DEFEAT GREEN FASCISM BY TAKING UP THE CHALLENGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION

by: Harley Schlanger

September 20 — A confluence of events occurring around the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the successful landing on the Moon by the United States’ Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, 1969 has generated worldwide excitement, which is adding to the potential today for a new era of international cooperation in space exploration.  The commemorations allowed millions who had not been alive on that historic day to experience the exciting events of the first footsteps on the Moon, generating what the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp LaRouche called “Moon Fever.”  It is estimated that more than half-a-billion people watched in 1969 as the lunar module landed, and heard astronaut Neil Armstrong say “Houston, Tranquility base here.  The Eagle has landed.”  They continued to watch the process in awe, as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step onto the lunar surface, and when Armstrong proclaimed, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The commemoration of these events in the U.S. and worldwide on July 20 coincided with bold new developments in space exploration underway by many nations.  Leading the way is China’s Chang’e Project, which landed a module on the far side of the Moon on January 3, 2019, and deployed the Yutu-2 rover, as part of a plan to map the Moon.  The Chinese program intends, among other things, to  begin mining Helium 3, which will be used as the fuel for producing fusion energy on earth.

At the same time, tens of millions of Indians turned their eyes toward the Moon, in anticipation of the landing on the Moon’s South Pole of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.  The touchdown of the capsule occurred on September 6, but scientists lost contact during landing.  Despite the disappointment, Prime Minister Modi, who was present at the space center when the landing was scheduled, addressed the nation, tweeting that India “is proud of our scientists.  They’ve given their best and have always made India proud. These are moments to be courageous, and courageous we will be!”  Despite the apparent setback, he added, “We remain hopeful and will continue working hard on our space programme.”

Another piece of this picture is the bold return of the U.S. to manned missions, with the Artemis Project scheduled to put a team of four astronauts, including at least one woman, on the Moon by 2024.  After decades of scaling back the goals of the U.S. space program and scientists, President Trump intervened, signing an order on December 11, 2017 announcing the plans for Artemis.  At that time, Trump said,

“The directive I’m signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery….It marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.”

To build on the enthusiasm generated by the commemoration and these programs, LaRouchePAC (LPAC) initiated Days of Action on September 10 and 12, as part of a month-long organizing campaign to spread the optimism surrounding this confluence.  This optimism is sorely needed, given the global offensive launched by City of London and Wall Street billionaires to fund an extreme ecological fascist movement, around the fraudulent scientific narrative of “man-made climate change.”  As young people are being bombarded with apocalyptic scare stories about the “world ending in twelve years,” led by the 16-year old media darling Greta Thunberg and the “Fridays for Future” campaign, to pull children out of school and into a “childrens’ crusade”, the Extinction Rebellion is deploying throughout the Trans-Atlantic region in proto-terrorist actions against the forms of energy production and manufacturing necessary to sustain life for seven-plus billion people on the planet.  The message spread by the eco-fascists is that eating meat, driving automobiles, cooling homes in the summer and heating them in the winter, along with other aspects of modern life, are what is driving mankind to a climate Armageddon!

It should not be missed that the demands for austerity explicitly pushed by the organizers of this crusade coincide completely with the draconian insistence of its financial backers, that a level of austerity necessary for mass population reduction be imposed, to divert funds away from scientific and technological progress and into a speculative bubble, to stave off the collapse of the financial system.  This tactic, of using fake “environmental” claims to induce people to voluntarily accept genocide, was first exposed by economist Lyndon LaRouche in the late 1960s, with his scientific attacks on the “Limits to Growth” movement.

“LOOK TO THE STARS”

The campaign in the U.S. by LPAC and internationally by the Schiller Institute was initiated by Helga Zepp LaRouche, who wrote a leaflet for mass distribution titled “The Age of Reason Is in the Stars” (https://larouchepac.com/sites/default/files/20190905%20Helga%20Leaflet%20spec_1.pdf).  In releasing it, she said, “We will have International Days of Action starting on September 10 and 12, for which I have just written this leaflet that should be used simultaneously everywhere — in Latin American, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, and in the United States.  We should rally youth of the world to see that the climate-change madness is completely contrary to the true identity of man as a spacefaring species, which can, with space technology, attack any problem, including that of climate change.”

With this as the spirit guiding organizers, book tables have been set up at college campuses in the U.S., Europe, Australia and South America, and distributions of the leaflet are also taking place in Africa and Asia.  There is even a report that leaflets were taken to a research outpost in Antarctica, meaning that people are being challenged to join the mobilization on all seven continents!  Signs at the tables present a direct challenge to young people, who are being recruited to march like lemmings for their own destruction, and to inspire cognitive reflection among those zombified by the pessimistic culture which engulfs them.  Some of the signs used include “Man is NOT an animal”, “CO2 is Not Dangerous, But Nuclear War Is!”, and “End the Green Lunacy! Build the Lunar City!”  One of the more provocative signs, which directly confronts those being told that having children is bad — as it means more rapid depletion  of “scarce resources”– is one which reads, “The World Needs More People.”

The message in the LPAC space mobilization is that the universe, as presented by the Climate Change shock troops, of declining, finite resources, does not exist.  The potential embodied by an active, global return to spacefaring demonstrates that the universe is not a closed system, with fixed resources, but one which is not only constantly undergoing a dynamic of expansion and development, but requires human intervention for that to occur.  The approach taken by organizers in the U.S. was reported by Daniel Burke, an LPAC activist running for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, who described how the “extra-terrestrial imperative” is coherent with the desire to overcome the injustices of poverty, hunger and disease on earth.

He said we are telling youth, “That we Americans, and particularly American youth, should look to our responsibility to revive the moral leadership of the United States that we had under John F Kennedy; to revive an anti-imperialist vision for the United States and the purpose of our nation itself. That means that the nations of Africa, the nations in the under-developed regions of the world, the regions where we have a lack of electricity, a lack of water, a lack of conditions of life whereby people can live meaningful lives; they depend upon us to make a breakthrough now to get a concept delivered to the leadership of the world, and specifically, certainly to our American leadership — Trump and otherwise — that we need [LaRouche’s] Four Powers Agreement. We need the United States, Russia, China, India cooperating; and many other nations around that core of great powers, around the next 40-50 years. To have a vision, a mission for what it is we want to accomplish for the good of mankind. We are calling on them to join us in that process….”

Burke called this a “privilege,” to live at a time when one’s actions can improve conditions for a growing human population for the next several generations, in contrast to those who are marching as lemmings in the Green-suicide Climate Crusade financed by billionaires, who believe that humans are the cancer of the planet!

NASA RESPONDS

One of the more exciting developments of this mobilization was an exchange between LPAC’s Kesha Rogers and Jim Bridenstine, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  After years of seeing NASA retreat from the mission defined by President Kennedy, as a result of anti-science lunacy and neo-liberal, anti-government budgetary restrictions, Bridenstine, under the leadership of President Trump, is presiding over a re-invigoration of NASA, centered on the Moon-Mars mission of the Artemis Project.

Rogers addressed Bridenstine on September 12, when he spoke at the Rice University Space Institute in Houston.  It was at Rice, on September 12, 1962, that President Kennedy delivered his famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, in which he pledged to land a man on the Moon, and return him safely, before the end of the decade.  Rogers is well-known for her successful campaigns in 2010 and 2012, when she won the Democratic nomination for Congress in the Houston district where NASA is located.  In those campaigns, she called for the removal of the anti-science President Obama, and the adoption of LaRouche’s Moon-Mars mission.

Rogers opened by saying the LaRouche organization is circulating a petition in support of Trump’s Artemis program.  But for this to work, she said, we must look beyond the 2024 target date, at programs for the next fifty years, which will require the necessity for the development of nuclear fusion propulsion to get to Mars.  She also emphasized the importance of collaboration with other nations.

Bridenstine responded by thanking Rogers for “her advocacy”, adding “Let me know what I can do to help.  I mean that seriously.”  He then got to the core of the issue: “NASA has not a science problem or a technical problem. We can retire all of the technical risks you can imagine: We’re an amazing agency, with amazing engineers. We have a political problem! That’s why we’re not on the Moon right now; that’s we’re not at Mars right now…we have a political science problem at NASA historically. I have been very clear: My objective is to fix that. I’ve been working on it since the day I got into this office.”

Addressing her point on the need for nuclear propulsion, he said that he believes we are not yet at the point of using fusion propulsion, but fission propulsion is promising: “other countries are developing that technology right now,” he said, “and we should be part of it.”

It is through dialogues like this, which importantly occurred on a university campus, that the spirit of adventure into the unknown can be rekindled among youth.  This will inspire an otherwise lost, pessimistic generation, made susceptible to the lies spread by the billionaires financing the “Green revolution”, and by the brainwashing of the genocidal population reduction mafia, reinforced by university professors and the mainstream media, to rise to the challenge presented by the “extraterrestrial imperative.”  Whether or not youth rise to this challenge depends on the success of the LaRouchePAC/Schiller Institute organizing drive.

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