MAY 25 DANISH-SWEDISH SEMINAR

For a New Security and Development Architecture, Not Geopolitical Blocs

May 30—The Danish-Swedish seminar, “We Need a New Security and Development Architecture for all Nations, Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs: No in the Danish June 1 Referendum About Abolishing the EU Defense Opt-Out! No to Sweden and Finland Joining NATO!” on May 25, 2022, as of this writing had 4,000 views. The live audience included political and diplomatic representatives from across Europe, Asia and Africa as well as concerned citizens from around the world. Michelle Rasmussen, the vice-president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark, reported on that seminar at The LaRouche Organization’s Manhattan town meeting on May 28.

We include here edited excerpts from Michelle Rasmussen’s report on the seminar and the section of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote presentation that included an important report on the nature of the insane assault on China. The full conference is available here.

Report from Michelle Rasmussen

After the start of the Feb. 24 war in Ukraine, with Russia moving military forces into Ukraine, there was a dramatic shift in defense policy in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. In Denmark, there was a National Defense Compromise involving five of the parliament’s parties, including a decision to hold a referendum June 1, about abolishing the Danish European Union defense cooperation opt-out. Danish voters had approved the Maastricht Treaty, only after four opt-outs were negotiated, including not participating in EU military activities. Now, as a measure to increase militarization, the government has moved to abolish this opt-out, and the voters have to decide Yes or No.

We wanted to make an intervention to approach the Danish discussion from the highest level, knowing that the only way to understand a single factor, is by understanding the whole. We decided to organize a seminar. Just then, the Swedish and Finnish governments announced their decision to apply for NATO membership, so we made it into a joint seminar, sponsored by the Schiller Institutes in Denmark and Sweden entitled, “We need a new security and development architecture for all nations, not a strengthening of geopolitical blocks—NO in the Danish June 1 referendum about abolishing the EU Defense opt-out, and NO to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.”

The idea was to broaden the space dimension, by discussing the entire international strategic situation, and broaden the time dimension, go back in time to answer, how did we get here—actually facing possible nuclear war, going forward in time—how do we avoid escalation of the current war, even to nuclear war, and going further ahead in time, how to prevent future conflicts from becoming to wars.

My personal view is that the Schiller Institute’s role is not to defend this war, because the war is a tragedy, but to make it very clear how we got to this tragic result, including, emphatically the responsibility on the Western side, and what we have to do to prevent a worse tragedy.

The speakers were:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute. She gave the keynote presentation about the need for a new security and development architecture.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen, a Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken in the late 1990s, author, and a leader of the Russian-Danish Dialogue organization. He spoke about the background to the Ukraine war, including the West’s part in leading up to the war.

Jan Øberg, PhD, a peace and future researcher, a visiting professor in peace and conflict studies in Japan, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland, and co-founder and Director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, in Lund, Sweden. Jan Øberg addressed the problem with the existing Western order, why Sweden and Finland should not join NATO—which should be disbanded—and some principles for resolving conflicts without violence.

Li Xing, PhD, Director of the Research Centre on Development and International Relations, professor in the Department of Politics and Society, Faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences, Aalborg University, and author. Li Xing spoke about Chinese proposals for a new security and development architecture: Xi Jinping’s April proposal for a new international security architecture, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative.

Ulf Sandmark, Chairman, the Schiller Institute in Sweden spoke on why Sweden and Finland should not join NATO.

Michelle Rasmussen, Vice President, the Schiller Institute in Denmark, spoke on why Denmark should not intensify its geopolitical military engagements.

After the conference, Dr. Li Xing, a speaker at the conference, expressed his happiness with the initiative: “The seminar was very conducive to promote what used to be in the West a number of good intellectual traditions historically derived from the Renaissance, enlightenment movement and religious reform. I came from China to study in Denmark and thought that the values and intellectual exchange were so conducive to intellectual development.... This included accommodating different approaches and methods and tolerating opposite ideas and understandings.... The most serious loss [in the current situation] is the disappearance of those intellectual traditions.”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Who and Why of New Lies About Xinjiang

Take this insane policy of causing a Crimea Cuban Missile Crisis, together with another British policy, exposed in a paper by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020, which they put again on the front page of the Henry Jackson Society website, outlining a strategy to use the infamous “Five Eyes” alliance, as the instrument to force through the decoupling of the West from China. This rabidly anti-Russia, anti-China neocon think tank is run by British intelligence, through among others, the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove.

The attempt to decouple China from the international system could detonate an economic nuclear bomb upon the entire world economy. China is not just the world’s largest trading power. China is currently generating the highest rate of scientific and technological development on the planet, a productive power which the developing sector nations and the collapsing Western nations urgently require if they want to survive.

But actual nuclear warfare could also be the result, because part of the Henry Jackson Society strategy is to build up ties with Taiwan leading to its separation from China. China has made abundantly clear that it will respond with overwhelming military force to any attempt to split Taiwan off from the rest of the nation of China. This is as dangerous a proposition as a NATO-backed Ukraine moving to retake Crimea. So, when President Biden made a gaffe in answering a reporter on his recent trip to Japan, who asked: “Would the United States defend Taiwan militarily?” Biden said, again, “Yes.” And he had to be corrected, again, by the White House.

Now, just today, if you open the media, if you look at TV or newspapers, a huge scandal story about pictures from what the story calls labor camps in Xinjiang, was “investigated” by a group of international media. The story alleges that 1 million Uighurs were tortured, beaten in labor camps, used as forced labor, and so forth. Germany’s so-called Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock immediately had an outcry demanding a transparent clearing up of the accusations.

Calls that all relations with China should be cut—after cutting relations with Russia—and that all trade with China should be stopped, now, let’s look at it realistically: China in 2021 was the third largest partner for the EU export of goods, 10.2%, and the largest partner for the EU import of goods, 22.4%; for Germany, it was the largest trading partner for goods in 2021, with a volume of trade of over €245 billion. To cut that would mean total economic suicide, which is already happening with the relations with Russia.

What is the source of this incredible story? The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading newspapers in Germany, says, all the photos and data have been made available through Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist, and longtime Xinjiang observer. Now, this Mr. Adrian Zenz claims that he got all of that from an “unnamed source” who had access to cyber, cyberwar spying and whatnot.

Well, that’s a very dubious observation. But Adrian Zenz is not an unknown entity. The blog, The Grayzone, and the very respected investigative journalists Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal, already wrote articles in 2019, after Zenz had come up with a similar story about genocide in Xinjiang, that Mr. Zenz is a “far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports ‘scriptural spanking’ of children, and claims that he is ‘led by God’ on a ‘mission’ against China,” because the end-times are near and the rise of the anti-Christ is also coming. He is on a complete rampage, saying that there is genocide in Xinjiang; that there is a collapse of the demographic curve of the Uighurs. Lyle Goldstein, who is a professor at the Naval War College in the United States, says that such a statement is “ridiculous to the point of being insulting to those who lost relatives in the Holocaust.”

There is ample evidence that there is no “demographic collapse” of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Just the opposite, there is a 2019 study in the British medical journal, Lancet, which talks about a massive improvement of life expectancy among the Uighurs, a demographic growth rate which is much higher than that of the Han Chinese, an improvement in maternal health, in infant mortality, and all of this represents “a remarkable success story.”

Zenz’s so-called testimony comes from Uighur exiles who have been cultivated by the U.S. State Department. Zenz served as a fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., which is a right-wing lobbying group born out of the National Captive Nations Committee.

Now, that is a very, very interesting connection, because that committee was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky, who was its chairman, the co-chairman was Yaroslav Stetsko, who was a leader of the OUN-B militia, which is the Nazi group that fought along with German Nazis during the occupation of Ukraine in World War II. Stetsko and his wife had a residence in Munich during the entire postwar period and from there led the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.”

After her husband died, Mrs. Stetsko went to Ukraine and rebuilt the OUN-B, the Bandera organization, in the tradition of the ideas of Stepan Bandera. Now, that is a direct connection to that apparatus that was heavily led by the Western secret services—Bandera himself joined the MI6 in 1947, and the BND in Munich had a close, at least “knowledge” about these people (to say the least).

Zenz was also deployed by the Jamestown Foundation, a neocon think tank in D.C., which was founded by CIA director William Casey as an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents.