Gorbachev 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.
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I have met several Nobel Peace Laureates and 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 are His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and Kofi Annan. I have talked at great length with Jody Williams, Founder of the effort and author of the international treaty to ban landmines. When he came to lecture in Santa Fe, I asked Oscar Arias Sanchez, now President of Costa Rica, to help create a branch in Santa Fe of the United Nations University for Peace.
In the two year effort to establish that pacifist precept school, Dag Hammarskjold’s nephew, Knut, served 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, and World Chess Champion, Anatoly Karpov.
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 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. At that conference, I met Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and we spoke for a very long time in French about Canada's role in ending the most bestial arms race. I have several letters from Mother Teresa along similar lines, about the tragic waste of economic resources in making more nuclear weapons.
In 2005, former President of Poland, Lech Walesa, Peace Laureate in 1983, came to Santa Fe and lectured on how the USA has lost most of its political power, most of its moral power, and only has left its massive military power, which is using up what economic power it has left.
Yet, somehow, to me , former President Mikhail Gorbachev is the most compelling of all of these Nobel Peace Laureates.
I do believe that because I was asking for tens of millions of Americans and several billions people in hundreds of nations, Mr. Gorbachev 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. What choice is there?
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