AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LEADERS OF THE WORLD

 

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LEADERS OF THE WORLD

I am Stathis Papavasiliou MD FACP, a Greek retired academic physician, a husband for fifty years, a father of two wonderful sons, grandfather of four grandsons and a father in law of an angel walking on earth.

Throughout most of my adult life I have served my fellow men in Greece and in the USA, I have strived to acquire the skills and promote knowledge in my field through hard work in classrooms, research laboratories, libraries and endless hours of personal study in my field and beyond and pass everything on to my students and fellows.

I have served my country faithfully and taught my sons to learn and respect the history and customs of other peoples in the world without losing sight of and affirming their own values and national identity in a constructive way.

In my sunset years I prayed to God to grant me health so I could enjoy some rest and see my family grow, progress and prosper.

Instead, I am forced to work in my mid 70’s to make ends meet, I have been betrayed by the governing bodies of my own country for the past several decades, the EU, the financial institutions of the world, the world leadership as a whole and now for reasons that I neither approve nor condone I am threatened with extinction along with the rest of humanity in an all out nuclear holocaust, because of the festering wound of the Ukrainian War, a deteriorating situation in the Middle East and the whole geopolitical and economic mess that you have created.

I am sure there are billions of people of all races, all walks of life, all creeds, throughout the globe who want to go on living, hoping that the rising sun will bring a better day.

Our fault is that we do not wield the same power of life and death over others as you do.

Do I trust you, the world leadership, to make sane, rational decisions?

Certainly not. Your behaviour and decisions for the past forty to fifty years attest to the opposite.

You have failed to create a fair, safe and equitable system of world governance and you have to a greater or lesser extent failed to address urgent and important issues that face humanity such as climate change, demographics, education, health and food issues by kicking the can down the road. Your primary aim has been to perpetuate your hold to power and undermine your real and perceived opponents in a life or death struggle for dominance.

In essence, you have annulled the sacrifice of the Allies in the beaches of Normandy and the Pacific, the defenders of Stalingrad, the victims of Japanese imperialism in Asia, the victims of the Holocaust and the countless anonymous resistance fighters, prisoners of war and civilians who lost their lives in the fight against Nazism, Fascism and Imperial militarism.

Instead, you have committed and tolerated corruption, mismanagement, dishonesty, injustice, oppression, bigotry at a monumental scale. You have let organized crime erode institutions that make social life possible, while at the same time, you have eliminated privacy and have sunk the value of individual freedoms and lives in a bottomless pit.

You have turned our value system upside down and forced down our throats social attitudes that we do not accept. You have stripped us of our national pride and dignity.

What’s there to trust?

So, suppose you start this nuclear war.

Who is going to benefit?

Yes, the chances of your personal and your one percent crony elite’s survival are far better than mine and others like myself.

However, do you really think that after destroying the planet’s biosphere that you are going to emerge from wherever you will hide and it’s going to be business as usual?

The only thing that you will have accomplished will be to demonstrate conclusively that humanity was a failed experiment of chance. Pulling the trigger is final proof that you don’t believe in any kind of Higher Power, a belief that might restrain you from a monumental criminal act of raving madness.

It won’t matter who fires the first shot. There will be no judges and juries, no pundits and analysts to comment analyse and conclude who’s right and who’s wrong after the last shot is fired. The idea of a limited nuclear exchange is stark crazy.

You will have eliminated in a single stroke millennia of painstaking accumulation of knowledge, art, science, inspiration, love, the dreams and hopes of billions and after you die out, your accomplishment is going to be a silent radioactive planet wandering in space devoid of intelligent, rational life.

Wake up and reign in your primordial aggression. We are not a band of recently evolved hominids fighting for territory and resources against other hominids. We are on the verge of great things to come for all.

Change course. Change history. Change the way decisions are made among nations.

Give the peoples of the world what they need most; honourable peace, justice, liberty, safety and a decent living. The name of the game is the increase of the probability of survival of the species, not the hedonism, power mongering and domination of the few over the many.

Go ahead, prove me wrong.