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Wednesday, Aug, 26, 2026, 11am ET/ 5pm CET
On Thursday, Oct. 25, 1962, three days after President Kennedy announced the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Pope John XXIII went on Vatican Radio and asked the governments of the world to keep talking. The next morning Pravda carried the appeal, under the headline “Save Peace!” (or “Save the World!”) quoting him at length: let leaders “heed the anguished cry which, from every point of the earth, from innocent children to the aged, from individuals to communities, rises toward Heaven: peace! Peace!” The day after the Pravda report, Khrushchev proposed to Kennedy the exchange that ended the crisis.
Consider the present situation.
Gold has overtaken U.S. Treasuries as the single largest central bank reserve asset by market value. The 30-year Treasury yield touched a nineteen-year high. The Treasury doubled the size of its own bond buybacks, and the effect lasted only briefly. On Monday the Secretary of the Treasury announced an operation whose stated terms are that any entity facilitating Iranian money laundering “will be removed from the U.S. dollar system” and named gold as one of five sectors to be sanctioned. Three American officials told a reporter that 40 tankers crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Friday night, carrying 16 million barrels. That claim is difficult to reconcile with commercial vessel-tracking data, which showed far fewer recorded vessel transits.
What that costs is counted in people. The American labor force lost about 1.3 million of them in twelve months. That decline is especially striking in an aging country whose labor-force growth increasingly depends on immigration, especially as another million are to be struck from it by early 2027.
What is a human being for? “It is not the exertion of physical force by men which rules mankind,” Lyndon LaRouche wrote in 1994, in The Science of Physical Economy as the Platonic Epistemological Basis for All Branches of Human Knowledge, published in EIR. “Mankind is ruled by the force of ideas, by the interplay of those contending ideas which, acting through the minds of men, thus control the physical conduct of society.” And in the same essay, against every doctrine that sorts human beings into the useful and the disposable: “The human race is made up of nothing but individuals who share in common that spark of creative reason which defines all persons as in the image of the Creator.”
A million people removed from a labor force are not a statistic. They are a million minds a nation’s leadership has decided it does not require.
Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, is in Moscow. He meets Sergey Lavrov Tuesday, Aug. 25, and Yuri Ushakov, President Putin’s foreign policy aide, the next day. An open letter released Aug. 19 asks Pope Leo XIV to convene the heads of state of the three principal nuclear powers, in the spirit of John XXIII’s appeal in 1962. Leo has already made the argument himself: on July 30, 2025, marking fifty years since the Helsinki Final Act, he called it essential “to persevere in dialogue, strengthen cooperation, and make diplomacy the preferred path.”
Will we “save peace” today?
