Newsletter #14
31-12-2025
We hope you had a merry Christmas and a peaceful holiday season!
The message of Christmas—hope, love, and reconciliation—must be our compass. Every encounter, every open word, every bridge we build is a step in the right direction. We wish you a smooth transition into the new year.
Let’s make 2026 the decisive phase for peace in Europe 🕊
We wish everyone a new year in which we can achieve great things for peace together! We look forward to further cooperation and actions with you in 2026 – every contribution counts.
#Peace #Europe #HopeFor2026
An international conference, intended to build on the legendary meeting of the first European movement in Hertenstein, Switzerland, in 1946, is planned for September 2026 in Istanbul as a new ‘East-West Forum’. Here, we want to discuss the original European ideas of a social democracy and peace union of all countries on this continent, by and for citizens, neutral, non-aligned and committed to a civil character, as well as a new European security architecture with and not against Russia, beyond a NATO that is no longer relevant. Of course we will continue with Civil Diplomacy and keep you up to date with all our current activities.
We are also continuing to work on networking and cooperation with many other peace groups – here is an interesting paper on evaluation and strategic suggestions for next year: https://www.pressenza.com/de/2025/12/strategie-in-zeiten-der-eskalation-ein-diskussionsbeitrag-zur-zukunft-der-friedensbewegung/
We have now documented our Europe-wide creative actions from October 3rd in two videos. The longer version, with many of your submitted contributions, can be found on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykknvdZ6GEw&t=9s
And the short version on our social media channels Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn
Peace, freedom, and justice for Palestine must not be forgotten! Babies are freezing to death in Gaza! Israeli policy and the world’s inaction are to blame.
The world must stop treating the word “ceasefire” as a guarantee of safety when the residents of the Gaza Strip remain under fire, under siege, and under conditions that guarantee more suffering and heartbreak.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad Dec 23, 2025 https://zeteo.com/p/babies-are-freezing-to-death-in-gaza
Even though we in the EU are still a small but steadily growing voice for peace and international understanding, there are more and more voices countering the truth of war propaganda:
Most recently, Tulsi Gabbard warned that the EU and NATO are using war propaganda to sabotage peace efforts and embroil the US military in a direct conflict with Russia.
In doing so, she confirms what we have been criticizing since April 2022: EU governments, NATO, intelligence agencies, the arms industry, and the US Deep State are torpedoing peace negotiations and non-military conflict resolution. This makes them the aggressor and the greatest threat to our security in Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LoXCadQD5Q
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn makes an accusation (https://x.com/i/status/2002518869609431458) that strikes at the heart of Western power structures: the pressure to escalate tensions with Russia does not originate in Moscow, but rather from Western security and interest structures themselves.
The CIA is working with Britain’s MI6 and parts of the European security bureaucracy to provoke a lasting conflict with Russia. Not out of a need for defense, but because conflict is institutionally useful: for budgets, influence, and political relevance. Security apparatuses such as NATO need threats. Without escalation, there is no legitimacy, no resources, no power projection. The “endless war” is thus a systemic condition. Flynn points to Afghanistan and Iraq: 20 years of deployment, trillions in costs, loss of prestige – without strategic consequences.
Particularly explosive is Flynn’s suggestion that the desire for escalation today comes more strongly from Europe than from the US. While parts of the US elite are weary of war, Europe is increasingly acting as a pioneer of confrontation – politically, financially, rhetorically.
This is where the analysis of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán comes in. He speaks openly: Orbán (https://x.com/i/status/2002266353185472809)
For the first time in the history of the European Union, 24 member states have jointly granted a war loan to a country outside the Union. This is not a technical detail, but a qualitative turning point. The logic of a loan is clear: whoever lends money wants it back. In this case, however, repayment is not linked to economic growth or stabilization, but to military victory. For this money to ever be repaid, Russia would have to be defeated. This is not the logic of peace, but the logic of war. A war loan inevitably makes its financiers interested in the continuation and escalation of the conflict, because defeat would also mean financial loss. From this point on, we are no longer talking only about political or moral decisions, but about harsh financial constraints that are pushing Europe in one direction: toward war. The warlike logic from Brussels is thus intensifying. It is not slowing down, it is not being weakened, but institutionalized. The risk is greater today than ever before because the continuation of the war is now linked to a financial interest.
Hungary is consciously not taking this dangerous path. We are not participating in initiatives that are in the interests of those who want to prolong the war. We are not looking for a fast track to war, but a way out. This is not isolationism, but strategic sobriety. It is in Hungary’s interest – and, in the long term, also in Europe’s interest.”
Orbán names three driving forces: arms manufacturers, who always want war; banks, who are counting on access to Russian assets; and politicians, who are not sober enough to recognize where this logic ends. His conclusion is sobering: one should not trust European elites to put the brakes on in time.
Flynn and Orbán confirm the same thing from different perspectives: the engine of escalation is located in the West itself.
However, the American and European populations are not prepared to finance another proxy war, let alone Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Flynn deliberately refers to as a “little dictator.”
EU politicians are playing with the illusion of a winnable “non-nuclear war” against Russia and are thus running the risk of plunging the entire European continent, and perhaps even the world, into ruin and destruction. They must be brought to their senses and made to change course!
The rule of law in the EU is coming to an end – now it could happen to anyone!
In conversation with Pascal Lottaz, Michael von der Schulenburg attempts to shed light on what must be rejected by any understanding of the rule of law and democracy.
“Ultimately, it is a warning to all of us, myself included. I mean, we could all be sanctioned for questionable things, basically just because we oppose the EU’s war policy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjPqSSpOUqU
With the EU’s latest package of sanctions, 17 more people, including several EU and Swiss citizens, are being sanctioned. We have a number of terms in the German language for what is happening to them, their disenfranchisement. Eight or ostracism, banishment, exile, outlawry. All these terms have hardly any colloquial significance anymore, as they actually originate from times when justice was dictated by the exercise of sovereign power and imposed more or less arbitrarily. But with its sanctions list, the EU is, as a matter of course, putting such medieval concepts in place against the principles of the rule of law. .
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Warm regards and a happy New Year
Isabelle Casel