This article appears in the August 11, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
‘A CHORUS FOR PEACE’
Humanity for Peace Rallies Worldwide To Avert Nuclear War
[Print version of this article]
Aug. 6—This day marked the 78th anniversary of America’s use of a nuclear weapon to devastate the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The city of Hiroshima has estimated that 237,000 people were killed directly or indirectly by the bomb’s effects, including burns, radiation sickness, and cancer. Modern nuclear weapons are typically at least 700% more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Many analysts agree that the danger that these weapons may be used is currently greater than ever before in history, due to the geopolitical proxy war being waged by NATO against Russia and potentially China.
In order to call attention to the gravity of this situation, a coalition of pro-peace organizations emerged over the past month and announced its intention to hold antiwar rallies to commemorate the Hiroshima bombing, and to mobilize the population to prevent a far worse catastrophe. The focal point was a “Hiroshima Day” rally at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in New York, the location of many UN missions; it was augmented by dozens of sister rallies around the world.
The coalition, called Humanity for Peace, emerged over the Spring and Summer months of 2023, in good part catalyzed by urgent calls of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, to confront the military escalation and try to join with forces from the “non-aligned” developing nations. Humanity for Peace presented a list of four demands:
• Immediately end all funding and weapons for Ukraine;
• Immediately convene unconditional peace talks;
• Dissolve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO);
• A new international security architecture must be created to end the division of the world into blocs, eliminating geopolitics. This new architecture must take into account the security concerns of every sovereign nation, large or small.
No to NATO
A prelude to the worldwide Aug. 6 events was the “No to NATO, No War” Internet broadcast from the UK’s “No to NATO” group, which featured Germany’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Americans Angela McArdle of the Libertarian Party National Council and journalist Dan Kovalik, Guyana’s former President Donald Ramotar, former British diplomat Peter Ford, and Scottish independent journalist David Clews.
This event featured Helga Zepp-LaRouche taking on the German Green Party membership with a challenge to leave their party—supposedly founded on a commitment to peace, and now aggressively pushing any war or military threat against Russia or China—and join the Humanity for Peace mobilization. Zepp-LaRouche established that the actual cause for NATO’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine is that an entire era, the 500–600 years of the colonial period, is now coming to an end, and that stopping the war is only possible through cooperation by Europe with the Global South under a new security and development architecture.
This insight led host Chris Williamson to ask Ramotar and Clews to respond to Zepp-LaRouche, which they did energetically. Ramotar said, “In all of these negatives [of war and the threat of nuclear war] is developing a positive…. A new system is being created.”
Kovalik at the conclusion called on everyone: “Get out in the streets on Sunday” at the UN rally. And Williamson then announced the “No to NATO” rally in London on Aug. 6, at Whitehall beginning at 1:00 p.m. London time.
Scientists Call To Stop a New World War
On July 31, a group of scientists issued a statement in support of Humanity for Peace and its objectives. [See our Editorial this issue—ed.] They urged:
Recall the words of Einstein and his colleagues: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
‘Sister Rallies’ Worldwide Build to Aug. 6
Plans for complementary events, “sister rallies,” began to spring up around the world in late July. In addition to the London rally, there were six events scheduled around Europe, and others in North, Central, and South America.
In the United States, the first event took place in front of the state capitol in Austin, Texas on Friday, August 4. It was addressed by Schiller Institute representative Joe Jennings and Travis County Libertarian Party Chairman Ted Brown, along with a surprise appearance by Libertarian National Committee Chairwoman Angela McArdle. The rally effectively merged with another rally being held at the same location by the group Austin Peace Action.
Humanity for Peace rallied Saturday morning, Aug. 5 in downtown Los Angeles, where there had been a Rage Against the War Machine rally in February. Several dozen activists and contacts from the Schiller Institute and from the Party of Communists USA each had banners and book tables.
Also on Friday, a rally was held in front of the United Nations building in Mexico City, Mexico. Mexican peace activists met with UN representatives, presenting them with the Humanity for Peace material and briefing them on the related actions that were taking place around the world.
Saturday, Aug. 5, began with three events in Germany, in Dresden, Munich and Frankfurt. The Frankfurt rally included participation by three different political parties; among the speakers in Frankfurt were Alexander Hartmann of Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität –BüSo), Ilker Özyavuz of Team Todenhöfer, and Maj. Florian D. Pfaff, who represents the Basis Party as well as the well-known Darmstädter Signal association of active and former Bundeswehr personnel.
On Sunday, Aug. 6, the day of the Hiroshima nuclear incineration almost 80 years ago, further actions took place around the world. In France, a Schiller Institute rally Aug. 6 on Place Saint Michel in Paris featured its large banner, “Hiroshima plus jamais” (Hiroshima, Never Again). The organizers had distributed leaflets in advance at cinemas showing the newly released film about the bomb, Oppenheimer, and got a polarized response. It drew people to the rally.
In Stockholm, Humanity for Peace brought out demonstrators from a number of smaller parties opposing Sweden’s NATO bid, with leaders and activists from the Schiller Institute. Germany saw rallies in Herrsching, Stuttgart, Mainz and Berlin. There were rallies in Bucharest, Iasi and Craiova in Romania; London in the UK; Vienna in Austria; Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic; Santiago in Chile; Managua in Nicaragua; and San Cristóbal Verapaz in Guatemala. Other rallies were planned to take place in Guyana and Guatemala, while in the United States they were scheduled for Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Houston, Des Moines, and several locations in northern California.
Also on Aug. 6, the Peace Bell Society (Friedensglockengesellschaft Berlin), one of the sponsoring organizations of Humanity for Peace, held an event at Friedrichshain Park in Berlin, where they rang the Peace Bell at 8:15 a.m. CET, the moment that the nuclear bomb was exploded over Hiroshima. Among the various speakers at the commemoration, journalist Wolfram Adolphi, referenced the relevance of the movie Oppenheimer for today.
There were two rallies held in Bucharest, Romania: one was organized at University Square by the Committee for Peace (Comitetul Pentru Pace), the Schiller Institute, and the Romanian Socialist Party. The other, at Union Square (Piata Unirii), was organized by the Movement for Peace (Miscarea Pentru Pace). Other rallies were held in Iasi, sponsored by ROC-TV, the Free and Sovereign civic group (Liber si Suveran), and the Patria Party; and in Craiova, sponsored by the Movement for Peace.
Activists from Humanity for Peace in Chile were invited by the organization World Without War and Without Violence, which has international chapters; the group Coordinator Against Nuclear War; and a local group, the Community for Human Development, to participate in a rally in Santiago, held at the centrally-located Parque Metropolitano. Humanity for Peace representatives spoke about its four demands, and displayed its banner.
Meanwhile, an official ceremony was held at the Hiroshima Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan, attended by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Outside the Memorial there were demonstrations, with people angry about how the G7 had “hijacked” the Hiroshima theme for their own war-like purposes, and calling for an end to the war in Ukraine.
At the United Nations
At the main event, at New York City’s Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in front of the United Nations, Humanity for Peace assembled a crowd of hundreds which heard messages of support from three presidential pre-candidates—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on recording (Democrat); Aaron Day (Republican), and Mike ter Maat (Libertarian), the latter two in person—as well as from LaRouche independent candidate from New York for U.S. Senate, Diane Sare; the former President of Guyana, Donald Ramotar; and a number of prominent activists against NATO’s war including Scott Ritter and the LaRouche movement’s José Vega.
A presidential candidate from Haiti, Jude Elie; the president and founder of the Guinean-American League of Friends for Freedom, Ahmadou Diallo; and the National Director of the American Muslim Alliance, Muhammad Salim Akhtar spoke to the crowd, along with talk show host Garland Nixon and other media personalities from the New York City area. (A video stream of the rally is available here.) The rally was co-moderated by Anastasia Battle of the Schiller Institute, and Irene Mavrakakis of Liberty Speaks.
All of the speakers, each in their own way, conveyed the spirit that “peace is more powerful than war,” as Rev. Dr. Terri Strong, who gave the convocation prayer, stated in her remarks. Ritter, the former UN Weapons Inspector and Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, pointed in the direction of Central Park and said that within a year, he wants to see one million demonstrate there as in 1982, referring to the peace demonstration that pushed Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev toward the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.
Diane Sare said of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, which military leaders then agreed would serve no purpose in ending the war:
We did it to demonstrate that we could do it, and we did it to demonstrate that we would do it. Is anyone here so naïve as to believe that we have become more moral now?
Vega closed out the rally by announcing Humanity for Peace would hold further actions Sept. 1 and beyond, stating: “This does not end here. This is the beginning of something!”
The central message to the event came from Zepp-LaRouche, whom various speakers thanked as the initiator and driving force of the Humanity for Peace process. Her message:
To all the courageous people demonstrating today for peace!
We have to wake people up all over the world. Never before was mankind in a bigger danger of annihilating itself in a global nuclear war. Of the more than 12,000 existing nuclear weapons today, each of which are up to a thousand times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 3,800 are immediately deployable and nearly 2,000 are on “launch on warning” status.
If it comes to nuclear war, as there are politicians today who are recklessly considering the use of these weapons, not even a historian will be left to investigate how it could have come to this incomprehensible catastrophe. If it happens, the people who die in the first minutes will be the comparably lucky ones, for in the following days, months and years, all life on this planet will become extinct, both through total radiation and a nuclear winter of many years. Everything for which thousands of generations have struggled, all sorrows and joy, all poems and songs, will vanish forever.
We demand the immediate controlled destruction of all nuclear weapons. But even more profoundly, we demand the realization of a new global security and development architecture, which takes into account the security interests of all nations of the world, big ones and small ones. This architecture must overcome the formation of geopolitical blocs once and for all, and put the interest of the one humanity first. The precondition for this is a new just world economic order, which allows every nation and every human being to fully develop all of their innate potentials.
Let us unite the peace movements all over the world with the nations of the Global South, for the realization of a new paradigm in the history of the human species. The new name for peace must be development!
A Chorus for Peace
Following the rally at the UN, many participants went to the Unitarian Church of All Souls for an uplifting conclusion to the day’s events: a musical performance of Mozart’s Requiem, conducted by Maestro Gürer Aykala, the Permanent Conductor and General Music Director of the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, and former conductor of the El Paso Symphony Orchestra (Texas). Also on the program were African-American spirituals and other selections, sung by New York City area soloists.
Dennis Small contributed to this article.
