Sixth Weekly Meeting of the International Peace Coalition
July 14, 2023 (EIRNS)—The sixth weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) took place on Friday, July 14, chaired by the Schiller Institute’s Anastasia Battle, with 38 guests from 15 countries and peace organizations, in addition to 20 members of the Schiller Institute.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, opened the meeting by noting two globally important events in the week since the July 7 fifth IPC meeting: the two-day international conference of the Schiller Institute in Strasbourg, France on July 8-9; and the NATO Summit of July 11-12 in Vilnius (referred to as the “villainous Vilnius Summit” by one speaker at the IPC meeting). While the Schiller Conference provided ideas and discussion on the urgency of substituting cooperation for confrontation, preventing the current rush to an outbreak of global nuclear war and bringing the world’s nations together in a paradigm of development, the NATO Summit was a war cry for more escalation of the surrogate NATO war against Russia centered in Ukraine.
Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the newly announced decision by President Joe Biden to deploy cluster bombs to Ukraine—300 million bomblets altogether—as madness that will cause thousands of deaths of innocents, as has already been demonstrated by the death and maiming of children and other civilians in Cambodia and Vietnam from the land mines and cluster bombs deployed during the Indochina war of the 1960-70s, deaths and injuries continuing even today. There is international opposition to this genocidal act, including from within the United States, but Biden is going ahead regardless.
The ugly irony of this move, Zepp-LaRouche added, is that Biden has admitted that even though he once opposed the use of cluster bombs as a war crime, now the U.S. and its NATO allies are running out of ammunition to prop up the bloodletting in Ukraine, and therefore will use the cluster bombs to keep the war going. She pointed to the decision to deploy F-16s to Ukraine as yet another insane act, noting that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia will have no way to know if the nuclear-weapon capable F-16s are armed with nuclear weapons or not, and must therefore treat them as being nuclear armed.
Zepp-LaRouche also pointed to the NATO Summit’s embrace of a policy to expand the domain of NATO to the Asia-Pacific region, targeting China with the same war-policy as deployed against Russia in Europe.
As to Ukraine, she reported the intention presented at the NATO Summit to turn the country into a military production center, with the West’s major military-industrial companies setting up production facilities in Ukraine for a “forever war.” In the process, there was no discussion by any NATO participants of a peace plan, or even for negotiations for peace. At the rate of destruction of the Ukraine economy and the death of thousands of young men in the bloody cauldron of war, there will be no way for the country to rebuild even if the war can be stopped.
The lesson, Zepp-LaRouche concluded, is that the International Peace Coalition must grow and create a massive public outcry against the madness. The plan for international demonstrations on Aug. 6, the 78th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by U.S. President Harry Truman, must be the basis for expanding this effort.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and a co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Peace (VIPS), gave a situation report on the war in Ukraine, asserting that while Biden is declaring that Ukraine is winning, even that Putin has “already lost” the war, that simply demonstrates that Biden is living in an “alternative reality,” since it is abundantly clear that the opposite is the case. The much-heralded “counteroffensive” by the Zelenskyy government forces has been a colossal failure, with the mass destruction of tanks and other military equipment, as well as yet more thousands of lives lost.
Col. Richard H. Black, a retired Marine officer and former Army Joint Advocate General (JAG) lawyer who headed the Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon before retiring from the military and serving in Virginia’s House of Delegates and Senate, reviewed the failure of Kiev’s “counteroffensive,” suggesting that the idea of a perpetual war of attrition is a losing proposition for Ukraine, and that they may not be able to sustain the current pace even through the end of August. Regarding the cluster bombs, he remarked that the world agreed to ban mustard gas and other chemical weapons as war crimes, and for the U.S. to simply declare that cluster bombs are to be accepted because “Ukraine needs them” does not change the fact that their use is a war crime. Are we to declare later that nuclear weapons will stop being illegal if “Ukraine needs them,” he asked. We are heading for nuclear war, he warned, and there is far too little resistance to it in the U.S., so this Coalition must grow.
Joseph Boyd-Barrett, a professor at California State University and an expert on propaganda, gave further evidence of the falsification in the mainstream media about the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western backers in NATO have already essentially lost the war, as their munitions are running out and the NATO countries are not able to sustain the supply, while Russia “can produce multiples” of the munitions produced by the combined NATO backers of Kiev. He estimates that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will run out by the end of August. The problem remains that the Ukraine government, and its backers in NATO, don’t care that the country and the population are being destroyed by the war policy, and refuse to negotiate. Zelenskyy was elected on a pledge to bring peace, but now it must be said that the Kiev regime’s policy is to see their own population murdered by continuing a war which cannot be won. The Democratic Party in power in Washington appears to believe that the only way to win the next general election in November 2024 is to keep the war going through next year.
Joan Carrero, a peace activist from Spain, said that the Western elites are suffering from dementia, as they repeat without any evidence that Russia will lose the war. He said that he had lived in Hiroshima for a year and a half, and saw effects of the destruction, calling for the Aug. 6 demonstrations worldwide to be a turning point to stop the madness.
Moderator Anastasia Battle read four demands which the IPC will issue on their website,
https://humanityforpeace.net, which are:
end the supply of weapons to Ukraine
begin unconditional peace talks with all parties to the war
end the NATO alliance
establish a new security and development architecture for all nations, ending the division of the world into warring “blocs.”
Bernie Holland, a peace activist from the U.K., asked Helga Zepp-LaRouche to discuss her concept of the “Coincidence of Opposites” which is the eighth of her “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.”
Zepp-LaRouche replied with an in-depth discussion of the concept, developed by the 15th- century genius Nicholas of Cusa, who discovered the idea as a method of thought based on the truth that the “One” is superior to the “Many,” that only by recognizing that there is a common principle which unites all human beings, whatever their faith or ethnicity or nationality. This method of thinking made it possible for Cusa to bring about the unity of the Roman and Orthodox Christian religions at the ecumenical Council of Florence between 1431 and 1449, and later was the basis of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. In the current age of nuclear weapons, that principle of creative thought, based on love rather than hate, is the only basis for world peace.
Other speakers reported on their organizing efforts for peace in Germany, England, Holland, Scotland, France, Italy, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, India, and across the U.S. All agreed to build an even larger attendance, including representatives from the Global South, for the next meeting on Friday, July 21.
