June 6—As we mark the 55th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the former Attorney General and U.S. Senator, and the likely Democratic nominee for the 1968 presidential election, we must seize the opportunity to make the vision of peace expressed by President John F. Kennedy a reality.
That vision was expressed most powerfully in what the president’s nephew, and current presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has called President Kennedy’s most important speech: that delivered at American University sixty years ago this Saturday, on June 6, 1963.
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” he said. “This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
That strategy of peace was based on acting for the benefit of all: “‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,’ the Scriptures tell us, ‘he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him,’” said Kennedy. “And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation…?”
The contrast between these aspirations, expressed by an American President six decades ago, and the terrifying reality of the present, could not be more jarring.
The Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, located on the Dnieper River in Kherson, was destroyed early this morning. It is useful to recall the recent words of UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter: “Zelenskyy, they hate you,” said Ritter, as reported by Tass. “Now do you know why they hate you? Because they’re letting you slaughter your people. They don’t like you. They don’t respect you. They’re using you.”
Look at the depraved way the claimed territory of Ukraine is being used now, through the destruction of a hydroelectric dam that has flooded out thousands, made it impossible to fully reopen the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, and which, in what may be the most stunning demonstration of the “Big Lie” they have yet attempted, is claimed by the Zelensky government to have been perpetrated by … Russia itself!
Similar claims have been made about the nuclear power plant. Russia, say these propagandists, is deliberately trying to cause disaster, to expand the war. The same type of people tell you, on the contrary, that Russia has no serious red lines and will not escalate, even if their claimed red lines are crossed. Which way is it? And what is the end-game?
The only outcome that will satisfy the Anglo-American masters of NATO is the dismemberment of Russia and the crushing of China’s growth and international sovereignty. The weapons in that fight are military, economic, and, to a very great degree, informational — the propagandizing of war to create a sense of ineluctability, of inevitability, of a destiny of conflict.
But war is not inevitable, if the people of NATO countries stand up against it, in a process that can be catalyzed and supported through the efforts of the Global South.
French President Macron’s warnings that NATO should not attempt to expand to the Pacific are useful. So is the potential for expanding the discussion brought about by the U.S. presidential race. The additional voices of RFK Jr. and Cornel West may at least put on the table for Americans an expanded discussion of matters of war and peace.
Lyndon LaRouche expressed the coming direction of the world in his 2001 “The Vernadsky Strategy”: “A group of nations, brought together through aid of triangular cooperation among Russia, China, and India, and thus bringing in most of the states of Asia, presents us with a reasonable prospect of well-grounded, long-term cooperation, where such cooperation were otherwise virtually impossible to achieve. Under the presently onrushing economic-strategic conditions, in which the Anglo-American financier power largely evaporates, new options are likely to be put on the table, even successfully.”
The most powerful coming inflection point in bringing into reality those “new options” is the Schiller Institute’s Saturday conference, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace.” Let us bring justice to the slain president, by fulfilling his intention.
