Over the past month and more, NATO’S War Party has gone into lethal overdrive, in both Southwest Asia (Gaza) and Central Europe (Ukraine), placing the world on the brink of nuclear war. This Friday, the International Peace Coalition will be addressed by Scott Ritter. Ritter is an intelligence officer, military analyst, and former chief weapons inspector to Iraq, 1991-1998 United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq 1991-1998, charged with finding and destroying all weapons of mass destruction. Since then, he has been targeted and harassed by elements of the State Department and other American federal agencies, and has been placed, along with IPC co-founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Independent United States Senate candidate Diane Sare, and several others, on “Ukrainian Intelligence” hit lists.  His life, and the lives of others, are in immediate danger, true, but they are the beginning. 

For all of us, this is a “Martin Niemoller moment.” Niemoller, a clergyman in 1930s Germany, said:

“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

We have seen the double-headed monster of the war in Southwest Asia (Gaza) and the war in Europe (Ukraine), either or both of which can lead “unexpectedly” to thermonuclear confrontation very quickly. Ukraine’s no-longer-legal President Zelensky, probably with the blessing of London and Washington, has launched a foredoomed but destructive “Battle of the Bulge” invasion of the Kursk region of Russia. Then, there is Netanyahu’s NATO-endorsed mass murder of perhaps 200,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the name of “self-defense.” Netanyahu and Zelensky are both attempting to make negotiations impossible, and total war inevitable. The two-headed monster has one purpose—to draw the US, Germany, and other NATO countries into direct military confrontation with Russia, with the extraordinary danger that entails.

But this need not be so. Proposals for a new security and development architecture, including that circulated by the International Peace Coalition, and by governments such as China and Brazil, addressing both Gaza and Ukraine, are in circulation. Assassination and threat of assassination are being used to prevent progress, either through murder, or through intimidation.

If you not only believe in freedom of thought, but in preserving and defending it, you must join this meeting this Friday and urge others to attend. Last week the IPC brought together 550 individuals from 50 nations, and widely divergent political affiliations, as we must. There is a higher principle that must unite us.  As Zepp-LaRouche states in her Ten Principles: “A New World economic order is emerging, involving the vast majority of the countries of the global south. The European nations in the US must not fight this effort, but by joining hands with the developing countries, cooperate to shape the next epoch of the development of the human species to become a renaissance of the highest and most noble expressions of creativity!”

Join the International Peace Coalition this Friday at 11am EDT. We will be joined with former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. Marine intelligence officer, Scott Ritter, Executive Director of Friends of Sabeel of North America, Jonathan Kuttab, Co-Founder of Nonviolence International, former CIA analyst and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Ray McGovern, Prof. Henry Baldelomar,Chargé d'Affaires of the Bolivian Embassy in Washington, D.C.and others.