EDITORIAL

Schiller Institute Conference:
The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace!

May 31—The Schiller Institute will hold a conference Saturday, June 10, beginning at 10:00 a.m. EDT (4:00 p.m./16:00 CET). Registration is here.

On June 10, 1963, eight months after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and peering into the abyss of thermonuclear self-destruction, American President John F. Kennedy gave a world-historical speech at American University in Washington. He said:

Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

In a video address Sept. 23, 2022 to an international conference in Moscow marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s Ambassador to the United States, said:

Whereas the consequence of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the recognition of the possibility of peaceful co-existence of two great powers, now, over the past decades, Washington has set out to subvert Russia, bring it to its knees, or even better—to dismember it into several separate principalities.

Further, China and other nations’ Ukraine peace proposals have been rejected by London and Washington. Worse, China/Taiwan is to be the next theater in which world war is to be provoked.

In the last month, mad drone attacks have been launched directly into Russia, including on the Kremlin itself. These attacks are coming, either from an unhinged Zelensky regime, or from NATO special forces masquerading as “anti-Putin freedom fighters” who are being “passively supported” by the London-Washington military-intelligence establishment. Whatever their origin, they are criminally insane, and must be stopped.

No nation has the right to bring the world to the brink of annihilation; every citizen of the world has not only the right, but the obligation to act against such madness. This cannot be done through war. As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his opposition to the Vietnam War put it,

The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. The choice is between non-violence and non-existence.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, wrote an “Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from All Over the World, to the (Next) President of the United States!” which says:

Today we are faced with a strategic situation which is much more dangerous than that at the height of the Cuban missile crisis; offensive NATO weapon systems are much closer to the border of Russia than Cuba was to the U.S., the destructive power of the weapons even greater, the warning time before their launch shorter, and the trust between the leaders of the big nuclear powers much below that between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The doomsday clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at 90 seconds before midnight, and that may be overly optimistic.

The Schiller Institute therefore calls upon all sane forces either already proposing pathways to immediate peace, or inclined to do so, to convene on the 60th anniversary of the JFK American University “Peace Speech” on June 10—an international assembly of the people of the world to deliberate on what Zepp-LaRouche has called “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture” and what we must each and all do, to bring that about. As JFK said at American University:

Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.