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Conference: The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace

Saturday, June 10, 2023 · 10 a.m. EDT, 4 p.m. CET

Conference proceedings

Q&A

Add your name to our Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from All Over the World to the (Next) President of the United States!

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

Nearly 60 years later, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov 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 Martin Luther King 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 wrote an “Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from all over the world, including the U.S., 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 June 10, the 60th anniversary of the JFK American University “Peace Speech,” an international assembly of the people of the world to deliberate on what Zepp-LaRouche has called “Ten Principles for a New 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 man made—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.”


International Forum: Risks of the West’s “China Strategy”?

Speakers include

  • Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the International Schiller Institute, Germany
  • Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University in Shanghai, China
  • Charles Liu, Senior Fellow of the Taihe Institute, China
  • Ole Döring, Professor at Foreign Language Studies College of Hunan Normal University

In the current geopolitical environment, Western leaders are moving away from referring to
China as a “partner” and emphasizing China more as a “rival”.
For example, the EU Commission recently promoted “de-risking” to reduce Europe’s alleged
dependence on China in certain economic sectors. The United States “decoupling” strategy
seeks to cut China off from technology supply chains. And the German government has declared
China a security risk and is working on a plan to impose import and export controls, investment
barriers and other sanctions on China.

China, on the other hand, emphasizes that if countries want to reduce risk, they should trade
more with China. What are the options and potentials of both views?
Western sanctions against Russian energy commodities and goods have already shown the
opposite effect and have largely backfired on Europe. Will Western leaders learn from this failure
and prevent another serious miscalculation?

In reality, China is the world’s most important market and production center, and its Belt and Road
Initiative is bringing infrastructure development to the majority of countries in need. Will the West
reflect on this fact and create a new paradigm of peaceful win-win cooperation?
Since the mainstream Western “narrative” leaves no space for such a debate, we want to provide
a platform for a broad alliance of international thinkers, entrepreneurs, and policy strategists to
have a public conversation.


PRESS RELEASE: International Peace Coalition Must Grow To Stop World War III

 If you are interested in working with the International Peace Coalition, please contact questions@schillerinstitute.org

June 7, 2023 (EIRNS) — A zoom meeting with over 25 representatives of peace organizations from about a dozen nations was held on June 2, with the aim of bringing the diverse peace movements around the world together to counter the rapidly escalating threat of a U.S.-NATO full-scale war with Russia and potentially also China. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened the meeting, noting the extreme danger of the NATO escalation toward war: Defender 23 now ongoing, the largest multinational air operations exercise in NATO’s history;  the drone attacks on Moscow; and the virulent proposals for dismantling the Russian Federation. She said there were significant peace rallies in the U.S. and Europe in February and in March, but since that time the war escalation has rapidly increased, and the peace movement clearly needs to increase much more. So it is urgent to launch a much more integrated form of organization to unify and expand the world’s peace movements to end the march to war, before it is too late.

The discussion included the urgent need for the diversion of military spending to development, contrasting the cost of a single F-16 (in the tens of millions of dollars each) to the massive need for development financing in most parts of the world.

The challenge of mobilizing large numbers of Americans to become a voice for peace is one priority, and joining with the Global South, which is experiencing a renaissance of the Non-Aligned Movement to finally overcome all forms of colonialism, another. The voice of the majority of the human species must be heard, since the existence of all of us is at stake.

Over 25 “world citizens” from a dozen nations — France, Guyana, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK and the U.S .— participated in the two-and-a-half hour meeting, discussing proposals for achieving these goals.

Following are excerpts from some of the participants in the discussion:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute founder, Germany:

“The large demonstrations in February in Washington, D.C. and in Germany, Berlin having 50,000 people and many other local rallies since, do not match the masses in the streets which protested the Pershing II SS-20 Middle Range missile crisis in the 1980’s, with hundreds of thousands of people in the street, who were aware that we were close to WWIII then. … I think that we really have to make an effort; and I would wish that this discussion today leads to a new form of organization where we would use this group of people as a kernel to try to unify the Peace movement internationally, across five continents.”

Donald Ramotar, Former President of Guyana:

“We have to pull our minds together, and I hope this meeting will help to make a contribution in that way, to break out of this information blockade that most people in developing countries are facing.”

Richard Black, Former Virginia State Senator, USA:

“We are in a great deal of danger, and I think it makes a great deal of sense to bring all those groups together, especially those who don’t agree on many things, but where we intersect, where we overlap, this is where we need to act and join forces.”

Ray McGovern, Veterans for Peace, VIPS, and Pax Christi, USA:

“It doesn’t matter if Ray McGovern believes that Putin is right on this, what matters is that Putin thinks this is the case! What we need is whistle blowers, like my former friends in the CIA — What we need is a mass mobilization to say ‘Look, stop this Defender 23’, it can come to what the Chinese call a ‘no good end.'”

Jack Gilroy, Veterans for Peace and Pax Christi, USA:

“There is a huge education needed in the United States to teach the American people, through writings and videos and various pronouncements by people in the existing Peace communities, that people must understand that Americans did provoke Russia to act.”

Martin Schotz, author, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, Massachusetts, USA:

“My work is primarily trying to get President Kennedy’s American University speech distributed as widely as possible. The reason for that is that Kennedy has outlined in great detail and sophistication, what the peace process is all about and the various aspects of it. If one looks at U.S. foreign policy of the last 30 years, from my point of view, the U.S. is 180 degrees from that speech. The exact opposite process, it’s been following, and that is a war process.”

Chandra Muzaffar, President of International Movement for a Just World, Malaysia

“Number 1, I think that it is extremely important to create a strong Peace movement in the United States of America…

“Number 2, I think it is also very important to encourage groups at the grassroots level in different parts of the world. I come from the Global South, and I think it is quite possible to do this, not through Peace groups, since there are not many in the Global South, but there are other types of civil society movements, they should be enthused to act…

And the third, we have to try to get some voices within the corridors of power to act.”

Angela McArdle, Chair, Libertarian Party and Rage Against the War Machine Organizer, USA:

“What I hope is what we do is really laser focus on the anti war movement. What can we do to advance an agenda of Peace and how can we do it that makes room for as many people as possible? I don’t believe that the bloods of monsters of the war machine, like Mitch McConnell or the McCain/Cheney types will have any interest in what we’re doing, but I would hope that people who are regular ‘low-information’ voters on the right and left will see what we are doing, be inspired by it and want to join with us.”

Nick Brana, Chair, Peoples Party and Rage Against the War Machine Organizer, USA:

“I have a format that I think would be really good for the next meeting, that I think would really help us work [on] this enormous challenge we face, and work backwards from our goal to end the war… to what are the possible solutions? There have been Peace negotiation proposals by the Vatican, by Brazil, by China. There have been mass demonstrations to stop the war in the U.S., mass demonstrations to stop the war in Germany… and then we can identify a number of different possible win conditions for us as an international Peace movement, that these are the routes by which the war can be ended. And then work backwards from those.”

Alessia Ruggeri, Trade Unionist, Italy:

“I remember very well our mobilization with the Schiller Institute to unblock Afghan funds being frozen by the Federal Reserve, funds which were needed to feed starving children. And I share Helga’s view; peace means also economic development, as the BRICS countries are demanding right now. It is very important that all peace movements come under a single cap, a single direction, thanks to this initiative of the Schiller Institute. This way we can be stronger”.

Maurizio Abbate, Chairman of ENAC, Ente Nazionale Attività Culturali, Italy:

“I’ve heard a lot of reports of large demonstrations: 300,000 people or so in important cities. But this reaches only people who know the problem, who are committed. But the great majority of people who listen to the mainstream media will not understand… So it’s important to reach the people who do not know and do cultural work… One should start from culture: Schools and universities.”

“No2NATO” Representative, UK:

“It’s clear that the mainstream media narrative across the West is the same. People listen to their television. They are hearing the same narrative day in and day out. We need to try to change that narrative… George Galloway and Chris Williamson send their apologies for not being able to attend the meeting, saying, ‘We do hope to attend any future events that you do.’ ”

Bernie Holland, SGI-UK National Culture Centre, UK:

“I am very touched by your sincerity regarding these problems. Now this word sincerity is important here in the context of statecraft and diplomacy. I’m putting emphasis on this because for many years, we have seen the great lengths that President Putin and Secretary Lavrov have gone to build an ‘entente cordiale’ with Western partners, only to be met with dissent and deceit.”

Ulf Sandmark, President, Schiller Institute, Sweden:

“What I want to bring up is the NordStream issue. Because the Swedish prosecutor is sitting on the proof, taking the material from the bottom of the sea. They are saying that all traces on those materials are from explosives. They are not releasing the proof at all, but they are actually doing a cover up of the crime scene. We in Sweden don’t have the power to force the prosecutor to release these things. So we need international pressure.”

Johan Nordquist, publisher, Truth Guardian, Sweden

“The ignorance is monumental amongst ordinary people. And I think we have to overcome that. One way to do that, which has inspired me, is Scott Ritter’s effort to counter Russophobia. In Sweden, it is very difficult to speak because of the widespread Russophobia… One very simple message to reach people who are not aware, or are still in the mainstream media bubble — and that would be to ban nuclear weapons.”

Diane Sare, U.S. Senate Candidate, New York, USA:

“I was just thinking about this challenge ‘why aren’t people in the streets, why don’t we have millions of people in the streets?’ I think there are two reasons. One is that Americans had believed that you change things through the electoral process. But many Americans, from both sides, have lost faith in their electoral system, with good reason. So they are at a loss. The other is a despair… If things get really bad, and worse, or that people realize they are worse, will this cause them to go out in the streets? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s going to work that way.”

Jacques Cheminade, former Presidential Candidate France:

“What we have here (France) at this point is the highest form of social demonstrations, I think probably in the developed sector. These demonstrations are against the pensions reform, the counter reform of the French government. So as such, if it’s limited against pensions, it becomes a single issue and it doesn’t work. And what we have to do, is to transform this social ferment into a mobilization for Peace.”

Steve Starr, Professor at the University of Missouri, former Director of the UM Clinical Laboratory Science program, USA

“The hallmark of the Biden regime is irrationality. I think we have to find a way to get these people out of power. We can’t wait for elections and whether the elections would be rigged or not would be another question. There is a man named Francis Boyle, who wrote up articles of presidential impeachment; and I think it would be worthwhile to get someone to bring those up to the House of Representatives. Because the neo-cons running foreign policy, are entirely corrupt and delusional. I think some of them think they can get Russia to back down and I think some think they can win a nuclear war.”

In attendance were also:

Former Mexican Congresswoman María de los Ángeles Huerta
Chris Fogarty, Irish-American leader

Marinella Correggia, Eco-peace activist, journalist, Italy 
Christer Lundgren, Sweden
Kirk Meighoo, former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago
Juan Carrero, Fundación S’Olivar, Spain
Jose Vega, Activist, Interventionist and Schiller Institute organizer, USA
Anastasia Battle, Activist, Interventionist and Editor-in-Chief, Leonore Magazine, USA


America Should Become, Again, a Force for Good in the World

Register for the June 10, 2023 Schiller Institute conference, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace”

TRANSCRIPT

 HARLEY SCHLANGER: This is someone who is circulating the statement for signatures. She asks: “Can you say what you hope to accomplish with the statement the Schiller Institute issued, ‘Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from All Over the World to the (Next) President of the United States!’ What is the intent of circulating that?”

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, on the 10th of June is 60th anniversary of the famous speech by John F. Kennedy at the American University, which is generally called the “Peace Speech.” And if you haven’t don’t that yet, you should read that speech, or even listen to him on YouTube, because it is a beautiful speech, where Kennedy says that the world needs peace, coming from America, but not a Pax Americana, where the United States would enforce with weapons to subject all others and that way have a “peace of grave.” But to have a peace where each country can flourish and work together.

And it’s a very beautiful, poetical speech. And it is so important that people listen to that speech—there are also other, incredible speeches by Kennedy, for example, one where he talks about the importance of art and culture, which I can only underwrite every word he is saying there, that it is the culture of a country which is what makes it human and what makes it beautiful.

First of all, many young people have no real idea who Kennedy was, because they were born long, long after he had been assassinated, and therefore they don’t have a vivid idea any more that he represented a completely different paradigm of American politics. And this is very important, because what I want to accomplish with that statement is, as I mentioned before: We are in an unbelievable historic transformation right now, of which people in the West are hardly aware. The Global South is shifting—first of all, they have a completely new self-assurance; they have the economic ties, especially with China, but also among each other, Brazil, India, Indonesia—these are all major countries that are now rising. And the danger would be that the West remains arrogant, and basically says, “who are these people from the South? They should be submitting to the unipolar world,” because they will not.

And it would be very dangerous if you would have a complete separation into two blocs, a Western bloc, and a bloc of Russia, China, and the Global South, because you can’t solve the problems of the world by this separation. And if the dynamic would continue, that it would all turn anti-America, which is clearly a tendency, because the United States—there was just a report by Brown University; and they made a study and they said the interventionist wars in which the United States was involved after 9/11, resulted in 4.5 million deaths! Now, that is an unbelievable figure! And naturally, there are many people in the Global South also, who are not exactly friendly to the United States, and that’s probably the understatement of the year. And it would be very devastating if that would remain like that. Because I think if that is the tendency, World War III is unfortunately very likely down the road, or sooner or later.

So, since Kennedy represents a completely different paradigm of American politics, more like it was meant to be with the Founding Fathers, the American Revolution, the War of Independence against the British Empire, John Quincy Adams’ conception of foreign policy; Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then Kennedy, who, after all, defused the Cuban Missile Crisis, together with Khrushchev, and who had a very optimistic idea about the ability of man to solve any problems through science and technology.

So, it’s a different paradigm. And by making this appeal, by saying, that what the whole world wishes, is that the United States would go back to that kind of a paradigm, which Kennedy represented. I think that first of all, it will help to educate people around the world to look at the United States in a more differentiated way, and hopefully, inside the United States also causes Americans to review their own history. Because, as my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, emphatically always said, that things went wrong with America after the assassination of Kennedy, and especially the cover-up through the Warrant Commission. Because, if you assassinate the President of a country, which, obviously, the “lone assassin” theory does not hold for one minute, and then you have a cover-up and the institutions of that country are not able to remedy that, or find out the truth and find justice, this is an extremely—this was a break in the history of the United States. And the last 50, now 60 years, that is something one has to work through and find back to the kinds of values that existed with Franklin Roosevelt, with Kennedy, and I think that that’s the purpose.

And I always think one should relate to the best tradition of the other, and not the worst. When I founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, the main purpose was to contribute to a just, new world economic order, and the idea that this is only possible if one has a renaissance of Classical culture and a dialogue of the best traditions of all cultures, with the idea that peace is really possible when you relate to the best of the other person, or the other country, or the other tradition, and vice versa. Because, when you bring forth what is good in the other, then that is the basis for peace.

So I hope with that, and the memory comes back, that America should become, again, a force for good in the world, and then the whole world would be peaceful, and happy.


President John F. Kennedy’s American University “Peace Speech” of June 10, 1963

Register for the June 10, 2023 Schiller Institute conference, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace”

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

Nearly 60 years later, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov 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 Martin Luther King 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 wrote an “Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from all over the world, including the U.S., 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 June 10, the 60th anniversary of the JFK American University “Peace Speech,” an international assembly of the people of the world to deliberate on what Zepp-LaRouche has called “Ten Principles for a New 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 man made—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.”


Have a discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche at 11am EDT, 5pm CET! Send questions, thoughts and organizing reports to questions@schillerinstitute.org


Will the U.S. Join the Global Majority? LIVE discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Don’t miss the opportunity to discuss the strategic situation with Helga Zepp-LaRouche ! Send in your questions early to questions@schillerinstitute.org


How to Stop a New Great Depression — LIVE discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Live Discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche May 10, 2023 at 11am EDT

Email in your questions, thoughts and organizing reports to questions@schillerinstitute.org or join us live and post them in the YouTube chat.

There is no shortcut, there is no short way of saying: We just have to go for Glass-Steagall, or we have to do this, or that. We have to get people to understand the whole picture. And I know that many people say that this is impossible, that people are not educated. But I think the only chance we have is to get a sufficient number of people internationally to understand both the historic dimension of what is happening, the economic-financial side of it, the military side, and most importantly, a vision of where this has to go.

That is the gigantic task which we have to accomplish, if there is to be any hope that this can be stopped, a nanosecond before midnight—or hopefully it’s seconds, but it could be much less.

Because what is still hanging over us like a Damocles Sword is that the drone attack on the Kremlin was very likely what Colonel Bosshard had characterized as a probe for a decapitalization strike against Russia and the Russian President; followed by the announcement by the Russians that they will counter that, in ways which they will keep secret and covert, but it will be felt. Now, what that response is going to be, I have no idea: It could be some use of hypersonic missiles, it could be all kinds of things.

But we are in an absolutely, incredibly dangerous moment. And the problem is that the vast majority of people on both sides of the Atlantic are absolutely sleepwalking, and the mass media are involved in the most criminal effort to distract people, to use disinformation to convince people that the world is very different than it actually is.


There Must Be a Clear Voice to Counter the War Hawks: Discuss Helga Zepp-LaRouche

We need everyone to muster their courage and intervene across the world! Have a discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche! Go through the world historic situation and what we can do to intervene on it. Email in your questions, thoughts and organizing reports to questions@schillerinstitute.org or join us live and post them in the YouTube chat.


Let Your Voice Be Heard! Live discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Have a discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Wednesday, April 26 at 11am EDT, 5pm CET! Email in your questions, thoughts and organizing reports to questions@schillerinstitute.org or join us live and post them in the YouTube chat.
We look forward to hearing from you!


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