Worldwide ‘Humanity for Peace’ Rallies Launch Movement To Stop the Danger of Nuclear War and Build a Durable Peace
Aug. 6, 2023 (EIRNS)—A stunning chorus of voices from around the world sang out on Sunday Aug. 6, the 78th anniversary of the barbaric bombing of Hiroshima, from dozens of parallel “Humanity for Peace” rallies across Europe, Ibero-America and the United States, led by a flagship rally in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in front of the United Nations in New York City, demanding peace and a new international security architecture that protects the interests of all nations, large and small.
At the UN rally, a solid crowd of about 250 at any one time—with an additional equal number passing through over the course of the two-and-half-hour event—heard from some 20 speakers from numerous countries and of varied political affiliations, all committed to the common cause of the one Humanity, of stopping the imminent danger of thermonuclear and building a growing movement to forge a durable and just peace. The rally was co-moderated by Anastasia Battle of the Schiller Institute, and Irene Mavrakakis of Liberty Speaks.
Reflecting the political diversity of the coalition, the Humanity for Peace rally heard messages of support from three Presidential candidates—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Democrat), Aaron Day (Republican), and Mike ter Maat (Libertarian)—as well as from LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, Diane Sare; the former President of Guyana, Donald Ramotar; Haitian presidential candidate Jude Elie; and a number of prominent anti-war activists including Scott Ritter and the LaRouche movement’s Jose Vega. All of the speakers, each in their own way, conveyed the spirit that “peace is more powerful than war,” as Rev. Dr. Terri Strong stated in her remarks. Vega closed out the rally by announcing upcoming further Humanity for Peace events in September and beyond, stating: “This does not end here!”
The central message to the event came from Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, whom various speakers thanked as the initiator and driving force of the Humanity for Peace process. Zepp-LaRouche’s message to the rally was as follows:
“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, month 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 is development!”
Mike Billington
EIR
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