May 16, 2025 (EIRNS)—The successful beginning of direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine yesterday in Istanbul, is a de facto resumption of the process that had been aborted through the intervention of Britain’s Boris Johnson in early April of 2022. This was initiated by actors in Europe—Starmer, Macron, Merz and Tusk—who had intended to do precisely the opposite. President Putin’s rapid-response counter-offer to re-open negotiations to bring the war to a close was implemented without a 30-day ceasefire “or else.” This has driven Zelenskyy into an apoplectic rage, but without substantive effect, rendering his “no negotiations with Russia” decree of October 2022 irrelevant. President Donald Trump, just returning from Southwest Asia—without visiting Israel—and who also wants to end the NATO-Russia war, has made it clear that the United States endorses the resumption of the interrupted Istanbul process.
There is a lack of vision, however, exhibited in the lack of advanced solution in the realm of physical economy, both with respect to Southwest Asia, including both Gaza and Iran, and the Ukraine conflict. In today’s meeting of the International Peace Coalition, there was an important discussion about whether policies like the Oasis Plan proposal first proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in 1975, exactly 50 years ago, were the new name for peace. At next weekend’s Schiller Institute conference, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” such solution-concepts will be presented in the six panels of the May 24-25 gathering.
The beginning of the change that is required comes from understanding and accepting the humanity of “the enemy,” the “Other.” Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who just returned from two weeks in Russia representing the better angels of America at various events memorializing the Victory Against Fascism in Europe 80 years ago, offered an insight, by telling a story about Vladimir Putin’s relationship to World War Two, into why this ceremony is so central to Russian cultural life.
“Here’s Putin. Now this is kind of poignant, if you’re open minded. ‘My mother told me stories about the war. And my relatives passed me a letter from my grandfather, during the war, to his son. His son was in the army, and the letter was an account of how my grandfather’s wife got killed. A bullet hit her in the stomach during the war, and she was dying in his arms, and my grandfather … was holding her, and she said, ’Don’t cry for me. Pursue the battle…. Don’t make me sad. Don’t you be sad.’ So Putin says, ‘This is a quality that many people have, regardless of nationality. Even as they are dying, they are thinking of other people, including Russians.’
“Now, Putin is not living up to his hyper-nationalist reputation here. He would have said, ‘Ah, we Russians, we have this special quality…. No; he says, ’this is universal. This is a human quality, including the Russians. She knew that she was dying and she said, don’t cry, don’t make me sad in her dying hour. Can you imagine? She was worried about my grandfather.’ At the end of the letter was a little postscript: ‘Smash those bastards!!’ Putin calls that, in the understatement of the century, ‘a motivational phrase….’
“Now this is the payoff here. ‘I took the letter and I read it. I was an adult. I had been an intelligence officer for nearly twenty years. I did not expect to learn anything new. But when I took the letter and began to read it, I suddenly looked at these past events in a different way, I suddenly felt the fabric of those events. And this must be passed on.’ Fabric of such events.”
The Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, who spoke immediately following McGovern, put a human face on the Israelis and Palestinians of today’s Gaza. "Hope is an action. I’m an Israeli. I lost my parents on October 7 [2023]. I (also) lost many of my childhood friends. And I partnered with Palestinians that also lost family members and loved ones, over a century-long conflict. And we are saying that hope is an action that we are creating together by envisioning a better future, and working together to make it into a reality.
“And exactly like Ray said, each one of us should be accountable. We cannot wait for the Messiah. We cannot wait for the prophets; we cannot wait for angels. Each one of us, here, … needs to be the Messiah. Each one of us needs to act as an angel. And each one of us needs to act as a prophet. So if enough people will act upon those values, and will be courageous and brave enough, we’re going to achieve peace by 2030. This is our mission.
“We created a coalition because we realized that, if we would not be synchronized, we would not make it. (At) The People’s Peace Summit in Jerusalem last week, we rented the most prestigious venue within Israel, in Jerusalem, where usually the far right is doing its gathering. We decided, we are going to bring peace to Jerusalem. We are going to bring peace to the International Conference Center (ICC) in Jerusalem … it was beautiful to see both Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Jewish Israelis, youth and elderly, coming together, stating, on the stage, (that) we must end the war, we must end the war now. It is already too late for so many, for too many. We must make a deal, and we must start a peace process. That’s the only way to move forward, and that’s how we created great hope, by envisioning a better future.”
To provide “a beautiful vision for humanity in a time of great adversity,” however, it is essential to provide the physical-economic conditions through which that vision can become reality. The Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture written by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche specify how that can be done. The collaboration of nations in the Belt and Road Initiative, like that now being pursued by South America’s Colombia with China, as well as Brazil and others, is the essential prerequisite for peace.
This, however, also identifies the potentially fatal flaw in American foreign and domestic policy. America had abandoned its own American System of promoting technological progress, eradicating poverty, spreading mass literacy, and promoting the General Welfare of the posterity of all nations. The revolutionaries in the early American colonies who decided, 250 years ago, “to take arms against the sea of troubles” caused by the British Empire, “and by opposing, end them,” established that system. And without returning to that system, no amount of good intentions will prevent the United States from pushing the world to the brink of thermonuclear war, from which we may fail to return, as we nearly did last November.
This generation of Americans, now watching the mass killing of innocent people in Palestine, and the pursuit of a senseless war in Ukraine, must rise up and declare their independence from the crimes being committed in their name. The assembly on May 24-25 at the Schiller Institute Conference, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” can be the beginning of an “Intercontinental Congress for Peace Through Development” that finally realizes the dream of those who have proudly striven, fought and died for the freedom of all men and women everywhere, not only in our lifetime, but for all time.
