon. It should have been celebrated throughout the world.
But why was this not made prominently known to all? That was not done, because of the wall-breaching, barriers-crossing enthusiasm it would have engendered, an enthusiasm more powerful than that we saw with the April 8 solar eclipse. It was not done, because the Chinese are the next “great enemy” which threatens the “rules-based order,” we are already being told—even as the NATO war on Russia causes the world to be poised one accidental idiocy, or one intentional lunacy away from thermonuclear war.
The beauty, and necessity, of the International Peace Coalition process initiated by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is that it is beginning to take on aspects of a Platonic symposium. Several of the participants have now decided that it is the process of thinking that is increasingly imbued in the weekly dialogue, rather than the individual evaluations presented, which gives a unique character to the Friday gatherings. They are establishing a consistency in deliberation upon policy, premised upon the idea that it is the thinking citizen, in social discourse on the “res publica” —the public things—that must be the engine of change. This is to be done, not by overturning an order which will, in any case, collapse, but by establishing principles, intelligible to all and tested through social practice, through which self-government, starting with putting an end to the slaughter called war, supersedes all “rules of law.” Circulation of this past week’s proceedings of the IPC’s 52nd consecutive session, by energetic, informed citizens, is the declaration and deployment of intellectual independence we need, if humanity is to not only survive, but advance, in these next weeks and months.
