EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY JUNE 11, 2023

‘World Peace Is the Most Important Issue for Mankind’

June 10, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—An intense four-hour dialogue occurred at today’s Schiller Institute online conference “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace,” an event commemorating President John F. Kennedy’s historic American University speech of June 10, 1963—and the paradigm of Man that it represented, which is decisive to bringing about peace today in this most dangerous of global crises.

Participants included Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute; Donald Ramotar, former President of Guyana; Pino Arlacchi, former head of the UN Office for Drug Control (1997-2002) and former Italian member of parliament; Ray McGovern, former senior analyst, CIA, and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Founder and president, JUST International, Malaysia; Diane Sare, U.S. Senate candidate from New York; and Harley Schlanger, spokesman for The LaRouche Organization. The meeting was moderated by the Schiller Institute’s Dennis Speed.

The following is taken from the opening section of Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks to that meeting:

“We are commemorating one of the most important speeches of the postwar period, the speech given by JFK 60 years ago at American University, his very famous Peace Speech. But we are not doing it in an academic manner, we are doing it with a dramatic worldwide mobilization of as many forces as possible, and as an urgent appeal to the US government to return to the outlook expressed by John F. Kennedy, that the United States must return to become a force of peace in the world, not, as Kennedy said, ‘a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war ... but the kind of peace that makes life on the Earth worth living.’”

Because we are concerned that the world is dangerously close to the possible outbreak of a new world war, which this time would be a thermonuclear one, and therefore mean the annihilation of all life on Earth.

Starting Monday, over Germany there will start the largest NATO air war maneuver since the end of the Cold War, the Air Defender 23, with the largest maneuver transfer of 100 fighter jets from the US to Germany, including the nuclear-capable stealth F-35, as well as 120 more fighter jets from other countries. The basis of the maneuver is an air war against an imaginary enemy, who as well commands a potent air force, and it is obvious, who that would be. Under the present condition of an escalating war in Ukraine, some military accident or the error of a pilot very easily can be misread as an act of aggression. There have been recently more and more Ukrainian strikes into the territory of Russia, and the Russian air surveillance for sure will be on high alert observing the NATO maneuver. Russian observers, who could verify that the maneuvers are not a pretext for the preparation of a nuclear attack, have not been invited. Even though this maneuver has been prepared since 2018, to actually carry it out under conditions of a hot war in the middle of Europe puts the world at risk of extinction, even if there were no intention, just misfortune. This maneuver must be called off before it starts!

With an obviously insane proposal to drive nuclear brinkmanship to the extreme, under the headline “The key to ending the war in Ukraine? Attacking Crimea,” John E. Herbst, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and Daniel Fried, a fellow at the Council, have now repeated the proposal by the British Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) of a year ago, to “end” the Ukraine war by creating a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids,” by having Ukraine attack Crimea. By destroying the Kerch Bridge, Ukraine would first take Crimea, and then fissures in Putin’s regime would grow and he would then fall. Then Russia would accept to have lost the war. Not one mention of the utmost danger, that this would cross the ultimate red line of the presently strongest nuclear power—Russia—and a demonstrated ignorance about the lack of the kind of back-channel discussion which existed between Kennedy and Khrushchev, this proposal obviously reflects the thinking of a major faction in the Anglo-American establishment, for which the Atlantic Council is the mouthpiece.

In addition to the member of the Order of the British Empire and former commander of the UK and NATO Chemical, Biological, Radiological Nuclear Forces, ret. British Army Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, is asserting without the slightest proof, that President Putin would be preparing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as an “improvised nuclear weapon.” Therefore, the West should act to “urgently stop Putin” with “whatever it takes,” he says.

These proposals are sheer madness. What should cause every sane person on the planet to be alarmed to the highest degree, is not only the fact that it has become “normal” for the mainstream media to publish such nuclear war-mongering poison, but that almost all the Western establishments don’t denounce such irresponsible utterings, but go along with the official narrative about Putin’s “unprovoked war of aggression.”

The situation today is far more dangerous than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and far more dangerous than during the intermediate-range missile crisis in the beginning of the 1980s, but the public awareness has been squashed by a relentless war propaganda, which has demonized Russia and increasingly China, and seemingly eradicated any historic memory in parts of the population and leaves others with a feeling of despair about what to do!

Indeed, what is to be done, in this amazingly dangerous moment of history? The Schiller Institute is circulating internationally an appeal to the President of the United States—that is, President Biden—to urgently return to the policies of John F. Kennedy, as they are expressed in his peace speech given 60 years ago today.