More than half a century later, Kennedys calls for peace still echo just as loudly.
Peace is perhaps among the most paramount of worldly concepts today. As we live in an age of constant imperialist aggression, never ending provocation, upheaval, and perpetual war, as brinksmanship pushes us to the brink of potential complete annihilation it is now more pertinent than ever that not only Americans but people around the world, but especially Americans, embrace the concept of lasting peace.
On June 10th, 1963 president John F. Kennedy gave what was one of his administrations defining speeches. Speaking to the graduating class of American University in Washington DC the President would go on for nearly half an hour describing the complex geopolitics of the Cold War era and the terrible fate that nearly befell humanity should cooler heads had not prevailed and emphasizing the utmost importance of a foreign policy rooted in peace, non aggression, understanding, and mutual cooperation.
Peace — A notion which the President considered "the most important topic on earth". A sentiment which very much still rings true today among astute observers of our geopolitical situation.
We live in a time in which the threat of nuclear exchange is far higher than it ever was during the height of the Cold War, yet many turn a blind eye to it in exchange for the false sense of security that ignorance guarantees. Even in the event of a non-nuclear conflict between global superpowers the casualties of that calamity would be far greater than anything ever seen on this planet before. More than the two previous world wars or anything else imaginable.
Yet the remarks of President Kennedy then can be and should be just as applicable today as they were sixty years ago.
"I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn."
President Kennedy spoke of peace, in his own words, as "the necessary rational end of rational men". Therein lies the crux of our modern conundrum; We are no longer governed by rational men who seek a rational means of conflict resolution, but rather arguably a cabal of madmen who prioritize their own ends over the well-being of humanity.
A political system whose foreign policy is firmly under the control of war profiteers whose primary incentive is a financial one, and power hungry megalomaniacs driven not by the desire to see human civilization flourish and prosper but by their own selfish desires for a unipolar hegemony which sees the United States as the sole arbiter of order across the world, held together by force or threats of force. The very pax-Americana President Kennedy warned of in his opening remarks.
Somewhat prophetically, in this very speech the President referenced what was at the time perceived as merely Soviet propaganda what is now wholly and undoubtedly an accurate description of the current leadership and ambitions of the American establishment.
“American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars, that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union, and that the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries and to achieve world domination by means of aggressive wars.”
As studiers of modern foreign policy are well aware this is the precisely the nature of our current predicament up to and including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. As has by this point been thoroughly reported by our publication and others it is a documented fact that the United States did knowingly and deliberately aggravate and otherwise facilitate unrest in Eastern Europe which led to the current conflict.
Indeed this has been the case for nearly every American military incursion since its beginning, including the War on Terror and before. From the copious lies surrounding 9/11 used to justify a US assault on Afghanistan, to Iraq's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction", and the continually unraveling false flag gas attack still cited as justification for the illegal occupation of Syria, the American empire's post-9/11 wars haven't a leg to stand on.
Even at the time of the utterance of his impeccable speech the powers that be which were plotting the president's demise just a few short months later were also well on their way formulating America's entry into Vietnam via the now infamous lie known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
It was this coup upon President Kennedy's death and the institution of enterprise which followed that many can argue gave rise to the military industrial complex that we know of today forewarned by Kennedy's predecessor President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, and 30 years prior by American war hero and decorated Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler in his personal memoir War Is A Racket.
The pertinency with which we must pursue peace has not faltered, nor should we falter in our pursuance of it. Not only for ourselves, not only for our country, but for the sake of all humanity. The everlasting peace of which President Kennedy spoke of can be and must be realized, not as a pipe dream but as a tangible means of ensuring the continuation of our civilization.
As you listen to the entirety of President Kennedy's speech linked below allow these words from his inaugural address to resonate just as deeply as we ponder the ways in which we may affect positive change for our future;
"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
