I loved the idea of having been invited to an event where the politicians had been bared. It inspired hope that against all odds we might yet achieve something. I loved the idea that the politicians with their own agendas had been barred. The world scene had become saturated with politicians that increasingly had prostituted themselves to their clients the moneybags, to serve insane games hidden behind fairytale mythologies and Disneyland-type fantasies that were served up for their masters to the public to keep public opinion tied into knots while the empires were raping the world to the point that mankind's future now hung in the balance. The lobbying efforts for developing and building the nuclear bomb came out of the background of the old British Empire. They wanted a weapon to terrible that all nations would lay down their sovereignty into the hands of a singe world-empire, just to survive. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing has been carried out to drive this terror threat home. The plan would have succeeded had Russia not built a bigger bomb, the H-bomb. And so the quest for world-empire status had become an arms race, a new Thirty Years War, while Peace of Westphalia Principle that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 wasn't even on the horizon.

      In this respect Youth Peace Conference posed a great challenge to the world to turn itself around from the bottom up, as nothing else would work, while no one of the youth that had called for the conference knew how to begin or were even aware of the Westphalia Principle. Much less had anyone established a foundation that came close, on which any real movement could begin. Of course, neither had we moved forward ourselves sufficiently with the Principle of Universal Love, which had remained but a vague idea for us, inspired by Steve and Ushi and few others; an idea that still hang precariously on the horizon as through it didn't really belong into the real world. I, for one, had no idea how one might implement such a vast principle and make it a global foundation. Consequently I had nothing substantial to offer. I shouldn't have been surprised therefore when the conference flopped and I failed. It was said at the closing of the conference, which had started with such high hopes, that it soured the soup by simply accomplishing nothing. And it was also said that this sad state of affairs, that has become the state of the world, might not be reversible.



      Fred had been excited when he got the official invitation. His eyes sparkled when he read to us the long list of the conference goals. He was so exited that he convinced himself that we had a real chance to achieve a breakthrough. He felt that our achievement in Venice had fermented the thinking around the world sufficiently to create a new environment so that a few steps towards peace could be taken. In his excitement Fred came down from Washington to North Carolina personally, to our coastal surveillance outpost, as if descending from his ivory-tower world. He seemed especially excited by the fact that he found my invitation by name attached to it. He told us that his office rarely receives requests by name for such events. Of course, he nor any of us knew why my personal attendance was being requested.

      Steve didn't answer that question, though it was he who had alerted us on Ross' rock almost a month in advance that the Moscow peace event was being planned. He always knew about those things before they happened. His large private network of contacts in the intellectual community evidently also extended into Russia. He had sent us several notes about the Moscow event before Fred knew about it. One of his notes came with a warning attached that the political layers in Russia weren't looking for any kind of real breakthrough at all, but were only hoping that America would take more of the pressure off Russia in the arms race that was hurting Russia's economy. Steve warned us that Russia wasn't looking for peace at all. Steve wrote that they had no intentions to change their ideological posture in any fundamental way, much less was there a demonstrated eagerness at the lower levels behind the political scene towards that. The Soviets evidently had not the slightest intention to scrap their key military project, the Ogarkov Plan for a 'winnable' nuclear war. Steve warned that Russia was only looking for concessions from the West, not solutions. They wanted the West to give Russia breathing space in strategic matters in order to enable them to shape the arms race into a more survivable proposition for them, especially economically. Steve said that they were looking for a type of peace that includes the West's guaranteed accommodation of the Soviet System while the Soviets intended to offer nothing substantial in return.

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche