Dear Marco, it is good to be in touch with you again.

I am deeply into finishing my book, so I cannot come to Zagreb. At any other time I would have done so gladly, as I told Emma.

I am sending the enclosed statement for whatever use you want to make of it. Please note also the words of de Gaulle at the end. They would be good just now for Yugoslavia.

I wonder what my old friend Dedijer, or his friend Tito, would make of the present trouble.

Love to you and to Emma

George Wald

THE COLD WAR HAS ENDED - BUT OUR HOPES?

By George Wald

(Professor of Biology Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA. Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1967)

(This statement was sent originally as an open letter to President VACLAV HAVEL of Czechoslovakia)

When the Cold War between the two superpowers ended, together with its Balance of Terror, the entire world hoped that we would enter a period of peace and plenty - the latter paid for by stopping a worldwide military expenditure of about one trillion (one thousand million) dollars a year, mainly by the superpowers, and using that "peace dividend" to supply human needs - nutrition, health care, housing, education, and stable and unpolluted environments.

The Gulf War crushed those hopes. It revived militarism and the armaments industry and trade worldwide. No peace dividend. Military material remains by far the world's biggest business. The US, though relieved of the "Soviet threat", has still a military budget of about 300 billion dollars per year, about half contracted for with private corporations for military supplies worldwide.

Meanwhile more than 40,000 children die per day - more than 17 million per year - of hunger and diseases fostered by hunger.

The Gulf War, victory in which the US government is so lavishly celebrating, was not really a war but a massacre. The "kill ratio" - a brutal term invented in our VietNam war - which we there tried to hold to at least 6:1, in the Gulf War must have been about 1,000:1. It was on all counts an American war. The cooperation of the UN Security Council was in large part purchased.

Capitalism in the US now has the status, not merely of an economic system, but as the state religion. Like many other religions, it aggressively seeks converts. It takes immense satisfaction therefore in the degree to which the formerly Communist states of Eastern Europe now accept and try to learn to live with the so-called "free market".

I know that your President Vaclav Havel hopes to pursue, well aware how difficult that will be in the present world - a genuinely democratic government of socially and economically moral principle - a government and economy with a human face. His own history offers assurance of his sincerity and knowing whereof he speaks. As an American I have not experienced such a government, though such an intent was beautifully expressed by our President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, when he bequeathed to the American people the resolve "that government of the people, by the people, for the people not perish from the Earth".

Let me then stress several outstanding features of the capitalism that I live with and have come to know:

(1) The pursuit of profit knows no limit, and unless restricted by governments becomes destructive without limit. We have long known enough to solve all the world's most serious environmental problems, yet none of them without some decrease of profits. A society that accepts maximizing profits as its major objective can only end by making our planet uninhabitable.

(2) The principle commodity in the "free market" is not products, but people, i.e., workers. Businesses have become increasingly transnational. Disregarding national allegiancies or boundaries, they send their work wherever labor is cheapest. A striking example is the death of the American city Flint, Michigan, as the result of General Motors moving its auto plants, on which the city lived, to Mexico, where it could pay workers about 1/7 as much as in the US. (See the popular American film "Roger and Me" - Warners Brothers, Munich office, tel: 089-4180090).

(3) What we call the Third World in reality consists of the poor of every nation. The US, for example, now contains 20-25 million chronically hungry Americans, and more than 4 million who are homeless. One-fifth of our children live in deep poverty. So we contain our own Third World, as do Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and other First World nations. Meanwhile the US contains also 66 billionaires, each of whom possesses at least one thousand million dollars, 22 of whom possess at least two billion dollars.

(4) The reverse is also true. Even the poorest Third World nation contains a well-to-do elite - land-owning, business, governmental, military. In almost every case that elite runs the country, and identifies its own interest as the national interest.

(5) Capitalism works most profitably in the presence of a pool of unemployed and desperately poor people such as we now have in the USA. They serve two purposes: they provide plenty of cheap labor for new enterprises and they threaten the jobs and help to depress the pay of the already employed workers. Since it is pratically impossible to conduct a successful strike under these conditions, American labor unions are now almost powerless and are rapidly losing members. American workers were once the best paid in the world. "After correcting for inflation, the hourly and weekly wages of...non-supervisory workers (about 2/3 of the work force) have been declining since 1973. At the end of 1990 weekly wages are 17 per cent below where they were in 1973...and were back to levels not seen since 1958" (Lester Thurow, dean of the MIT School of Management. Fron the Boston Globe, Jan. 22, 1991).

(6) Elections in the USA have become a lucrative business, and government - as has long been the case - is for sale. The average cost of a Senatorial campaign is now more than 4 million dollars. That means that a Senator who expects to run for office again must put by on the average 13,000 dollars per week for six years. In a large state a Senatorial campaign can cost 20 million dollars. A Presidential campaign runs into hundreds of millions. Obviously that kind of money can come only from the wealthy, and ends with our elected officials at all levels governing on their behalf.

What I have discussed above is obviously not the world I want, not in my country nor any other. I want a world of peace and justice for all. Most of all I want a world for children, for all children everywhere. A world for children would be the best world for all of us. If you run into any controversial political issue, just ask what outcome would be best for children, and the answer will always come out right. Try it and see.

I think that it might help for the United Nations to sponsor a movement proposed some years ago by an idealistic Dutchman whose name now escapes me - a system of dual citizenship in which, without renouncing one's national citizenship one declared one's self also a citizen of the World, with a responsibility to all humankind, indeed to all life on the Earth, and to the welfare of our planet, our home in the Universe.

Prague, 22 June, 1991

World Congress Alternatives and

Environment

A word to the people of Yugoslavia as of all other lands:

Many years ago Charles de Gaulle said: "Patritism is love of one's country. Nationalism is hatred of other countries.