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Press Conference in Santa Fe, Gorbachev
At the beginning of today’s Press Conference in Santa Fe, Gorbachev defended Putin’s concern over USA building extensive missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, but said that it was good that Bush and Putin took the time to recently meet, once before Bush leaves office. He also stated that the USA needs to “elect a President who gets along with the world, and doesn’t brandish a big stick and make threats.”
This is “up to the American people to persuade its leaders, and this burden can’t be shouldered by others.” After 15 years of “pushing” since leaving office in 1992, Gorbachev now believes that most world leaders and heads of state are “lagging,” and that what we need next is “planetary glasnost.” He is encouraged by the progress in Russia of the political party he started, the Union of Social Democrats, given that more than 100 nations have the same kind of party, the Social Democrats. He said the history of the USSR was a 70 year experiment with Communism in its extreme Bolshevik form, and that Russia had “paid the price” for doing so.
Gorbachev reminisced on Yeltsin being pressured by the International Monetary Fund and a few US Think Tanks which came to impose on Russia a free market approach, which did a lot of good. He called it the “Washington Consensus” that was really the opposite ideology and effect of Bolshevism.I have met and talked with several Nobel Peace Laureates, as well as several others I thought should have won that honorable prize. The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 95 individuals and 20 organizations since 1901. The Laureates I have exchanged extensive correspondence with include His
holiness, the Dalai Lama, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. I have talked at length with Jody Williams who, with her husband, wrote their own treaty essentially putting an end to land mines, and then obtained the signatures of most of the heads of state in the world (USA notably has not signed this treaty).
I asked Oscar Aria Sanchez, former-and-now-again President of Costa Rica, to help create a branch in Santa Fe of the United Nations University for Peace; Dag Hammarskjold’s nephew Knut was on the Board of Honorary Advisors of this conception, as was Gandhi’s grandson, Arun, and Einstein’s granddaughter,
Evelyn. So was former USA Secretary of Interior, Stewart Udall. As an organization making a huge difference in the world, Doctors without Borders is my highest inspiration daily in my work to get the neurotoxic and carcinogenic artificial sweetener, aspartame, off the market by rescinding its approval to be sold.
Mairead Corrigan of Ireland was the first Nobel Peace Laureate I talked with for several hours at the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in 1978. I also had a very long conversation with Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and I have always thought he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly, George Mc Govern deserves something like a Nobel Peace Prize, for his lifetime of pacifism.
Another Peace Laureate, Lech Walesa, Founder of the Solidarnosc Movement in Poland, visited Santa Fe recently, and made a strong point of pointing out that the USA has lost its moral power and ethical strength, most of its political power, and only has left its military power, which is hardly enough to maintain its status as a once-powerful "superpower."
Somehow, today former President Mikhail Gorbachev was the most compelling of all of the Nobel Peace Laureates I have encountered and with whom I have exhanged correspondence. I am certain that because I was asking on behalf of tens of millions of Americans and several billions people in hundreds of nations, that he really will help to advise and guide the next USA President to bring the USA out of the Middle East, and to end the war in iraq. There really is no choice.
Stephen Fox 19/04/08
Stephen Fox, alternative newspaper managing editor and gallery owner of Santa Fe, on Monday afternoon asked former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev if, after November, he would please be so kind as to lead and advise the next USA President as to how to get out of our Iraq quagmire.
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