The following are the remarks delivered to the 62nd weekly International Peace Coalition Meeting, August 9, 2024, by Dennis Kucinich, who served as the United States Congressman for Ohio’s 10th Congressional District from 1997 to 2013, and is an independent candidate for Congress in 2024.
Dennis Kucinich: First of all, I want to thank the two previous speakers for their eloquent statements on the state of affairs. Having worked inside of the government for many years, I can certainly attest to the observations of Colonel Wilkerson and thank him for his service to the country, and for his true patriotism. And also thank Madame LaRouche for her very sharp, poignant insights into the current situation.
We all know, and that’s why we’re on this call, we all know that we’re on the cusp of World War III. In some ways World War III is already happening on the installment plan. We have the extraordinary event of a genocide occurring in Gaza with the participation of the United States of America, as should send a warning signal to everyone about the inconscient forces that are moving, not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world in support of continuous war. This is not without historical parallel. The brilliant historian Barbara Tuchman, in her book The March of Folly, identified how throughout history, governments had made worse the better reason and made choices that destroyed their nations, and in some cases had a profound impact on civilization itself. We are at such a moment again. The thought forms that bring us war have overwhelmed common sense. The policies that bring us war are enriching an elite class that is able to justify, in the most wicked terms, their designs in order to keep the profits rolling in. The one thing I know from 16 years in Congress is affirmation of General Smedley Butler’s statement that war is a racket, because every war I’ve seen, since I was in the House of Representatives beginning in 1997, was based on lies. And that the lies are instrumental in not only trying to seize power and resources, but also in building profit.
We are in a dark period here of humanity, but we still have what rests within each of us, this inner light that connects with what we could call the primal human sympathies, as the poet Wordsworth described it in Intimations of Immortality. The primal human sympathies that connect us each to each, and cause us to be aware of our common humanity. And this is something that this call is important for, because it’s a reaffirmation of the common humanity which we hold across the world in the cause of peace: Not the peace of the grave, but peace that enables each person on the planet to live out their own individual destiny, or collective destiny with their family and the people of their community. We are now at a crisis point where, as was stated in the introduction to this call, we could be facing a nuclear war. There are those who talk of nuclear weapons as though it’s no big deal. They talk about nuclear weapons that have a (quote) “limited” (unquote) effect. When I was in Congress the last time, I cautioned about the use of so-called nuclear bunker-busters against Iran, and pointed out how any kind of nuclear weapon—“low-yield” as they call it—would create nuclear fallout that would spread thousands of miles and would poison millions of people.
