A Collective Call by the Women of the World

Global Women for Peace – United against NATO, 4 June 28

LISTEN TO US.
We are speaking to you — every president, every prime minister, every king, every general, every warlord, every weapons dealer, every man sitting behind a polished desk or atop a throne of power — every single one of you who holds a nation’s fate in your hands and has chosen, again and again, to spend it on war.

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?
Do you not see what you are doing? Do you not feel it? The mothers burying their children. The fathers standing in the rubble of what was once a home, a life, a future. The little girls who no longer have schools to walk to. The little boys who have never known a single day without the sound of explosions. Do these images reach you in your fortified palaces and secured bunkers?
Do they cost you even one night of sleep?
WHY — why in the name of everything sacred — CAN’T YOU USE YOUR MINDS?
You are supposedly the smartest men in the room. You have advisors and analysts, historians and economists, strategists and diplomats. You have centuries of human knowledge at your fingertips. And yet — and yet — the answer you reach for, time and time and time again, is MONSTER bombs. A missile. A drone. A bullet. Another weapon. Another war.
Is that truly the best your intelligence can produce?

SIT DOWN.
Not at a war table. Not in a command center. Sit down across from each other — as men, as human beings — and talk. That is all we are asking. Just talk. Negotiate. Compromise. Give something. Take something. Find the middle. Find the bridge. Find the thread of humanity that must — that must — still connect you.
Because here is what we know, what every woman who has ever carried life in her body knows instinctively: nothing built on destruction ever lasts. Not one empire. Not one conquest. Not one “victory” purchased with the blood of the innocent. History has screamed this truth at you for thousands of years and still — still — you do not hear it.

STOP DESTROYING EACH OTHER’S LANDS.
Those are not just territories on your maps. Those are orchards that took generations to grow. Those are rivers that gave life to entire civilizations. Those are cities that held art, music, laughter, love. When you bomb a city, you are not just destroying infrastructure — you are erasing memory. You are committing violence against time itself. And no flag planted in the ash of someone else’s home is worth that.

STOP DESTROYING EACH OTHER’S PEOPLE.
They are not pawns. They are not collateral. They are not numbers in a military briefing. They are people — with names, with dreams, with people who love them. Every single one. On every side. Every soldier forced to fight a war he didn’t choose. Every civilian who never wanted any part of your quarrel. Every child. Every child. Can you look at the face of a child and justify this? Can you? Then look harder.
STOP WASTING THE WORLD’S WEALTH ON WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.
Do you have any idea — any real idea — what the world spends on war every single year? Trillions. Trillions of dollars, euros, rubles, yuan — the combined treasure of humanity — poured into machines designed for one single purpose: to kill. While people drink contaminated water. While children go to bed hungry. While diseases go uncured because the research has no funding. While the planet itself burns and floods and cries out for attention.
You are building monstrous weapons — things so terrible their very existence is a crime against the future — and you call this strength? You call this leadership?
We call it madness.

And we are done being polite about it.
We do not come to you without hope. We come to you because of hope — because we refuse to believe that the men entrusted with the greatest power in human history are incapable of the most basic human act: choosing peace.
Peace is not weakness. It is the hardest, most disciplined, most courageous thing a leader can choose. It requires more intelligence than war. More creativity than war. More genuine strength than war ever could.
History does not remember the men who destroyed most. It remembers — it honors — the ones who found a way through. The ones who chose the harder, braver path.
Be those men.
Sit down. Look each other in the eye. Remember that on the other side of every enemy you’ve invented is a human being trying, just like you, to matter — to protect something, to be heard, to leave something worth leaving.

Talk to him.

The world is watching. Your children are watching. History — relentless, unforgiving, honest history — is watching.
And we are watching.
Choose differently. Choose better. Choose peace.
While there is still something left to save.
If You Won’t Listen to Us — Then Listen to One of Your Own
If you don’t want to listen to us — the mothers, the daughters, the women who birth the very lives you send to war — then read this. Read it carefully. Read it slowly. Let it land.
These are not our words. These are the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower — Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, architect of the victory in World War II, President of the United States of America. A soldier’s soldier. A man who sat exactly where you sit. A man who knew war not from a briefing room, but from its blood-soaked reality.

He said this 65 years ago. And every single word is more urgent today than the day he spoke it:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
“Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war — as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years — I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.”
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower

He was disappointed. A man of that stature, that experience, that power — disappointed — because even after everything humanity had endured, the world still could not find its way to lasting peace.
Sixty-five years have passed since he spoke those words.
What have you done with them?
He called disarmament a continuing imperative — not an option, not an ideal for dreamers, but an imperative. A necessity. A duty. He called on you to compose your differences “with intellect and decent purpose.” Not with missiles. Not with sanctions designed to starve populations. Not with proxy wars fought on the bodies of other people’s children.
With intellect. With decent purpose.

If a five-star general who led the liberation of a continent is telling you that war is not the answer — if a man who could never be accused of naivety about the brutality of conflict is begging you to find another way — then what exactly is your excuse?
He feared another war could utterly destroy a civilization built slowly and painfully over thousands of years.
Look around you. Is he wrong?
We are still here. We are still asking. Eisenhower is still asking — across the decades, from the weight of history itself.
When will you finally answer?

WE ARE DONE.
Do you understand what it takes to bring a life into this world?
The months of carrying. The pain of birth. The years — the years — of feeding and holding and teaching and worrying and loving a child into a human being. We pour everything we are into these sons and daughters of ours. Every sleepless night. Every sacrifice. Every prayer. We give our bodies, our time, our hearts — completely and without reservation — to bring forth the next generation of this world.
And you take them. And you waste them. And you bury them.
For what? For borders drawn by men long dead? For pride that won’t bend? For resources you could have negotiated for? For ideology? For ego?

WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF IT.
Sick and tired of kissing our children goodbye and wondering if it’s the last time. Sick and tired of folded flags handed to us in place of the living, breathing people we raised. Sick and tired of watching our daughters come home broken in ways no one can see. Sick and tired of a world where the measure of a nation’s power is how efficiently it can slaughter someone else’s children.
We gave you life. Every single one of you. You came into this world through a woman — helpless, small, entirely dependent on her love to survive. And somewhere along the way, you forgot that. You forgot that the enemy across the border also came into this world the same way. That his mother also stayed up through fevers and nightmares. That her daughter also had a first day of school, a first laugh, a first dream.
They are us. We are them. There is no “other side” that isn’t also human.
So hear us — really hear us — when we say:

GET YOUR HEADS TOGETHER.
Sit in a room. Stay there until you find a way forward. Call your diplomats. Call your historians. Call your economists. Call anyone with the intelligence and decency to help you find common ground — because it is there. It is always there. Peace is always possible. War is always a choice.
You are — supposedly — the most capable, the most resourceful, the most powerful human beings on this planet. Then act like it. Use those minds you were given. Use those positions you were entrusted with. Use the authority we — the people — placed in your hands for our protection, not our destruction.
TALK. NEGOTIATE. COMPROMISE. LISTEN. SOLVE.
These are not radical demands. They are the most basic expectations of any intelligent, capable human being faced with a problem.

And do it NOW.
Not next year. Not after the next offensive. Not after more cities are reduced to dust and more families are shattered beyond repair. NOW. While there are still people left to save. While there is still a world worth handing to the children you haven’t yet destroyed.
We brought you into this world.
We are telling you — with every ounce of love and fury that is in us —
STOP THIS MADNESS. NOW AND PREPARE FOR WORLD PEACE!!!!
The mothers and daughters of this earth are watching — and we will not be silent.

“If Rotary is to realize its proper destiny, it must be evolutionary at all times, REVOLUTIONARY on occasion.”—–Paul Harris