The 99th consecutive meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) took place on Friday, April 25, a process which has engaged over 5,000 people from more than 50 countries. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the initiator of the IPC, was not available for today’s meeting, so the event was opened with presentations by Schiller Institute leaders Dennis Speed and Dennis Small, joined by former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, former CIA official Ray McGovern, and Pax Christi leader Father Harry Bury.
The April 21 passing of Pope Francis and the transitions taking place in the Church and in global political relationships was a recurring theme of the presentations and discussion. Dennis Speed quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that Orthodox Christians believe that the death of someone during Easter Week means that God asserts that the life has been well lived. Various people have criticisms of some of Pope Francis’s ideas and policies, but he was certainly an outspoken advocate for peace. The issue is not just Pope Francis as an individual, but the question of the Papacy. Pope John XXIII’s April 11,1963 Encyclical “Pacem in Terris,” calling on every individual to contribute to world peace, is exemplary.
Speed noted that not only is the U.S.-Russia negotiation moving forward, but also that talks with Iran are also proceeding, while Foreign Minister Araghchi had called on the U.S. to participate in the development of Iran’s peaceful nuclear power program, a policy launched as part of President Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace program.
Dennis Small noted that the first meeting of the IPC, 99 weeks ago, followed by several months a public letter to Pope Francis by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and other “Political and Social Leaders” in support of his call for an international conference for ending the wars. Now, the effort for ending the Ukraine war has stalled due to open resistance from European leaders and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, but the more substantive issue of restoring relations between the world’s nuclear weapons powers, the U.S. and Russia, is progressing. He warned that we must watch out for a 9/11-type “Reichstag Fire” incident by those who are enraged against the Trump-Putin dialogue and willing to blow it up. Small’s second point addressed the furor over the tariff policy, noting that a letter by more than 100 economists (including two Nobel Prize economists and former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm), was not wrong in its criticisms of the tariff policy, but totally wrong in blaming the current global crisis on the tariffs. The tariffs, he said, are only a possible spark to the massive debt bubble, which is bringing down the Western financial system, including the $2 quadrillion in derivatives debt. Gramm, he noted, was the lead author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill which took down the Glass-Steagall law, and which is, therefore, responsible for the massive debt bubble today. President Clinton signed the bill, but primarily because he was being “Lewinskyied” at that time. Small proposed that the bill be renamed the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley-Lewinsky” bill!
Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich then gave his greetings to the IPC, expressing his full support for the effort to build a movement for peace and justice. He said the political system in the U.S. was fully bought, as are the media, causing a “numbness” among the population to the horrors being carried out around the world. The kind of mass street action which helped to stop the Vietnam War is desperately needed today, he said, but that a general change in “consciousness” in the population is also required.
Ray McGovern, a friend of Kucinich, thanked the “three Dennises” who had spoken, and issued a complaint about Pope Francis for making “pious statements” against the war on Gaza, and questioning the genocide, but in his view Francis had not done enough, just as Pope Pius XII had not done enough during World War II to stop the Nazis. The result, he said, is that we must recognize that “it is up to us.” He referenced the words of Cain in Genesis asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and Rabbi Heschel’s statement that we are not all guilty for the evil in the world, but we are all responsible. He quoted Isaiah, who was challenged when he went naked in the world: “I stripped my clothing, but you have stripped your justice and shalom.” McGovern closed by saying we must keep a sense of humor and “have fun.”
He asked for everyone to wish him luck and say prayers for him as he travels to Russia with Oliver Stone to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism in the Great Patriotic War and World War II.