EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 2021

War, Genocide and the Sheer Madness Will Not End Until the Bankrupt British Empire Is Replaced

March 2 , 2021 (EIRNS)—“The worst famine the world has seen in decades” is the way UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres decried what is happening in Yemen. His remarks came at a March 1 international donor’s conference, which failed to raise even half of the $3.85 billion in pledges for which it had aimed. One of the more disgusting ironies was that the single largest pledge to “help” ($430 million) came from Saudi Arabia, which is principally responsible for carrying out the British imperial policy of war and economic blockade to wipe out the Yemeni nation.

According to the latest UN data, more than 16 million Yemenis—about half the 29 million population—will face hunger this year, and nearly 50,000 are already starving to death in famine-like conditions. The UN warned that 400,000 Yemeni children under the age of five could die from severe acute malnutrition. Former U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has rightly charged that “[imposition of] sanctions similar to what the Saudi-U.S. alliance employed in Yemen is causing death and suffering for millions of innocent Syrians.”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche today emphasized that these are intentional policies, just as the Green New Deal is designed to intentionally deindustrialize and depopulate the planet. There is no fundamental difference between what the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street interests are instigating today, and what those same forces did in creating Hitler and his concentration camps. It is time to take the gloves off on this matter of historical fact, Zepp-LaRouche stated.

Nor will aid alone solve these problems. A massive development program linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the only way to save Yemen, Syria, and the broader regions of Africa and Southwest Asia—as the Schiller Institute has long insisted. Similarly, the United States must join that Belt and Road Initiative and work with China to develop the so-called Third World, both to pull itself out of its current economic depression and to create a new global security architecture in which peace becomes possible through development.

That was always the central strategic outlook of Lyndon LaRouche, as he again stated in a Nov. 19, 2002 interview with the leading Mexican daily Excélsior in response to the question: “Were you elected President of the United States, what would your priorities be?” To which LaRouche answered: “Exactly what they are at this moment, and have been since my Spring 1946 days as a U.S. soldier returned from northern Burma, in Calcutta, India: A just new world economic order among sovereign nation-states, an order consistent with objectives of what Alexander Hamilton named the American System of political-economy.”

This required approach to reversing the systemic breakdown crisis of the entire trans-Atlantic region will be one of the central issues addressed at the upcoming March 20 international conference sponsored by the Schiller Institute.

And then there is the madness—the sheer policy madness—issuing from the dying system. Recall that the Chatham House/Royal Institute of International Affairs argued in a Feb. 3, 2021 report that the growth of world food production was the single greatest cause of “the loss of bio-diversity,” and that a deliberate reduction of agriculture was the best way to save the planet. Now, the British Empire’s flagship publication, The Economist, has asked in a major Feb. 28 policy piece, “Is It Time for ‘Ecocide’ To Become an International Crime?” only to answer with scarcely concealed enthusiasm: “A growing m3vement wants destruction of the environment to be treated like genocide and crimes against humanity.”

This supposedly most heinous of crimes, “ecocide,” would then be added to 1) the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the deliberate destruction of a group of people; 2) crimes against humanity; 3) war crimes; 4) and the crime of aggression, as the only crimes that can be tried by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. A study promoting this idea is being prepared by Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London, and Dior Fall Sow, a Senegalese jurist and former UN international prosecutor, which will be presented to the ICC in June. “It could also mark a turning-point in how the relationship between humans and the natural world is understood,” The Economist pronounced.

“Ecocide” can be defined as the “extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory,” the magazine reported. Some still believe the measure of damage should be the harm it produces to people. But others, the article reports, view this as far too anthropocentric a view. Mr. Sands, for example, “thinks that ecocide should be defined by the need to protect the environment as an end in itself. This would require it to have its own free-standing basis as a new crime, rather than being slotted under existing ones.” Sands explained: “My sense is that there is a broad recognition that the old anthropocentric assumptions may well have to be cast to one side if justice is truly to be done, and the environment given a fair degree of protection.”

One would be tempted to view all of this little more than a sick joke, if it weren’t for the fact that YouTube, the Leviathan of the social media world, has decreed that any talk of election fraud in 2020 is a censorable lie; that the German Marshall Fund is demanding that anyone raising the role of windmills in the Texas energy catastrophe must be similarly silenced; and moreover that the trans-Atlantic financial system is in a breakdown crisis requiring the imposition of such lunatic policies in order to survive.

So either join the battle to stop the deadly lunacy, or prepare to eat your last supper, and make it a good one. Because the British Empire intends to make eating itself a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg code.