Commenting on the joint declaration issued today by NATO and the EU that they are preparing to aggressively counter what they called Russia’s “brutal” aggression and China’s “growing assertiveness,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche asked “Who authorized them” to form a “Global NATO,” which now puts everyone at risk? There was no vote by any nation, she continued, no public debate — this is exactly why no supra-national organization should have so much power.
Given that there is a growing awareness that the Ukraine situation will be “settled on the battlefield” and not through diplomacy — which increases the risk of nuclear war — it is essential that we catalyze public awareness that we are at the last moments before nuclear annihilation could be unleashed. She referred to the important dialogues of the last days, especially the January 10 round table on the implications of Merkel’s Minsk lies, as an example of what must be brought into public awareness.
She called on all viewers to back our initiatives, including signing and circulating the letter endorsing the proposal from the Pope to use the Vatican as a venue for negotiations, as a way of provoking necessary public response. To succeed, it is now necessary “to change attitudes [of citizens] in the western nations.”
Ray McGovern, Co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS),
Scott Ritter, former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq,
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute and Chair of Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (BüSo),
General (ret.) Dominique Delawarde, former liasson officer of France with the U.S. Army Higher Officers‘ School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Colonel (ret.) Alain Corvez, advisor on security questions, and others.
The surprising acknowledgments by former Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande, that they supported the Minsk Process only as a subterfuge to buy time for the arming and training of Ukraine, represents a breaking point. This Minsk Agreement acquired the character of international law with UN Resolution 2202. How do the representatives of the “rules-based order” deal with international law?
For years they have repeated the mantra that the sanctions against Russia could be lifted only if the Minsk Agreement was to be fully implemented. But if the conclusion of this agreement was nothing but lip service, what was their intention?
What sense does any agreement with representatives of the West make, if it must be assumed that they will do what they say only if it serves to carry out their agenda? What is necessary to restore trust in international political relations? Is that even possible?
The speakers named above will discuss the dangers of the strategic situation, and the alternatives.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the Nov. 22 Schiller Institute conference, “Stop the Danger of Nuclear War Now; Third Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World,” offered the following ten principles, upon which a new global security and development architecture could be founded. She added in her Nov. 24 webcast, “These ideas are meant to be food for thought and a dialogue among all people concerned to find a basis for a world order guaranteeing the durable existence of the human species.”
The new paradigm which will be characteristic of the new epoch, and towards which the new global security and development architecture must be directed, therefore, must eliminate the concept of oligarchism for good, and proceed to organize the political order in such a way, that the true character of humanity as the creative species can be realized.
Therefore, I suggest that the following principles must be discussed and if agreed upon be realized. These ideas are meant to be food for thought and a dialogue among all people concerned to find a basis for a world order guaranteeing the durable existence of the human species.
First: The new International Security and Development Architecture must be a partnership of perfectly sovereign nation states, which is based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter.
Second: The absolute priority must be to alleviate poverty in every nation on the planet, which is easily possible, if the existing technologies are being used for the benefit of the common good.
Third: The life expectancy of all people living must be prolonged to the fullest potential by creating modern health systems in every country on the planet. This is also the only way how the present and future potential pandemics can be overcome or be prevented.
Fourth: Since mankind is the only creative species known so far in the universe, and given the fact that human creativity is the only source of wealth through the potentially limitless discovery of new universal principles, one of the main aims of the new International Security and Development Architecture must be providing access to universal education for every child and adult person living. The true nature of man is to become a beautiful soul, as Friedrich Schiller discusses this, and the only person who can fulfill that condition is the genius.
Fifth: The international financial system must be reorganized, so that it can provide productive credits to accomplish these aims. A reference point can be the original Bretton Woods system, as Franklin D. Roosevelt intended it, but was never implemented due to his untimely death, and the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche. The primary aim of such a new credit system must be to increase dramatically the living standard of especially the nations of the Global South and of the poor in the Global North.
Sixth: The new economic order must be focused on creating the conditions for modern industries and agriculture, starting with the infrastructural development of all continents to eventually be connected by tunnels and bridges to become a World Land-Bridge.
Seventh: The new global security architecture must eliminate the concept of geopolitics by ending the division of the world into blocs. The security concerns of every sovereign nation must be taken into account. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction must be immediately banned. Through international cooperation, the means must be developed to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete, as it was originally intended by the proposal which became known as the SDI, suggested by LaRouche and made as an offer to the Soviet Union by President Reagan.
Eighth: In former times, one civilization at one corner of the world could go under, and the rest of the world would only find out years later, due to the length of distances and the time needed for travel. Now, for the first time, because of nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and other global effects, mankind is sitting in one boat. Therefore, a solution to the existential threat to humanity cannot be found with the help of secondary or partial arrangements, but the solution must be found on the level of that higher One, which is more powerful than the Many. It requires the thinking on the level of Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites, of Nicholas of Cusa.
Ninth: In order to overcome the conflicts arising out of quarreling opinions, which is how empires have maintained control over the underlings, the economic, social and political order has to be brought into cohesion with the lawfulness of the physical universe. In European philosophy this was discussed as the being in character with natural law, in Indian philosophy as cosmology, and in other cultures appropriate notions can be found. Modern sciences like space science, biophysics or thermonuclear fusion science will increase the knowledge of mankind about this lawfulness continuously. A similar cohesion can be found in the great works of classical art in different cultures.
Tenth: The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.
A new world economic order is emerging, involving the vast majority of the countries of the Global South. The European nations and the U.S. must not fight this effort, but by joining hands with the developing countries, cooperate to shape the next epoch of the development of the human species to become a renaissance of the highest and most noble expressions of creativity!
Let us therefore create an international movement of World Citizens, who work together to shape the next phase in the evolution of mankind, the new epoch! World Citizens of all countries, unite!
Listen to Helga Zepp-LaRouche develop principles of a new security and development architecture.
The Non-Release of the JFK Assassination Documents
Dennis Speed (moderator): This question is for you, Ray. It has to do with [Fox News host] Tucker Carlson’s broadcast of December 15th concerning the JFK assassination. The reason I’m bringing it up is because of its relationship to what you’ve talked about—the expanded military-industrial complex that you’ve dubbed the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank Complex).
Here’s a bit of what Carlson had to say, which gets to the point. He stated—among other things in what was a 30-minute discussion:
In 1976, long forgotten, the House of Representatives empaneled a special committee to re-investigate the JFK assassination. Their bipartisan conclusion? Jack Kennedy was almost certainly murdered as a result of a conspiracy. But the question is, a conspiracy by whom? The obvious subject would be the CIA.
DoS/Freddie Everett Then Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo delivers remarks on “Unalienable Rights and the Securing of Freedom” at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, July 16, 2020.
Carlson talked about how the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 had mandated the full disclosure of all documents by 2017, and that Mike Pompeo, then the Director of the CIA, withheld those documents from the public, and that the same thing happened again two days ago, when the Biden administration also withheld documents. Carlson went on to say:
We spoke to someone who had access to the still-hidden CIA documents. A person who is deeply familiar with what they contain. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of JFK, an American President?” Here’s the reply we received, verbatim: “The answer is, yes, I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”
Tucker Carlson did not name that source. He said, “This is not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ we spoke to, not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public.”
The broadcast continued in that vein. Then, near the end, he said:
Many people have known this for a long time, but people who knew would include every director of the CIA since November of 1963. That list would include Obama’s Director of the CIA, John Brennan, one of the most sinister and dishonest figures in American life. That list would also include, we are sad to say, our friend Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA in the last administration. Mike Pompeo knew this; we asked Pompeo to join us tonight, and although he rarely turns down televised interviews, he refused to come.
Ray, the question is: given the fact that you were a CIA analyst for 27 years, and you also returned various commendations that you got as a result of your differences and clear opposition to what happened, particularly in Iraq in 2003, what is your view of what Tucker Carlson said? What is your view about this issue, and what is your view about its relationship to the problem of an honest executive today, and an ability to get to the truth of things?
Six Ways From Sunday
Ray McGovern: Let me begin by quoting New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer, who should have lost to Diane Sare [in the recent midterm election]. After Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016, the very first week of January, he arranged to get himself on [Rachel] Maddow’s [MSNBC] show. Maddow said, now Senator Schumer, you have something to say about the CIA and how Trump is criticizing the CIA and taking off after them. What did he say? Schumer said,
He’s being very foolish. You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you. I thought Trump was a pretty smart businessman, and maybe he is. But he’s being very foolish to take on Intelligence.
Schumer was telling us what the situation is.
The best book about this is something called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, written by James W. Douglass, who happens to be a friend of mine. He pored over all the foregoing books—this is about 12 years ago now—put them all together, and said, yeah, JFK was done in by the Deep State. The CIA, the parts of the Army, parts of the FBI knew about it, and parts of the Secret Service. He was done in, why? Because after the Cuban Missile Crisis—which relates to the kind of situation we face now—after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK realized how close we had come to blowing up the world, he worked out a deal with Nikita Khrushchev, started a test ban treaty; started all kinds of negotiations toward rapprochement. With whom? With the Commies!
Now, you had to have been alive—I was serving in CIA under John Kennedy just for several months. But you had to be aware of the atmosphere. Kennedy was hated because he didn’t support the invasion of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion. He told those CIA types:
This sounds like a cockamamie operation to me. But if Eisenhower approved it, go ahead. But look, we’re not going to commit the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Army or the U.S. Armed Forces to rescue you if it screws up.
pursued it? We have then CIA Director Allen Dulles’ coffee-stained notes from his desk, saying that Kennedy said we would not commit U.S. forces, but when push comes to shove, he will not be able to avoid committing U.S. forces.
‘JFK and the Unspeakable’
So, what happened? Kennedy stayed true to his pledge not to commit U.S. forces. The whole thing fizzled out, and Kennedy was heard to say to a neighbor up there in Hyannis Port, “I’d like to take the CIA and scatter it into a thousand pieces.” That’s sort of a declaration of war, right? Kennedy and Allen Dulles didn’t get along very well at all. It took him several months to fire Allen Dulles. You don’t fire a well-connected patrician like Allen Dulles, whose brother is the Secretary of State, and who has all kinds of—let’s put it this way—“six ways from Sunday to get back at you,” without paying the price.
It was the substantive issue of John Kennedy trying to figure out how to live with the Russians in a more decent, peaceful way. And the fact that he could not be trusted to support fully the cockamamie schemes of CIA, that did him in. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable. It’s a quote from Thomas Merton, of all people.
NARA Allen Dulles, the CIA Director that Kennedy had fired, was brought in to orchestrate the Warren Commission proceedings to cover up the truth about his assassination.
Today, what happened when, under Trump’s watch—he’s still not being wise to the ways of Washington—he got up on the day that the Congressional mandate said he has to release the rest of the JFK documents hidden by the CIA and the FBI. He got up in the morning without telling anybody, and said, “Today’s the day Congress said I have to release those documents. I’m going to release them.” Four hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, he said, “Oh, I changed my mind. I’m not going to release them. The CIA and FBI said it’s too sensitive; we’ll revisit it in six months.” That’s what he said. It doesn’t matter what Congress said, right?
Six months. McGovern makes a little note in his notebook. In six months, it fell through the cracks; nobody remembered that they were going to revisit in six months. Hello! Do you have to be a master psychiatrist or psychologist to figure out that maybe if they don’t want those things released, it’s because it shows that they were involved?
After the Kennedy assassination, all kinds of irregular things happened. The Warren Commission was set up by Lyndon Johnson. Who did they pick to pretty much orchestrate the whole commission proceedings? It was Allen Dulles! Allen Dulles pretty much orchestrated that whole thing. Did LBJ know about all this? James Douglass tells me, yeah, the evidence is pretty clear. Johnson may not have been involved in the actual assassination, but he knew what the plans were; he was not agnostic on that. LBJ appoints Earl Warren, and Earl Warren appoints Allen Dulles.
The Political Parties Are Collapsing
What’s my point here? When honest people—people like me—said “wait a second. This doesn’t parse. There’s some suspicion that the CIA might have been involved in the assassination, and now you’re appointing the previous CIA Director?” Guess what we got? Conspiracy theorists. “You guys are conspiracy theorists.” That’s where the term got its impetus, and to this day, often when you say the truth, and when you stop saying the truth, you’re considered a conspiracy theorist.
U.S. House of Representatives The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations met from 1976 to 1978, ostensibly to investigate the assassinations of Martin Luther King and President John Kennedy. They endorsed the Warren Commission findings that the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service were not involved.
Both parties are equally corrupt in all this; both parties are equally afraid of the Deep State. You don’t have to just listen to Chuck Schumer to talk about “they’ve got six ways from Sunday to get back at you.” Talk to the Senators who knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq], but couldn’t say it, because it was classified. Talk to the Senators who know all about Afghanistan. Again, we come back to the Senators and the Representatives who are getting the take from the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex, the MICIMATT. Putting it in their pockets, appropriating more money for arms building, selling more money, taking a share of that money, putting it in their pockets, getting re-elected. Hello! Is this a great country or what? That’s what it takes; everybody’s afraid, and everybody’s on the take.
The Democrats tried to prevent Trump from winning the election in 2016. It’s documented now. Obama, in October; Hillary Clinton, also in October 2016 authorized all this Russia-gate stuff. We know about it; it’s in court testimony. Not many people know about it, but it’s in court testimony.
Then, what happened in 2020? My goodness! All of sudden, Hunter Biden’s computer comes out, and what does the Deep State do? They hire 51 former senior intelligence agents to say, “Russian operation. We can’t prove it, but it’s got the earmarks of a Russian operation.”
What am I saying, here? I’m saying that the media and the Deep State are joined at the hip now as never before. Both elections, or at least the following election, were probably affected by the fact that no one could tell the truth; Twitter wouldn’t allow it. Only Glenn Greenwald would tell the truth about Biden’s laptop, and how Joe Biden himself was on the take.
The 2016 thing? They tried and failed to derail Trump, but they sure got him for the four years after that. He couldn’t do a damn thing he wanted to do in terms of creating a more decent relationship with Russia.
It’s a sad story. Is the Deep State strong? It sure as Hell is. Is it still around? Of course it is. John Brennan [the former CIA Director] mentioned before. He’s a big commentator on MSNBC; James Clapper, [former Director of National Intelligence], is on CNN. It used to be that the Agency controlled the media; now the Agency is the media.
Preview the issue here and see the full table of contents.
The Schiller Institute has just released Volume 2, No. 1, of its new journal Leonore, which opens with the following from Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.’s October 20, 2002, article, “The Historical Individual:”
“The principal cause for the doom of any culture, is that mental disorder typical of popular opinion, which is to assume the validity of any assumptions currently adopted by a learned profession, or religious teaching, or more crudely adopted as ‘generally accepted popular opinion’.”
The 88-page issue, contains eleven articles, including the first English translation of one of the last letters by the 15th century scientific and political genius, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, which has been called his “religious last will,” and an original translation of Friedrich Schiller’s “On the Sublime,” described as “perhaps his most refined discussion of the process of the development of the soul.”
The preview includes the ground-breaking article by Jason Ross, “Vernadskian Time: Time for Humanity,” which addresses “the paradoxes posed by Vernadsky’s scientific work,” which open the way to a an entirely new set of definitions of space, time and matter, taken from the standpoint of the human mind.
The journal is yours as a monthly Schiller Institute contributing member. Memberships start at $5/month. Sign uphere.
In her weekly webcast today, Helga Zepp LaRouche ridiculed the anti-Russian narratives of NATO leaders, pointing to the broad implications of the admissions, by former German Chancellor Merkel and ex-President of France Hollande, that they never intended to fulfill the agreements they signed in Minsk. They were not just lying, she said — they were violating international law. These are the same people who speak incessantly about the “Rules-Based Order.” She said that these admissions led Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to announce that there is no longer anyone in the EU with whom to negotiate.
In contrast, leaders in the Global South are moving ahead with plans to build an alternative to the neo-colonial Unipolar Order. She cited a Chinese intellectual who said that rather than being in a period of “epochal change”, it is more properly a moment of “de-westernization.”
This moment requires a “higher level of thinking,” which she introduced with her Ten Principles, in which the principle of “One Humanity First” must be the starting point. Reflecting the “divine nature of human beings”, this new era can establish humans as a “species of poetry, science and composers.”
The New Year 2023, must become the year where humanity reaches the age of adulthood. That means, we must leave behind us childish, geopolitical squabblings, where nations fight each other as if we were spoiled brats, fighting each other aiming war toys against each other in a sandbox. That sandbox can turn thermonuclear radioactive in a moment.
We must remember that we are the creative species which has the lofty task to continue the process of creation for the good of all of humanity. The majority of mankind, the countries of the Global South, and many in the formerly so-called advanced countries, want to leave war behind us, be it the danger of a new global war, or the many interventionist wars, which left millions dead or displaced as refugees.
Let us create a new paradigm of international relations, where the interest of each sovereign nation is respected, where we all join hands to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment. Let us create a modern health system in every country, so that life expectancy is increased for all human beings living on this planet, and let us create the conditions, where every child and every adult has access to universal education, so that each person has the chance to realize his or her innate creative potentials to the fullest.
Let us also create a new credit system to finance these goals and to increase the living standard of the people of the Global South and the poor in the so-called industrialized countries. Let us finally bring infrastructure, agriculture, and industry to all continents on Earth. Let us create a new international security architecture, which overcomes the division of the world into blocs and ban all weapons of mass destruction and work to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete.
Let us think of the entire human species as that higher One, which is of a higher order than the many nations, and let us never pursue a national interest, which is not in coherence with the interest of humanity as a whole. Let us put the political, economic, and social order in cohesion with natural law, the laws of the physical universe, and let us increase that knowledge through progress in science and classical art. And let’s start from the assumption that the nature of man is fundamentally good, and that all evil comes from a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome!
A new world economic order is emerging, involving the vast majority of the countries of the Global South. The European nations and the U.S. must not fight this effort, but by joining hands with the developing countries, cooperate to shape the next epoch of the development of the human species to become a renaissance of the highest and most noble expressions of creativity!
Let us therefore create an international movement of World Citizens, who work together to shape the next phase in the evolution of mankind, the new epoch! World Citizens of all countries, unite!
The murder of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States sixty years ago, was also the murder of the American republic—and that murder is still unresolved in the minds of the American people. Many subsequent crimes, including many criminal wars and deposing of governments, are actually derivative expressions of that “murder most foul.”
Now, because of a December decision by the Biden Administration to continue to suppress certain documents, there is renewed discussion about the potential international significance of releasing thousands of pages of still-withheld files regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. Can the United States finally regain its soul as a nation through the public exposure of how and why American (and other) governmental and non-governmental institutions may have played a role in—or even directed—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963?
Answering that question with “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” is now essential to restoring the trust of both the American people as well as that of other nations in the now horribly compromised Congress, Presidency and American judicial system. To successfully do this, in the 60th year after JFK was murdered, requires a higher cultural vantage point from which to see and face the truth. Mozart’s Requiem, performed in Kennedy’s honor immediately after his assassination at the request of Jacquline Kennedy, provides that. The greatest beauty is required to confront the greatest ugliness. “
The Schiller Institute commemorated the January 1964 performance of the Mozart Requiem at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, 50 years to the day, January 19, 2014 . On that occasion, chairwoman and founder of the Schiller Institute Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who attended and briefly spoke (along with former Mayor of Boston and Ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn,) observed,“It is urgent to evoke again the divine spirit of beauty of Mozart’s composition in order to recreate in us the better world which both Kennedy and Mozart represent.”
Dr. Carlos Gallardo, the president of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru, joins a group of Peruvian children from the Oasis community settlement in Villa El Salvador, Lima, to call for peace and an end to violence, and to deliver a message endorsing the Pope’s offer for the Vatican to serve as the venue for urgent negotiations, with no pre-conditions, between all parties in the Ukraine war.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche used a pre-Christmas webcast to call for an expanded mobilization behind the offer of Pope Francis to use the Vatican as a site for negotiations, without preconditions, to end NATO’s war against Russia. Every thinking person, she said, is concerned with the danger of an escalation to World War III. She urged viewers to circulate the Schiller Institute’s letter of support for the Pope’s offer, in the spirit of Christmas, and use the season as a moment for serious reflection on the mission of Jesus to achieve peace, through acting with good will towards all men.
The Zelensky extravaganza in Washington yesterday demonstrated the opposite, exposing the British intent for expanding the war, even as NATO is approaching the crossing of a trip-wire which is unacceptable to Russia. She said that she believes the war hawks, typified by the Green officials in the German government, are preparing an escalation against China in 2023. If they are successful in “diversifying” EU economies away from China, Europe will be “marginalized”. Instead, the potential still exists for Europe to participate in the BRI.
The following statement was released on December 19, 2022, by the Schiller Institute to be circulated internationally in support of an international campaign for a Christmas truce and for accepting the Pope’s offer of the Vatican as venue for the immediate beginning of peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, without any preconditions. It is available as a two-sided with the musical score of the Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace), a traditional canon, which can be sung at peace vigils everywhere.We encourage you to distribute the statement and send us back responses to info@schillerinstitute.org.
Political and social leaders from around the world, of different philosophical outlooks and religious faiths, are coming together in support of the offer of Pope Francis to use the venue of the Vatican for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine for a diplomatic settlement of the war in Ukraine. The confrontation between the U.S., NATO, and Russia has escalated to the point where one more step, even an unintended mistake, one misreading by one side or the other, could trigger the launching of the entire nuclear arsenals of both sides, leading to a global nuclear war, followed by a nuclear winter of about ten years, which would mean that in all likelihood not one human being would survive.
According to the U.S.-based Arms Control Association, citing senior U.S. Officials: “Biden has decided not to follow through on his 2020 pledge to declare that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies. Instead, he approved a version of the policy from the Obama administration that leaves open the option to use nuclear weapons, not only in retaliation to a nuclear attack, but also to respond to non-nuclear threats.” The U.S. at no point in the past ever adopted a no-first-strike policy, and in the Bush as well as in the Trump administrations the option of a first strike existed in the security doctrine.
In response to the growing crisis and threats, Russian President Putin declared on December 9, in a press conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan that Russia will reconsider its current nuclear doctrine of using nuclear weapons only if attacked first with nuclear weapons by another party, or if the existence of the Russian state itself is threatened. Putin said Russia was now considering responding to the U.S. doctrine of preemptive first strike by having to adopt the same first strike policy. That means we are one step away from a thermonuclear catastrophe.
We call on all people of good will to support the offer of Pope Francis, which has been reiterated by Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, to use the venue of the Vatican for the immediate beginning of peace negotiations, without any preconditions.
A group of political and social leaders has just issued a public letter to Pope Francis in which they state that “we welcome Your Holiness’s offer of the Vatican as a possible neutral ground for peace talks – without any preconditions – between Russia and Ukraine… We note that others in Europe and the United States have also offered venues for the Russian and Ukrainian leadership to negotiate peace. We believe it is urgent to unify all such efforts into a globe-spanning movement to bring resolution to this conflict, taking into consideration the valid security interests of all parties.” They further called “on other political and social leaders around the world, regardless of differences in ideology or religious faith,” to join that effort.
We call on all men and women of good faith to join this call for a diplomatic solution. Also join our campaign to conduct choruses in the whole world to sing the canon for peace, “Dona Nobis Pacem.” May the voices for peace move the hearts and minds of those responsible.
