Artist: Chris Butler
We see an artist’s conception of a city built in a crater on the moon
EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 2023
Sept. 12, 2023 (EIRNS)—“You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to build nuplexes. Lay it out to ’em. How do you build a nuplex? Well, you go out and dig a big crater…. Build a crater the size of a city, a city of a half-million people, or 100,000 people, but build a crater for an industrial city of a new type, from six, seven or eight stories below the surface. On this thing, stick two nuclear plants, of one-half to two gigawatts each. We’re not going to export a few, ten or twenty billion dollars worth of additional exports—we’re going to export hundreds of cities!”
In Lyndon LaRouche’s Presidential campaign announcement of 1978, his design of a new type of bank, called the International Development Bank, crafted to make technology transfer from the “advanced” to the “developing” sector the fundamental, characteristic loaning activity of that bank, was, and is revolutionary. LaRouche’s unique concept of the World Land-Bridge, composed of what he called “development corridors,” is also unique. It frees mankind from the need to build most cities along coasts, or pre-existing inland bodies of water, and instead, to import, through a system of water and power projects, the very process of systemic, “full-set” industrial development into the interior of continents. These two ideas shift the characteristic of not only how civilization, but the biosphere itself is evolving. These and other LaRouche ideas are the most advanced economic conceptions ever presented in an electoral campaign by any candidate for public office in history. They should be made the subject of discussion, deliberation and debate in the “non-elections” planned for the United States in 2024. These stand out as completely revolutionary ideas, even 45 years after they were first proposed. It is only by presenting ideas of this type, in the streets of the United States and Europe in particular, including in an electoral setting, that the basis for negotiations between Russia and the trans-Atlantic world, or China and the trans-Atlantic world, can be re-established on a higher conceptual footing than now exists.
Only if the method underlying LaRouche’s economic proposals is increasingly publicly discussed is it likely that the Anglosphere can still be dissuaded from its disastrous, “surprisingly” short path to thermonuclear war. LaRouche publications are the short-term means to this end, augmented by vigorous social media campaigns that widely distribute video material such as the keynote speech by Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the Sept. 9 Schiller Institute conference, “Let Us Join Hands with the Global Majority To Create a New Chapter in World History!” There, and in her Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture of November last year, the reader can encounter the best short-term introduction to the method by which a higher order of strategic international policy is made.
While many things are happening in current history, it is important for everyone who actually cares about civilization to read President Putin’s Sept. 12 speech to the annual Eastern Economic Forum plenary directly, rather than the various media distortions. It should be read from the standpoint of the LaRouche “City-Builder” new economic platform conception identified above. Why? Let us examine this statement, made by Putin in his keynote speech to the Plenary Session of the 8th Eastern Economic Forum today: “Essentially, we are witnessing a new emerging model of relationships and integration—and not by Western patterns, for the elite, for the chosen ‘golden billion,’ but for the entire humanity and the entire existing and developing multipolar world. This model offers creative energy, openness and focus on a specific outcome as a powerful competitive advantage of the Asia-Pacific region, a key factor that determines and I am sure will determine for a long time its global leadership in economic growth.”
In the speech, President Putin was concentrating his attention on the enormous potential of the Russian Far East, an area that is more than 80% that of the continental United States. Putin pointed out,
“I should note here that the average percentage of explored subsurface resources in the Far East is now 35%. You understand, only 35% of the subsurface area has been explored. What does this mean? It shows that there is every opportunity for the mining industries to grow by leaps and bounds, including the strategic raw materials that are in short supply, and which will be in demand in the economy of the future. … In order to increase the scope of geological exploration, we have launched a frontal strategy, it is called so beautifully: Geology. Revival of a Legend. I ask the government to include a separate section in it, dedicated to the study of the Far East subsurface and to start preparing a similar section for Siberia….”
Those who know something of the scientific history of the United States, can hear the implication of what Putin is actually discussing here. What is the significance, in American history, for example, of the United States Geological Survey, the United States Coast Survey, or the U.S. Geodetic Survey, and their roles in establishing a scientifically independent, increasingly self-sufficient United States? In response to the passage of the John Quincy Adams-inspired General Survey Act of 1825, “authorizing the President to employ officers of the Army Corps of Engineers to make surveys for roads and canals of national importance,” Virginia Sen. John Randolph stated, “if Congress possesses the power to do what he is proposing in this bill … they may emancipate every slave in the United States.”
The BRICS process, so denounced and dismissed for so long by those that would have the world plunged into perpetual war, has increasingly emerged as the “seed-crystal,” but nonetheless central physical reality of a future “new planetary correlation of forces.” About Putin’s speech, though they reported secondary matters, Reuters and other press outlets could not grasp much, though many decided to fixate on the Russian President’s statement in discussions with the forum moderators, that “If one looks into the security sphere, new physical principles weapons will ensure the security of any country in the near historic perspective. We understand this very well and are working on it.” That scared them enough to report it, along with the visit of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to Russia and “what it could possibly mean.”
What it all basically means—what the BRICS-Plus process, informed by the revolutionary ideas of Lyndon LaRouche can mean—is that the Sun is setting on the multiple imperialisms that have dominated too much of human life for far too long. The British are not amused, but they are also not capable of stopping the process, short of instigating thermonuclear war. As for the role of cities in acquiring greater human wealth, intelligence, and freedom, consider this.
In the year 1800, some 3% of the world lived in cities. In 1900, some 14% of the world lived in cities. As of now, 55% of the world lives in cities. It is projected that by the year 2050, a least 68% of the world will be living in cities. “Together, India, China and Nigeria will account for 35% of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2018 and 2050. By 2050, it is projected that India will have added 416 million urban dwellers, China 255 million and Nigeria 189 million.”
Who will build these cities of the future? Where will those city-builders be born? When LaRouche proposed a revolution decades ago, of phased-in, eventually thermonuclear fusion-based economies that manufactured cities for export, built to change as they aged, with modular industrial capabilities, he also conceived of workforces so conversant with the “machine-tool principle” that they were skilled in changing their very skills, to adapt and be incorporated into industries yet unknown. These are the workforces that will build the African cities of the future, not die on the shores of Libya or in the fatal seas of the Mediterranean. Whether in the form of space technology, fusion technology, high-speed rail/magnetically levitated trains technology, water and power technology, etc. It is time for the city-builders, and city dwellers, worldwide, to as opposed to Mike “Mouse-o-lini” Bloomberg’s “Venetian world city-states” project, build hundreds of cities, brimming with the optimism that only the final end of colonialism can bring the human race.
