How Is It That We Are Still Barbarians? End the Sanctions; Unleash a New, Human Paradigm

How is it that ideologues in the U.S. and Europe are driving the world, step by deliberate step, down the path of extinction by nuclear war and hardly anyone in those countries has bothered to object?

On the other hand, all of the ingredients for a new paradigm are there, as seen in the policies proposed by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche for decades, solutions involving cooperation among nations for the common interests of all humanity: a new global health system to end the threat of future pandemics, a mobilization to double world food production and end the famine, agreements to build the World Land-Bridge of development corridors to end poverty for good, science driver missions for fusion power and space colonization, and a new financial architecture to support humanity’s interests—rather than that of financial swindlers.

With those solutions available, why is there such a knee-jerk reaction from the political classes in the other direction—toward war and famine? And why does the population tolerate it? Why are we still barbarians?

Consider the deadly weapon of sanctions: The “Caesar Sanctions” deployed against Syria are warfare by economic means, destroying the lives of people in Syria. Likewise the new sanctions against Russia, as is made explicit: the stated goal is to increase the velocity of debt distress in Russia, to increase borrowing costs, to slow down economic growth, to cause inflation. It is impossible to pretend that economic sanctions are not a part of military warfare. When somebody dies of suicide because they lost their job and can no longer support their family, or of starvation because there isn’t enough food—that is a death just as surely as when somebody is killed by a missile or a bomb in Yemen or in Syria. It is a death as surely as if there were military conflict between the United States and Russia directly. These sanctions are warfare—they are murder. People of the United States must stand up and end the killing that is being committed in their name.

In a statement earlier this week, Helga Zepp-LaRouche demanded, “This must stop and the Caesar Sanctions must be lifted. And all the members of the U.S. Congress who do not lift these sanctions make themselves complicit in every death that occurs in the region.” She further stated that all sanctions should be banned as a violation of human rights.

Unless the ideology of geopolitics—of viewing Russia’s independence and China’s growth as a threat—is overturned, we run the risk of sparking what will become the war that ends humanity. Americans, in particular, have a critical role to play in changing U.S. policy, to prevent it from blowing up the world.

As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has stressed, what we face now is not a collection of separate events, but a profound civilizational crisis. This is our test: Do we, as a civilization, have the moral fitness to survive? “This has reached the point where either the world wakes up and we start to remedy this, or we will not survive, because of our own moral failure as a human species. I call on you: Work with the Schiller Institute.”

The Schiller Institute’s May 8th Conference will be a crucial inflection point in turning these policies around, and our organizing between now and then—including recruiting many new members to the Schiller Institute—will be indispensable in ensuring that we are alive and in one piece, as a world, by that time.