EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY AUGUST 31, 2023

Sorry, Henry: History Is Being Produced in the South

Aug. 30, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—It is arguably the case that the results of the recent BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, has Henry Kissinger rolling over in his grave.

True, the 100-year-old Kissinger is not yet officially deceased as of this writing; but he has certainly been soul-dead for quite some time. The U.S.-based Leporello of the British Monarchy for many decades, Kissinger in 1969 had a revealing exchange with then Chilean Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdes, according to Valdes’s own account. On an official visit to Washington, Valdes delivered a speech that was moderately critical of U.S. foreign policy. Kissinger, then National Security Adviser under President Richard Nixon, berated Valdes: “Mr. Minister, you made a strange speech. You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.” Valdes replied: “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South,” to which the ever-arrogant Kissinger answered: “No, and I don’t care.”

That revealing exchange explains why Kissinger, along with his sponsors in the Anglo-American Establishment, are now rolling over in their respective graves, given the tectonic strategic shift signaled by the Aug. 22-24 BRICS summit, where the Global South—or more accurately, the Global Majority—indeed made history.

“There is a complete change in the global power structure,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told listeners during her Weekly Live Dialogue internet program.

“This is a breakthrough for all mankind. If the West would just give up their geopolitical viewpoint, they would rejoice. The Western countries are riding on the Titanic, with a collapsing economy, with the threat of a disintegration of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system.... This is a tremendous chance for us to reorganize our ways. But that will probably require a couple of more shocks.”

In the days immediately following the Johannesburg BRICS summit, its leaders have been emphatic that they have assumed responsibility for shaping history. “Twenty years ago, we—Brazil and Africa—were called Third World countries,” Brazilian President Lula da Silva stated in an Aug. 25 speech at the close of the Economic Forum in Angola, during his visit to that country.

“After the [BRICS] meeting we held in Johannesburg ... we’re no longer called Third World-ized, we’re called the Global South.... What does it show? It shows, quite simply, that the countries of the South decided to organize themselves.... And we decided that we no longer accept being treated as insignificant.” Lula concluded: “We don’t have the right to remain poor.... We don’t have the right to continue being called the Third World.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India hit the same theme in an Aug. 26 speech to gathered scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), called to celebrate the recent Chandrayaan-3 Moon landing success.

“Today India has become the fourth country in the world to touch the surface of the Moon. This success becomes even bigger when we see where India started its journey. There was a time when India did not have the necessary technology; there was no cooperation. We were counted among the countries standing in the ‘Third World.’ From there, today India has become the fifth largest economy in the world. Today, from trade to technology, India is being counted among the countries standing in the first row.... That is, institutions like our ISRO have played a very big role in this journey from ‘Third Row’ to ‘First Row.’ ”

These developments are changing the way the nations of the South view themselves, and their prospects for progress. On the last day of the Johannesburg summit the President of Bolivia, Luis Arce, announced his country’s intent to join the BRICS in 2024, and effusively described the summit as “a historic milestone in human history because it allows nations to access international markets without having to compromise their dignity, and without political conditions, sanctions or militaristic intimidation.”

The challenge now is to turn that commitment into reality, and bring an entirely new international financial architecture into existence, and put the old, deadly one out of its misery. Even as discussion continues among the nations of the Global Majority on further shifting their trade to payments in their national currencies—not the toxic, London-controlled dollar—all eyes are turning to the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) to address the more fundamental issue of figuring out ways to provide dramatically increased development financing to their nations. The Aug. 28 announcement by new BRICS member U.A.E. that being admitted to the BRICS at Johannesburg is “huge to the U.A.E.,” and that “we are actually going to push more” capital to help fund the NDB, was received with great consternation in the City of London and Wall Street. The U.A.E. is, after all, the third largest oil producer in OPEC and one of the few countries with over $1 trillion in its sovereign wealth fund. And the U.A.E.’s announcement poses the immediate question: Will Saudi Arabia shortly be making similar decisions?

In addition to receiving sharply increased funding for the NDB, a new currency, or unit of account, will be required to sequester such financial flows from the deadly IMF and the trans-Atlantic speculative banks. And those flows will have to be channeled to productive investments which increase the productive powers of labor, and therefore the economy’s Potential Relative Population Density—as Lyndon LaRouche specified those concepts of physical economy.

It is more than timely, therefore, that the Schiller Institute will be holding its next major international conference this coming Sept. 9, “Let us Join Hands with the Global Majority To Create a New Chapter in World History!” honoring the 101st anniversary of the birth of Lyndon LaRouche—a conference which will delve into the concepts that LaRouche uniquely provided to Mankind to navigate safely through an epochal, deadly breakdown crisis like the current one.