May 25, 2022 (EIRNS)—Michelle Rasmussen, vice president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark, opened the online seminar this afternoon:

Your Excellencies and diplomats from many countries on four continents, guest speakers, members and friends of the Schiller Institute, ladies and gentlemen,

Welcome to this seminar sponsored by the Schiller Institutes in Denmark and Sweden, which is also being live streamed on YouTube. The title is, “We Need a New International Security and Development Architecture, Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs. NO in the Danish June 1 referendum about abolishing the EU Defense opt-out, and NO to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.” I am Michelle Rasmussen, vice president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark, and I will be the moderator today.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, a dramatic shift in defense policy has been proposed in three of the Nordic countries. Denmark is having a referendum on June 1 about joining the EU’s military activities, and Sweden’s and Finland’s governments want to join NATO. We think that it is necessary to discuss these issues from a higher standpoint.

Our keynote speaker, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and international chairwoman of the Schiller Institute stated on May 19, that this is the most dangerous moment in world history. There is war in Europe, and many experts are warning that if the war were not ended soon, and a diplomatic solution crafted, and if those advocating increasing the geopolitical confrontation were not politically defeated, the war could escalate to, even, nuclear war. At the same time, the world economy is in crisis.

While the dangers are great, there is hope, because there are solutions in the form of a new security and development architecture, including proposals by the late Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of our political movement, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute,for a security agreement modeled on the Peace of Westphalia, combined with increased economic development cooperation between countries.

We have called this meeting to discuss:

• What caused the current extremely dangerous military, and economic crisis.

• Why strengthening the EU military arm with Danish participation, and Sweden and Finland joining NATO would only exacerbate geopolitical conflict, and

• What are the principles upon which we can create a new security and development architecture, for the benefit of all nations and people.

We want to ensure that both the dangers and solutions are known, and that an effective movement is built to stop a further escalation of this war and its economic effects, and prevent future wars and economic destruction. Somehow, humanity must create the conditions where war is not an option, in this era of nuclear weapons.

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche Keynote

May 25, 2022 (EIRNS)—Here is the Keynote of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche: We Need a New Security And Development Architecture for All Nations, Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs: Why Sweden and Finland Should Not Join NATO, and ‘No’ in the Referendum in Denmark to Join EU’s Military,” the online seminar in Denmark and Sweden today. She was introduced by Schiller Institute in Denmark Vice President Michelle Rasmussen, who moderated the seminar.

The video is available here: 
On the international Schiller Institute YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/8Dt9D_D_U4U

On the Danish YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1Pji0vjD9Kg

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Hello, good day, Ladies and Gentlemen: As Michelle just said, I have stated that we are facing the most dangerous crisis in the history of mankind. Now, why am I am saying that? Obviously, that includes two world wars in the 20th century, the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it’s a big order. Well, the first reason is the most obvious, for the very first time, we are facing the real danger of a global nuclear war, and if it would ever come to that, it for sure would mean the annihilation of the human species.

In the recent period, the illusion has developed that a limited nuclear war can be fought, and won, or that protracted, hybrid nuclear/conventional war can take place. This was the subject of a maneuver in January of this year, called “Global Lightning,” which had the idea that you have some nuclear bombs, neutron bombs, space war, cyberwar, and this would go on for weeks. Now, the famous nuclear arms specialist, former MIT Prof. Ted Postol has developed all the arguments why this is completely ludicrous, that why, if one uses only one single nuclear weapon, it is the logic of nuclear war, that all will be used.

In the recent months, since the war in Ukraine started, you hear from all kinds of politicians and journalists and who knows who else making reckless talk, saying things like “even if there is the risk of nuclear war, we have to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. We can’t be blackmailed.” Or, “it won’t happen, because nobody would be so foolish to do this.” Well, I don’t think that that is a convincing argument.

The second reason why I am saying we are in the worst crisis ever, is that we experience a civilizational breakdown, the end of an entire system. Now, this has many elements. We have an immediate danger of an escalation of the war, as a result of the present chicken-game policies conducted by NATO against Russia. We are facing a hyperinflationary blowout of the Western neoliberal financial system, which was long in process, even before the war in Ukraine started. We are looking at a world famine, which according to the United Nations is threatening 1.7 billion people with starvation. That is 20% of the entire human species. The pandemic is not over, and all of this is threatening social chaos as a result, and that chaos, all by itself, could threaten to plunge the world into a war.

If one listens to the Western media, and all kinds of politicians, it is naturally all to be blamed on Putin. He is being given all possible names right now, that he has caused an “unprovoked war of aggression”; that he responsible for world famine; that he is the cause of inflation; and so forth and so on. If you say any argument for the real causes of the present situation, you are immediately accused of fake news, you are called a “Putin agent,” it is denounced as Russia propaganda.

Well, it has very little to do with Ukraine. In reality, this present confrontation is about the world order. It is a fight between an unipolar world, which is really a world empire based on the “U.S.-British special relationship,” whereby the Anglo-American hegemon insists that only the so-called “rules-based order” which they have defined is valid; versus a world in which the rise of China and countries associated with Russia and China insist on their own right for economic development.

We are right now at the most precarious moment: The neoliberal system is collapsing. It is not strong enough any more to enforce its will, but the new order is not yet clearly defined. Naturally, in the officially allowed discussion, it is being said that this is a fight between the “democracies” and the “autocratic regimes.” Well, right now, if you listen to what certain politicians and people like Stoltenberg are saying, we are heading toward a potential total decoupling between the West, plus the Five Eyes, plus Japan, Australia, and South Korea, versus a part of the world which includes Russia, China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS, plus many countries that are now trying to become part of the BRICS, which is most of the Global South.

In frantic trips, Blinken is running around the world, trying to convince people to join the faction of the “democracies.” President Biden right now is in Asia, doing the same thing. Chancellor Scholz just went to Africa, von der Leyen to India, all in an effort to isolate Russia and China, but it’s not working: Because India, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and many others do not want to be pulled into a geopolitical confrontation between the two sides. And what we are actually experiencing is a real renaissance of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Well, we should not overlook, given the American policies, the role of the British, which is “Global Britain,” which is really a new word for the British Empire, which contrary to the views of many, has only changed its shape, but not its essence. Take, for example, an article by Malcolm Chalmers, Deputy Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which happens to be the oldest official think tank associated with the Royal household, and the British military. They describe themselves as the “world’s oldest and leading U.K. defense and security think tank.” They’re proposing a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids,” which could result over the Ukrainian attempt to retake Crimea, which would make it easier, in their view, to settle the Ukraine-Russia war. And this is the stunning proposition in this article, which has the headline, “This War Still Presents Nuclear Risks—Especially in Relation to Crimea,” which was published on May 20 by the RUSI think tank. [https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/war-still-presents-nuclear-risks-especially-relation-crimea]

Chalmers discusses how Russia could be forced into a nuclear confrontation, by sending evermore sophisticated weapons to Ukraine, from which it would ultimately back down. Chalmers describes NATO’s strategy over the last three months as that of “boiling the Russian frog.” You all remember the picture—according to the story, I don’t think it’s actually true—but according to the story, if you throw a frog into boiling water, the frog it will jump out; but if you put the frog into the water pot, when the water is cold, and then you slowly increase the temperature, the frog ends up being boiled without noticing. So he talks about “boiling the Russian frog” by progressively increasing “size and sophistication of the weapons they have been prepared to supply to Ukraine.” Because of those weapons, “the next period will see Ukraine reversing most of Russia’s recent territorial gains, including Kherson and even Mariupol.” That, however, would not occasion a nuclear threat, nor would Ukraine, using those weapons and territorial gains to destroy bridges, railheads, storage sites, and airbases inside Russia. But should Ukraine move to retake Crimea, strike a “tempting target,” of the Kerch Bridge for example, now, that could lead to a “Crimea Missile Crisis,” Chalmbers argues. “A specific threat to use nuclear weapons in relation to Crimea … might be viewed by Putin as a way to restore some of his coercive power, even if he (and the U.S.) doubted whether he would deliver on such a threat…. If a red line were not accepted by Ukraine, Russia might then feel that it had to consider a series of further escalatory options, such as putting its nuclear forces on higher alert.” They are already on alert. “Faced with the alternative of the likely loss of Crimea, Putin might believe that Ukraine (with U.S. encouragement) would be likely to blink first. It would be a moment of extreme peril, with all the parties seeking to understand the intent of each other even as they looked to pursue their national interests.

“Precisely because of the peril inherent in such a situation, a nuclear crisis of this sort could make it easier for leaders to make difficult compromises. Provided that the war was ended and the blockade of Odesa lifted, Ukraine’s leaders might be willing to postpone a settlement of the Crimea question. For Putin, the failure of the invasion, and the subsequent success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, would have been a massive humiliation. But he would at least be able to argue that the might of the Russian strategic arsenal had, at a moment of great national weakness, successfully deterred NATO’s designs for dismembering Russia. This could be enough for both sides to avoid the worst outcome of all.”

I mean, this is complete insanity, you know! Saying that one has to threaten to retake Crimea, and then get all the nuclear weapons on the highest alert, and then we can sit down and settle. So he calls that a Crimea Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids.

Now, that policy of “boiling the Russian frog,” that has not started three months ago, but that has been the method since 1990, when on Feb. 9, 1990, James Baker III promise to Gorbachev, that NATO would not move one inch eastward. In the entire Yeltsin period, there was a policy to reduce the former superpower into a raw materials exporting nation, with the “shock therapy” of Jeffrey Sachs, and between 1991-1994, the industrial potential of Russia was reduced to only 30%. There is a very important book by Sergei Glazyev, which describes the 1990s, with the title Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, because that is what was imposed on Russia at that time.

Now, the crime of Putin is that he tried to reverse that, and had some success with it. The answer was color revolutions, regime change, humanitarian wars, like the 20 years in Afghanistan, where as a result of the hasty retreat of NATO and the U.S. in August, now, there are 24 million people at starvation levels in Afghanistan, exposed to COVID, measles, polio, without adequate medicine. So, if one would have equally detailed TV coverage of Afghanistan for 20 years, like we see it now with Ukraine every day, maybe the world would have been equally upset—or, maybe not, because the Afghanis are not white.

Then you had the Iraq War in 2003, about which Nancy Pelosi admitted publicly that all responsible people knew ahead of time that there were no weapons of mass destruction. You had Libya. Hillary Clinton, during the Durham investigation in the United States, had to admit that the entire basis of Russiagate were all lies. Did one see anything about that in the mainstream media? Absolutely not! At least not in Europe. Then there was Syria. Then you had the 2014 Maidan coup, about which Victoria Nuland bragged, $5 billion were spent by the State Department on NGOs, and, let’s not forget, the Azov Battalion, which media in the West are now saying, there are no Nazis in Ukraine—but it is a documented fact that there are.

Now, Putin, as a result of this “boiling the Russian frog,” over almost 30 years, on Dec. 15 demanded legally binding security guarantees from the United States and NATO. He has not received an answer from the U.S. or NATO on the core demands, only on arms control, but that was not the essence of what he was demanding. The head of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, said that Russia had no other way, because they were threatened in the existence of the statehood of Russia, when they made what they call the “special military operation” in Ukraine. And one can absolutely argue that Russia was in a situation, according to UN Charter Article 51, which is a question of self-defense and not of aggression.

Now, we are facing with Finland and Sweden, the sixth expansion of NATO. That is the answer, which Stoltenberg even brags about. He says, “Putin wanted less NATO, now he gets more NATO.” So the boiling temperature is just being increased.

One has to take this insane policy of causing a Crimea Cuban Missile Crisis, together with another British policy, which was 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, which means it’s ongoing policy of that think tank. It is a report outlining a strategy to use the infamous “Five Eyes” alliance—U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand—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, who is the main brain of Russiagate, which was completely discredited as a lie; and he was one of the founders of the Henry Jackson Society and is one of its principals today.

So, even the attempt to decouple China from the international system, before consummated, could detonate an economic nuclear bomb upon the entire world economy. China is not just the world’s largest trading power: It’s 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 answer to a reporter on his recent trip to Japan, “Would the United States defend Taiwan militarily?” Biden said, again, “Yes.” And he had to be correct, again, by the White House.

Now, the Chinese already had editorials where they said, this is not a “gaffe,” this is a signal of what is the real intention of the United States. And Chas Freeman, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and he was the official translator for President Nixon in his 1972 trip to China, and a career diplomat, he warned, and called it a colossal mistake for Biden to have made such a stupid statement.

President Biden is currently championing these precisely British strategies on his current trip to Asia. Fresh from celebrating the expansion of NATO, Biden is to unveil a grandiose Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) during his stop in Japan as the highlight of the trip. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated bluntly on Wednesday, May 18, that the message of the IPEF is that “democracies and open societies of the world stand together to shape the rules of the road. We think that message will be heard everywhere. We think it will be heard in Beijing.”

Fifty-two U.S. Senators sent Biden off on his trip with instructions that Taiwan be incorporated as one of the “countries” participating in the IPEF, which is clearly not acceptable from the standpoint of China, because it is a violation of the One China policy.

Now, just today, if you open the media, if you look at the TV, if you look at TV or newspapers, a huge scandal story about pictures from the supposed labor camps in Xinjiang, were “investigated” by a group of international media, that 1 million Uighurs would have been tortured, beaten in labor camps, forced labor, and so forth. Naturally, our 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 million. 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 journalist Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal already wrote articles in 2019, after he 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 believes 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 because of a collapse of the demographic curve of the Uighurs, and Lyle Goldstein, who is professor at the Naval War College in the United States, says that such a statement is “ridiculous to the point of being inciting 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 are 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 was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky, who is heading this institution whose 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 led from there the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.” After he 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, which 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.

If Germany or other European nations fall for this intelligence operation, which is exactly what the Henry Jackson Society talked about, namely the “Five Eyes” at work, if they follow this, it would be complete economic suicide. Now, even Henry Kissinger, at the age of 99 years, is more reasonable, and at Davos, he said the world has at maximum a window of two months to end the Ukraine war through negotiations, and he appealed to Ukraine that they should agree to a territorial compromise to get peace.

At the Schiller conference on April 9, we presented a completely different approach: There is an alternative to the complete decoupling between the so-called “democracies” and the Global South on the other side. The new system is already emerging rapidly. There are many countries which at the recent foreign ministers’ meeting of the BRICS, want to be part of: Argentina, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and many others. You have the BRICS enlarged, you have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, almost all organizations of the Global South that want to be part of a new international security and development architecture, which basically is the combination of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, together with two other proposals by President Xi Jinping: The Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, which is actively being implemented.

Now, what we need is such a conference, for a new international security and development architecture, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia. Now, the Peace of Westphalia was the recognition of all war parties that if they would continue the war, no one would be left to enjoy the victory, because they would all be dead. And that is why they developed the principle that any peace must be based on the interest of the other. The security interest of every country on the planet, which today would mean a security architecture emphatically involving Russia and China. And such a conference, must address the causes for such a war danger: Because it is not enough at this point to be against the war. You have to solve the problem that the collapse of the neoliberal financial system is in progress.

Lyndon LaRouche has a unique record that he foresaw what is happening today, the present crisis, already in August 1971, when Nixon ended the old Bretton Woods system, by replacing the fixed-exchange-rate system, with a floating exchange-rate system, and LaRouche predicted at that time, that if you would continue on that road, it would lead to a new depression, the danger of a new war, and fascism. And that is exactly where we are today.

LaRouche proposed Four Laws to solve the crisis. The first step, a global Glass-Steagall banking separation system, must end the casino economy. There must be capital and exchange controls to prevent the speculative manipulation of currencies, which we see right now in much of the world.

Every country must have a National Bank to make credit generation again the question of the sovereign government, and not that of private bankers, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. Then, these National Banks must be connected through a credit system which provides long-term, low-interest credit for real investment in the physical economy.

Also, the Fourth Law is that we must have a crash program for fusion technology, which in the recent period has made tremendous progress, and the commercial use of it is visibly on the horizon. Because we need a massive increase in the productivity of the world economy because just the fact that 1.7 billion people are threatened with starvation, that 2 billion have no clean water, is the proof that the present level of productivity has fallen way below the level of maintaining the present world population of 8 billion people.

And there must be international cooperation, not only for fusion technology, but also for space technology and space travel, because that is the vanguard of scientific and technological realm today.

So we are right now confronted with a situation where the leading governments and institutions are challenged: Are we able to solve the problems of the world, are we able to address the problems which threaten the very existence of mankind, or not? Now, the Schiller Institute has proposed for more than 30 years, first, the Eurasian Land-Bridge; the New Silk Road, and in 2013, we proposed the “New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” Please show the slide: Now, this is a blueprint how we can overcome world poverty, how we can eradicate underdevelopment forever, and how can we create a new, modern world health system for every country in the world, which is the only way how we can overcome old and new diseases, this pandemic and threatening new pandemics.

This is absolutely possible, and this is the vision of how the world will look in a few years, anyway, if we avoid the present danger of nuclear war. The development of infrastructure connecting all continents is the natural way how infrastructure development will continue, provided there is peace. So I think that is something we need to put on the agenda for discussion, and the reason why, despite the incredible danger, one can be optimistic, is because we are the human species, we are capable of reason, and we are not barbarians.

Thank you.

Rasmussen: OK, we have 10 minutes now questions to Helga. … We have a question from Elena. While we’re waiting for Elena, we have a question from Jens Jørgen Nielsen, one of our speakers.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Thank you for a very good presentation. I essentially agree with you. I have one question. As you may know, I live in Denmark, where we will have a referendum in a week’s time, about the European Union: We are discussing in our country for the time being, the role of the European Union and whether it should have an army, how should we have security. I would like a few words: How do you think about the European Union in this context? Because I am somehow skeptical, but I would like to hear your opinion on the European Union and the development right now of the European Union in this context? And also specifically the question of the European military arm, which is the subject of referendum? And the policy toward Ukraine and Russia?

Zepp-LaRouche: When there was a referendum about the EU Constitution in France and Holland 2005, which was defeated, because the majority voted against it. And then they shifted it to the Lisbon Treaty, because by not calling it a “constitution” but by calling it a “treaty,” it did not require a vote. So this was decided in great secrecy, but we were extremely closely watching it at the time. And if you look at the Charter of the EU as it was agreed upon in Lisbon in December 2007, it is practically interwoven with NATO, in such a degree that the Article 5 of NATO practically also involves the EU. In other words, when you join the EU, you are practically also part of whatever NATO does. And the character of NATO has also dramatically changed, in the last 30 years, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the time of the Soviet Union, it was a defensive apparatus against the Warsaw Pact. But in the recent period, it has turned into a completely anti-Russian Russophobe alliance, and therefore, when, in November 2013, when the Ukraine government under Viktor Yanukovych refused to join the EU Association Agreement, it was clear that if Ukraine would join the EU, it would give NATO access to the Black Sea, and that is why he opted out in the last moment.

So, I think that that is an important thing to keep in mind. And the fact that Ursula von der Leyen is at the forefront of all of the policies which I described as British, in my various examples, such as the fight of so-called democracies and so-called autocratic regimes, when she is talking about that every day: She went to India talking like that.

I think the present EU has completely lost touch with the interest of its member-states. I think they have become a gigantic waterhead of a bureaucracy in Brussels which makes for the most part completely ridiculous decisions and orders and rules which are absolutely contrary to the interest of the member countries. And I actually have called for Germany to move out of the EU, because we don’t need a bureaucracy to have a unified Europe! We could have a Europe of the Fatherlands, in the spirit of Charles de Gaulle! We could work together for a join mission to contribute to shaping a new world order in a positive way: We could do that by having national sovereign governments just working together. You don’t need this bureaucracy. That is my view, and I would just advise anybody who has an interest in their own sovereignty to not join this colossus.

Rasmussen: Elena, why don’t you ask your question now?

Elena: Thank you so much. I find everything that Madam Helga said very, very interesting. And of course, at the moment, as I am very interested in the situation between Ukraine and Russia, my optimistic feeling is that Russia is going to come to a solution with Ukraine. Because as I have heard today, Putin has been somehow winning in the territories. So most likely something good will happen.

However, I think what Madam said is so beautiful, I would like to have something to read if possible. Because my connection was not very good, and I was not able to hear well. However, I would be very grateful if Madam could let me have what she said in a written form, that I can read and study. And I can write an article about what she has said, what are the goals of this new architecture and let other people to know about it.

Rasmussen: Elena we will have a transcript of Helga’s comments, and we can send those to you and all the participants. And also the video of this conference will be available to send around.

We have one more questioner, Kwame. We can take a short question.

Kwame: I’m a Swede. Thank you for a nice presentation. My question, because I don’t know: Would you say that China is united and in full control of the Chinese Communist Party? Or, are there some Chinese oligarchs that have good connections with their American counterparts? As for they send some money into the [inaud 51:09] laboratory, maybe to somehow get them connected to the globalists in the Western hemisphere. So, my question is, does the Chinese Communist Party have full control of the country?

Zepp-LaRouche: I would say, absolutely yes. And I just should say something, because right now, when you say “Communist,” some people fall completely into a coma and have hysterical outbursts. I mean, the Communist Party of China is, in my view—and I don’t even think that they would agree with that—but I think they’re 90% Confucian, in the tradition of the ancient Chinese traditions and philosophy, which influenced Chinese policy for more than two millennia. And naturally, there is an element of Marxism and communism, but it’s a meritocracy.

The way people look at the CPC in the West is completely uninformed, and I can only—my best way of answering is that I was in China for the first time, in 1971, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and I could travel around in Shanghai, Tientsin, Qingdao, Beijing, I could visit the countryside: And I saw a country which was really distraught! People were poor, the conditions were very terrible. The beautiful garden of the Summer Palace had been painted all red by the Revolutionary Guards. In any case, this was 51 years ago, and when you go to China now, it is so developed! They have 40,000 km of fast train system, of which nobody in the United States or Europe can even dream, because we have nothing like that! China has made an incredible development: 850 million people have been lifted out of poverty. And I could say many, many more things.

Deng Xiaoping coined the term “judging truth from facts.” And if you look at the facts of the gigantic development of China in the last 40 years, in particular, then this Communist Party has done something right. And if you travel to China, and study Chinese history, and meet people in all ranks of life, professors, students, people living in the countryside, other professions, you go to restaurants, and you see how people live, you find a population which is primarily content. They’re optimistic: They’re not like the Europeans and they’re for sure not like the Germans, who are completely pessimistic, and think nothing can function and you can’t do anything anyway. No. That is not the view in China. They are optimistic; they have, to a very large extent, trust in the government. And I think that the Chinese model, which the West is now regarding as a big competitor and threat, the Chinese model is doing something right, which the West is not doing right! And rather than opposing it, we should go to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and say: We should respect each other, even if the other one has a different social system, and even if the other one has a different way of doing things, according to their history, and their tradition. And I think then, we can absolutely peacefully live together. And that is my stated view, and I think all the slanders about China are really absolutely unfounded, and in particular, this present campaign by this very dubious Adrian Zenz, we should squash before it really takes hold.

Rasmussen: All right, thank you very much Helga! We really appreciate your very in-depth discussion.

Den 28. marts (EIRNS) – I 2019 offentliggjorde RAND Corporation en 354 sider lang rapport med titlen “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground”. Det er et manuskript til en politik for geopolitisk konfrontation mod Rusland, der har til formål at svække og underminere Rusland som stat.

EIR rapporterede dengang, at resuméet af rapporten fra RAND afslørede det hele: “Som USA’s nationale forsvarsstrategi har anerkendt, er USA i øjeblikket låst fast i en stormagts konkurrencesituation med Rusland. Denne rapport har til formål at definere områder, hvor USA kan konkurrere til sin egen fordel. Den undersøger Ruslands sårbarheder og bekymringer; den analyserer potentielle politiske muligheder for at udnytte dem; og vurderer de dermed forbundne fordele, omkostninger og risici, samt sandsynligheden for en vellykket gennemførelse.” (https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf)

Mange af de skridt i retning af konfrontation, som foreslås i rapporten, er siden blevet gennemført af USA, som Rick Sterling, en undersøgende journalist fra San Francisco-området, viser i en artikel i Dissident Voice. “I stedet for at ‘forsøge at holde sig på forkant’ eller forsøge at forbedre USA indenrigspolitisk eller med hensyn til de internationale relationer, er der lagt vægt på bestræbelser og handlinger, for at underminere den udpegede modstander Rusland”, skriver Sterling. Rapporten, fortsætter han, “konstaterer, at Rusland har ‘dybtliggende’ bekymringer for vestlig indblanding og potentielle militære angreb. Disse bekymringer anses for at være en sårbarhed, der kan udnyttes. Der nævnes ikke noget om årsagen til de russiske bekymringer: De er blevet invaderet flere gange og havde 27 millioner døde under Anden Verdenskrig.”

Sterling bemærker, at blandt de provokationer, der foreslås i rapporten, er følgende:

• “- Repositionering af bombefly inden for umiddelbar angrebsafstand af vigtige russiske strategiske mål”
• “- Udstationering af yderligere taktiske atomvåben til lokationer i Europa og Asien”
• “- Forøgelse af USA’s og allierede flådestyrkers stilling og tilstedeværelse i Ruslands operative områder (Sortehavet)”
• “- Afholdelse af NATO-krigsøvelser ved Ruslands grænser”
• “- Ophævelse af INF-traktaten (Intermediate Nuclear Forces).”

“Disse og mange andre provokationer, som Rand foreslår, er faktisk blevet gennemført,” skriver Sterling. “For eksempel gennemførte NATO massive kampøvelser med titlen ‘Defender 2021’ lige op ad Ruslands grænse. NATO er begyndt at ‘patruljere’ i Sortehavet og foretage provokerende indtrængen i Krim-farvande. USA har trukket sig ud af INF-traktaten.”

Hvad RAND-rapporten gør, forklarer han senere, er at vurdere omkostninger og fordele ved forskellige amerikanske handlinger. “Det betragtes som en ‘fordel’, hvis øget amerikansk bistand til Ukraine resulterer i tab af russisk blod og ressourcer. I forbindelse med spekulationer om muligheden for russisk troppetilstedeværelse i Ukraine antyder rapporten, at det kunne blive ‘ganske kontroversielt i hjemlandet, ligesom det var tilfældet, da Sovjet invaderede Afghanistan’.”

Fred, på den anden side, påpeger Sterling, betragtes som “ufordelagtigt”. “En fredsaftale, der garanterede grundlæggende rettigheder for alle ukrainere og statslig neutralitet i rivaliseringen mellem stormagter, ville være fordelagtigt for de fleste ukrainere,” skriver han. “Det er kun det amerikanske udenrigspolitiske establishment, herunder det amerikanske militær- medie- industrielle kompleks, og ukrainske ultranationalister, der ville være ” ugunstigt stillet”.”
(https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/03/rand-report-prescribed-us-provocations-against-russia-and-predicted-russia-might-retaliate-in-ukraine/)

Skriv gerne under og del:
Link: Underskriftindsamling: Indkaldelse til en international konference for at etablere
en ny arkitektur for sikkerhed og udvikling for alle nationer

Skriv gerne under og del:
Link: Underskriftindsamling: Indkaldelse til en international konference for at etablere
en ny arkitektur for sikkerhed og udvikling for alle nationer

Jan Øberg, ph.d., er freds- og fremtidsforsker og kunstfotograf,
Direktør, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, Sverige, https://transnational.live

Jan Øberg kan kontaktes her: oberg@transnational.org

Interviewet er på engelsk p.g.a. international deling.

Lydfil: 

Afskrift: 1. del om Ukraine-Rusland-U.S.-NATO krisen:

Michelle Rasmussen: Hello. Today is February 21st, 2022. I am Michele Rasmussen, the vice president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark. And I’m very happy that peace researcher Jan Oberg agreed to this interview. Jan Oberg was born in Denmark and lives in Sweden. He has a PhD in sociology and has been a visiting professor in peace and conflict studies in Japan, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, part time over the years. Jan Oberg has written thousands of pages of published articles and several books. He is the co-founder and director of the Independent TFF, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Lund, Sweden since 1985, and has been nominated over several years for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Our interview today will have three parts. The danger of war between Russia and Ukraine, which could lead to war between the United States and NATO and Russia, and how to stop it.

Secondly, your criticism of Denmark starting negotiations with the United States on a bilateral security agreement, which could mean permanent stationing of U.S. soldiers and armaments on Danish soil.

And thirdly, your criticism of a major report which alleged that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang province.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some in the West said would start last Wednesday has not occurred. But as we speak, tensions are still very high. You wrote an article, Jan Oberg, on January 19th, called Ukraine The West has paved the road to war with lies, specifying three lies concerning the Ukraine crisis. Let’s take them one by one.

You defined lie number one: “The Western leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, not to expand NATO eastwards. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet or Russian security interests around its borders, and, therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO, if they decide to freely.” Can you please explain more to our viewers about this lie?

Jan Oberg: Yes, and thank you very much for your very kind and long and detailed introduction of me. I would just say about that point that I’m amazed that this is now a kind of repeated truth in Western media, that Gorbachev was not given such promises. And it rests with a few words taken out of a longer article written years ago by a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who says that Gorbachev did not say so. That article was published by Brookings Institution. Now the truth is, and there’s a difference between truth and non truths, and we have to make that more and more clear when we deal with the West at the moment. The truth is, if you go to the National Security Archives in the U.S., if I remember correctly, the George Washington University that is well documented, their own formulation is that there are cascades of documentation. However, this was not written down in a treaty, or signed by the Western leaders, who one after the other came to Gorbachev’s dacha outside Moscow or visited him in Kremlin, and therefore some people would say it’s not valid. Now that is not true in politics. If we can’t rely on what was said and what was written down by people personally in their notebooks, etc.

George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, James Baker, you can almost mention any important Western leader were unanimous in saying to Gorbachev, we understand that the Warsaw Pact has gone, the Soviet Union has gone, and therefore, we are not going to take advantage of your weakness. James Baker’s formulation, according to all these sources, is we’re not going to expand nature one inch. And that was said in 89, 90. That is 30 years ago. And Gorbachev, because of those assurances also accepted, which he’s been blamed very much for since then, the reunification of Germany. Some sources say that was a kind of deal made that if Germany should be united, which it was very quickly after, it should be a neutral country. But the interpretation in the West was it could remain a member of NATO, but would then include what was at that time the German Democratic Republic, GDR [East Germany] into one Germany. You can go to Gorbachev’s Foundation home page and you will find several interviews, videos, whatever, in which he says these things, and you can go to the Danish leading expert in this, Jens Jørgen Nielsen, who has also written that he personally interviewed Gorbachev, in which Gorbachev, with sadness in his eyes, said that he was cheated, or that these promises were broken, whatever the formulation is.

And I fail to understand why this being one of the most important reasons behind the present crisis, namely Russia’s putting down its foot, saying “You can’t continue this expansion up to the border, with your troops and your long-range missiles, up to the border of Russia. And we will not accept Ukraine [as a member of NATO]. You have gotten ten former Warsaw Pact countries which are now members of NATO, NATO has 30 members. We are here with a military budget, which is eight percent of NATO’s, and you keep up with this expansion. We are not accepting that expansion to include Ukraine.

Now, this is so fundamental that, of course, it has to be denied by those who are hardliners, or hawks, or cannot live without enemies, or want a new Cold War, which we already have, in my view, and have had for some years. But that’s a long story. The way the West, and the U.S. in particular — but NATO’s secretary general’s behavior is outrageous to me, because it’s built on omission of one of the most important historical facts of modern Europe.

Michelle Rasmussen: Yes. In your article, you actually quote from the head of NATO, the general secretary of NATO, back in 1990, one year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Manfred Wörner, where you say that in these documents released by the U.S. National Security Archive, that you just referred to, “Manfred Wörner gave a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990, in which he argued ‘The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system.’ And the next year, in the middle of 1991, according to a memorandum from the Russian delegation who met with Wörner. He responded to the Russians by saying that he personally and the NATO council, were both against expansion “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view,” and “Wörner said that he would speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries leaders, as he had already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And he emphasized that we should not allow the isolation of USSR from the European community,” and this was even while the U.S.S.R. was still alive. So it must have been even more the case after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, and Russia emerged.

Jan Oberg: Well, if I may put in a little point here, you see, with that quotation of a former NATO secretary general, compare that with the present secretary general of NATO. Wörner was a man of intellect. The leaders around him at the time in Europe were too. I mean, those were the days when you had people like Willy Brandt in Germany and östpolitik [East policy], and you had Olof Palme in Sweden with common security thinking. We cannot in the West be sure, feel safe and secure in the West, if it’s against Russia. Which does not mean at all to give into everything Russia does, but just says we cannot be safe if the others don’t feel safe from us. And that was an intellectualism. That was an empathy, not a necessarily a sympathy, but it was an empathy for those over there, that we have to take into account, when we act. Today that intellectualism is gone completely.

And it is very interesting, as you point out, that 13 out of 16 NATO countries, at that time, were at that level, but in came in 1990 Bill Clinton. And he basically said, well, he didn’t state it. He acted as though he had stated it, I don’t care about those promises, and then he started expanding NATO. And the first office of NATO was set up in Kiev in 1994. That was the year when he did that. And that was a year when I sat in Tbilisi, Georgia, and interviewed the U.S. representative there, who, through a two-hour long conversation, basically talked about Georgia as “our country.”

So, you know, it’s sad to say it’s human to make mistakes, but to be so anti-intellectual, so anti-empathetic, so imbued with your own thinking and worldview, you’re not able to take the other side into account, is much more dangerous than it was at that time, because the leaders we have in the western world today are not up to it. They were earlier, but these are not.

Michelle Rasmussen: Lie number two that you pointed out, “The Ukraine conflict started by Putin’s out-of-the-blue aggression on Ukraine and then annexation of Crimea.” What’s the rest of the story here?

Jan Oberg: Well, it’s not the rest, it’s the beginning of the story. You see, people who write about these things, and it’s particularly those who are Western media and Western politicians and foreign ministers, et cetera, they say that it all started with this out-of-the-blue invasion in the Donbass, and then the taking, annexing or aggression on, or whatever the word is, Crimea. Well, they all forget, very conveniently, and very deliberately — I mean, this is not a longer time ago than people who write about it today would know — that there was a clearly western assisted, if not orchestrated, coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. After, I won’t go into that long story, after some negotiations about an economic agreement between Ukraine and the EU, in which the president then jumped off, allegedly under pressure from Putin, or whatever, but there were a series of violent events in Kiev.

And it’s well known from one of those who were there, and participated, namely the assistant secretary of State for European Affairs, Mrs. Nuland, and she’s given a speech in the U.S. where, if I remember correctly, she says that the US has pumped $5 billion into Ukraine over the years, to support democracy and human rights, et cetera, and training courses for young NGOs, et cetera. And it’s obvious that that operation, that ousting of the president, he had to flee to Russia, and the taking over, partly by neo-Nazis and fascists who were present and who probably did the beginning of the shooting and the killing of people, that all this had to do with the promise that was given to Ukraine years before that it would be integrated into the Euro-Atlantic framework. And then it was kind of stopping and saying, we don’t want that anyhow. We will negotiate something else, and we will look into what Putin has to offer, etc.

But that that, in Putin’s mind, in Russia’s mind, meant that NATO would be the future of Ukraine. And Russia had, still has, a huge military base in Crimea, which it had a lease on for, at the time, I think it was 30 plus years, meaning should Ukraine, which was clearly signalled by the western NATO member’s leadership, enter and become a full member of Ukraine, then he would look at a Russian base, either being lost or you would have a Russian military naval base in a NATO country.

Now I’m not saying that that was a smart move. I’m not saying it was a legal move, but it’s very difficult for the western world to blame Russia for annexing Crimea. If you look at the opinion polls and the votes for that, if you will, voting ourselves back to Russia — you know, the whole thing was Russia until 1954, when Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine, and he was from Ukraine himself. And so this happened three weeks before. And I’m amazed that it should not again be intellectually possible for people who witnessed this — The other thing we talked about with 30 years ago. There might be some young fools who would not read history books.

But what I’m talking about was something that happened in 2014, and there’s no excuse for not mentioning that there’s a connection between that coup d’état, and the influence of the West in Ukraine in a very substantial way, and what happened in Donbas and Crimea.

So I’m just saying, if I put it on a more general level, if we look at today’s ability to understand, describe, analyze issues as conflicts, we are heading for zero understanding. There is nobody in the press, and nobody in politics who are able, intellectually, to see these things as conflicts, that is, as a problem standing between two or more parties that has to be analyzed. And conflict resolution is about finding solutions that the parties we have defined as parties, and there certainly are many more than two in this very complex conflict, can live with in the future. What we are down to in banalization is that there is no conflict. There’s only one party, Russia, that does everything bad and evil and terrible, while we are sitting in the receiving end, being the good guys who’ve done nothing wrong in history. Who could never rethink what we did or say, we’re sorry, or change our policies, because we are right. There’s only one problem. That’s them. We’re down now to the level in which these things, also the last three months, the accusations about Russia invading Ukraine, has nothing to do with conflict analysis. It is purely focusing on one party, and one party, by definition, is not a conflict.

We are not party to a relationship anymore, and that makes a huge difference, again, from the leaders and the way of thinking and the intellectual approach that existed 20-30 years ago. And one reason for all of this is, of course, that the West is on his way down. Secondly, and they feel threatened by anything that happens around the world. And secondly, when you have been number one in a system for a long time, you become lazy. You don’t study. You don’t have as good education as you should have. You bring up people to high levels who have not read books, because we can get away with everything. We are so strong militarily. And when that happens, you know, it’s a slippery slope and you are actually on board the Titanic.

This is not a defense of everything Russia does. What I’m trying to say is there is a partner over there, by the way they call us partners in the West. We call them anything else but partners. We don’t even see them. We don’t listen to their interests. We didn’t listen to Putin when he spoke at the Munich conference in 2007 and said, ‘You have cheated us.’ And of course, when Gorbachev, 90 years old, says, you have cheated us, he’s not even quoted in the Western world, because there’s no space anymore for other views than our own. You know, this autism that is now classical in the Western security policy elite is damn dangerous.

Michelle Rasmussen: I want to just ask you shortly about the third lie, and then we’ll get into what you see as the solution. The third lie you, you pointed out, was that “NATO always has an open door to new members. It never tries to invite or drag them in does not seek expansion. It just happens because Eastern European countries since 1989 to 1990 have wanted to join without any pressure from NATO’s side, and this also applies to Ukraine.” And in this section, you also document that Putin actually asked for Russia to join NATO. Can you shortly, please explain your most important point about this third lie?

Jan Oberg: Yeah, well, it’s already there since you quoted my text, but the fascinating thing is that you have not had a referendum in any of these new member states. The fascinating thing is, in 2014, when this whole NATO membership came to its first conflictual situation in the case of Ukraine, there was not a majority, according to any opinion poll in Ukraine. There was not a majority. And I would say it’s not a matter of 51%. If a country is going to join NATO, it should be at least 75 or 80% of the people saying yes to that. Third, and it’s not something I’ve invented, it is NATO’s former secretary general Robertson, who has told the story. I think it was first released in the Guardian, but it’s also in a long podcast from a place I don’t remember, which the Guardian quotes. He says that he was asked by Putin whether, or at what time, or whatever the formulation was, NATO would accept Russia as a member.

This probably goes back to what you had already quoted Wörner, the NATO secretary general for having said, namely that a new security structure in Europe would, by necessity, have some kind of involvement, in a direct sense, of Russia, because Russia is also Europe.

And that was what Gorbachev had as an idea that the new [common] European home, something like a security structure where we could deal with our conflicts or differences or misunderstandings, and we could still be friends in the larger Europe.

And that was why I argued at the time thirty years ago that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the only reasonable thing was to close down NATO. And instead, as I said with Clinton and onwards, the whole interpretation was we have won. The Western system, the neoliberal democratic NATO system has won. We have nothing to learn from that. There’s nothing to change now. We just expand even more.

And the first thing NATO did, as you know, was a completely illegal. Also, according to its own charter, the invasion, involvement and bombing in Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia was not a member. Had never been a member of NATO, and NATO’s only mission is paragraph five, which says that we are one for all and all for one. We are going to support some member, if the member is attacked. Now, it had nothing to do in Yugoslavia. That happened in 1991 and onwards, all the nineties. And you remember the bombings and 72 two days of bombings in Kosovo and Serbia. And it’s nothing to do — and there was no UN mandate for it. But it was a triumphalist interpretation. We can now get away with everything, anything we want. We can do it because there’s no Russia to take into account. Russia could not do anything about it. China could not do anything about it at the time.

And so, you get into hubris and an inability to see your own limitations, and that is what we are coming up to now. We are seeing the boomerang coming back to NATO, the western world for these things. And then, of course, some idiots will sit somewhere and say, Jan Oberg is pro-Russia. No, I’m trying to stick to what I happen to remember happened at the time. I’m old enough to remember what was said to Gorbachev in those days when the Wall came down and all these things changed fundamentally.

I was not optimistic that NATO would adapt to that situation, but there was hope at that time. There’s no hope today for this, because if you could change, you would have changed long ago. So the prediction I make is the United States empire, NATO, will fall apart at some point. The question is how, how dangerous, and how violent that process will be, because it’s not able to conduct reforms or change itself fundamentally into something else, such as a common security organization for Europe.

Michelle Rasmussen: Well, I actually wanted to ask you now about the solutions, because you’ve been a peace researcher for many decades. What what would it take to peacefully resolve the immediate crisis? And secondly, how can we create the basis for peaceful world in the future? You mentioned the idea that you had 30 years ago for dismembering NATO and the founder and international chairman of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has now called for establishing a new security architecture, which would take the interests of all countries, including Russia, into account. So how could we solve the immediate crisis? If there were the political will, what would have to change among the parties? And secondly, what needs to be done in terms of long term peaceful cooperation?

Jan Oberg: Well, first of all, the question you are raising is a little bit like the seventh doctor who is trying to operate on a patient who is bleeding to death and then saying, “What should we do now?” What I have suggested over 30 years is something that should have been done to avoid the situation today, and nobody listened, as is clear, because you don’t listen to researchers anymore who say something else that state-financed researchers do. So it’s not an easy question you are raising, of course. I would say, of course, in the immediate situation, the Minsk agreements, which have not been upheld, particularly by Ukraine in establishing some kind of autonomy for the Donbass area. Now that is something we could work with, autonomous solutions. We could work with confederations, we could work with cantonization, if you will. Lots of what happened, and happens, in the eastern republics of Ukraine. It reminds me of a country I know very well, and partly educated in and worked in during the dissolution, namely Yugoslavia. So much so that it resembles Granica. Ukraine and Granica in Croatia, both mean border areas. Granica means border, and there’s so much that could have been a transfered of knowledge and wisdom and lessons learned, had we had a United Nations mission in that part. A peacekeeping mission, a monitoring mission. UN police and U.N. civil affairs in the Donbas region.

If I remember correctly, Putin is the only one who suggested that at some point. I don’t think he presented it as a big proposal to the world, but in an interview he said that was something he could think of. I wrote in 2014, why on earth has nobody even suggested that the United Nations, the world’s most competent organization in handling conflicts, and, if you will, put a lid on the military affairs, for instance, by disarming the parties on all sides, which they did in eastern and western Slovonia, in Croatia. Why has that not been suggested? Because the western world has driven the United Nations out to the periphery of international politics..

I’ve said Minsk. I’ve said the UN. I’ve said some kind of internal reforms in Ukraine. I have said, and I would insist on it, NATO must stop its expansion. NATO cannot take the risk, on behalf of Europe, and the world, to say we insist on continuing with giving weapons to, and finally making Ukraine a NATO member. You can ask Kissinger, you can ask Brzezinski, you can take the most, if you will, right wing hawkish politicians in the West. They’ve all said neutrality like Finland or Switzerland, or something like that, is the only viable option.

And is that to be pro-Russian? No, that needs to be pro-Western. Because I am just looking like so many others, fortunately, have done at the Cuban Missile Crisis. What would the United States — how would it have reacted, if Russia had a huge military alliance and tried to get Canada or Mexico to become members with long-range weapons standing a few kilometers from the U.S. border?

Do you think the US would have said, “Oh, they were all freely deciding to, so we think it’s OK.” Look at what they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They could not accept weapon stations in Cuba.

So, one of the things you have to ask yourself about is there one rule and one set of interests for the Western world that does not apply to other actors? If you want to avoid Russia invading Ukraine, which all this nonsense is about repeatedly now for two or three months. Look into a new status where the East and the West and Ukraine, all of it, can sit down and discuss security guarantees for Ukraine.

President Zelensky has said it quite nicely, I must say. If you don’t want us to become members of NATO, and he says that to the West, because he feels that it has taken a long time for the West to act, and he last said that at the Munich Security Conference, I think yesterday or two days ago, by the way, interestingly a man whose country is going to be invaded any moment, leaves the country and goes to a conference to speak which he could have done on Zoom.

I mean, the whole thing doesn’t make sense, like it didn’t make sense, was it on the 18th or 17th when all the West said that they’re going to invade Ukraine, and the Russian defense minister was sitting in Damascus and Putin was receiving Bolsonaro. I mean, don’t they have intelligence anymore in NATO and Washington?

So long story short, sit down and give Ukraine the guarantees and non-aggression pact with both sides or all sides, clearly limited non-nuclear defensive defense measures along the borders, or whatever, integration in whatever eastern and Western economic organizations.

And I would be happy to see them as part of the Belt and Road Initiative with economic opportunities. There is so much Ukraine could do if it could get out of the role of being a victim, and squeezed between the two sides all the time. And that can only be done if you elevate the issue to a higher level, in which Ukraine’s different peoples and different parts and parties are allowed to speak up about what future they want to have in their very specific situation that Ukraine is in. It is not any country in in Europe. It’s a poor country. It’s a country that has a specific history. It’s a country which is very complex, complex ethnically, language wise, historically, etc.

And that’s why I started out saying confederation. I said something like a Switzerland model, something like Cantonization, or whatever, but for Christ’s sake, give that country and its people a security, a good feeling that nobody’s going to encroach upon you..

And that is to me, the the schwerpunkt [main emphasis], the absolutely essential, that is to give the Ukraine people a feeling of security and safety and stability and peace so that they can develop. I find it very interesting that President Zelensky, in this very long interview to the international press a couple of weeks ago, say I’m paraphrasing it. But he says “I’m tired of all these people who say that we are going to be invaded because it destroys our economy. People are leaving. No business is coming in, right?”

Who are we to do this damage to Ukraine and then want it to become a member of NATO? You know, the whole thing is recklessly irresponsible, in my view, particularly with a view of Ukraine and its peoples and their needs.

So I would put that in focus, and then put in a huge UN peacekeeping mission and continue and expand the excellent OSCE mission. Put the international communit, good hearted, neutral people down there and diffuse those who have only one eyesight, only one view of all this. They are the dangerous people.

Michelle Rasmussen: And what about the more long-term idea of a new security architecture in general?

Jan Oberg: Oh, I would build a kind of, I wouldn’t say copy of, but I would I would build something inspired by the United Nations Security Council. All Europe, representatives for all countries, including NGOs, and not just government representatives. I would have an early warning mechanism where the moment there is something like a conflict coming up, we would have reporters and we would have investigations we would look into, not conflict prevention.

My goodness, people don’t read books. There’s nothing about conflict prevention. We should prevent violence. We should prevent violent conflict, but preventing conflicts is nonsense, life is getting richer. There’s not a family, there’s not a school, there’s not a workplace, there’s not a political party, there’s not a parliament in which there are no conflicts. Conflict is what life is made of. Conflict is terribly important because it makes us change and reflect. I’m all for conflicts, and I’m one hundred and ten percent against violence. But people will say “Conflict prevention is something we should work, on and educate people in.” Nonsense from people who never read books, as I said.

So I would look for something like common security. The good old Palme Commission from the eighties, which built on defensive defense. The idea that we all have a right, according to Article 51, in the UN Charter. Everybody has a right to self-defense.

But we do not have a right to missiles that can go 4,000 km or 8,000 kilometres and kill millions of people far away. Get rid of nuclear weapons and all these things. It has nothing to do with defensiveness and common security, and I say that wherever I go and whoever I speak to. Get rid of nuclear weapons and offensive long range weapons.

The only legitimate weapons there are in this world are defensive ones, and they are defined by two things. Short distance, ability to go only over a short distance, such as helicopters instead of fighter airplanes or missiles.

And second, limited destructive capacity because they’re going to be used on your own territory in case somebody encroaches or invades you. But nobody wants to have nuclear weapons or totally super destructive weapons on their own territory because they don’t want them to be used to there. So just ask yourself, what would you like in Country X, Y and Z to be defended with? And that’s a definition of a defensive weapons. If we all had only defensive military structures, there would be very few wars, but they would also not be a military-industrial-media-academic complex that earns the money on this.

The whole thing here that the big elephant in the room we are talking about is, well, there are two of them, is NATO expansion, which we should never have done this way. And secondly, it’s the interest of the military-industrial-media-academic complex, as I call it, that earns a hell of a lot of money on people’s suffering, and millions of people who, at this moment while we speak, are living in fear and despair because of what they see in the media is going to happen. None of what we see at this moment was necessary. It’s all made up by elites who have an interest in these kinds of things happening or the threat of the Cold War. And even if we avoid a big war now, and I hope, I don’t pray to anything, but I hope very much that we do, thanks to some people’s wisdom, and it’s going to be very cold in Europe in the future after this.

Look at the demonization that the West has done again against Russia, and to a certain extent, of Ukraine. This is not psychologically something that will be repaired in two weeks.

Michelle Rasmussen: Yeah, and also, as you mentioned at the beginning, it has also something to do with the unwillingness in part of certain of the Western elites to accept that we do not have an Anglo-American unipolar world, but that there are other countries that need to be listened to and respected.

Jan Oberg: Yeah, and you might add, what the West gets out of this is that Russia and China will get closer and closer. You are already seeing the common declaration. We will have friendship eternally. And that’s between two countries who up to the sixties at some point were very strong enemies. And the same will go with Iran, and there would be other countries like Serbia which are turning away from the West. We’re going to sit and be isolating ourselves because, one, we cannot bully the world anymore, as we could before in the West. And secondly, nobody wants to be bullied anymore. We have to live in a world in which there are different systems. This Christian missionary idea that everybody must become like us. We opened up to China because then we hope they would become liberal democracies with many parties, and the parliament is awfully naïve. And time is over for that kind of thinking.

Michelle Rasmussen: I want to go into the other two subjects. Firstly, the question of the negotiations between Denmark and the United States in the context of the political, military and media statements of recent years alleging that Russia has aggressive intentions against Europe and the U.S. the Danish Social Democratic government announced on February 10th that a year ago, the U.S. requested negotiations on a Defense Cooperation Agreement, and that Denmark was now ready to start these negotiations. The government announced that it could mean permanent stationing of U.S. troops and armaments on Danish soil. And if so, this would be against the decades-long policy of the Danish government not to allow foreign troops or armaments permanently stationed in Denmark. And you wrote an article two days later criticizing these negotiations. Why are you against this?

Jan Oberg: I’m against it because it’s a break of 70 years of sensible policies. We do not accept foreign weapons and we do not accept foreign troops, and we do not accept nuclear weapons stationed on Danish soil. I sat, for ten years, all throughout the 1980s, in the Danish Governments Commission for Security and Disarmament as an expert. Nobody in the 80s would have mentioned anything like this. I guess the whole thing is something that had begun to go mad around 20 years ago, when Denmark engaged and became a bomber nation for the first time in Yugoslavia. And then Afghanistan and Iraq, and it means that you cannot say no. This is an offer you can’t refuse. You can’t refuse it, among other things, it’s my interpretation, because you remember the story where President Trump suggested that he or the U.S. could buy Greenland, and the prime minister Mette Frederiksen said, ‘Well, that is not something to be discussed. The question is absurd,’ after which he got very angry. He got personally very angry, and he said, ‘It’s not a matter of speaking to me. You’re speaking to the United States of America.’ And I think this offer to begin negotiations must have come relatively shortly after that, as ‘This offer is not something you should call absurd once again.’ I’ve no evidence for that. But if these negotiations started more than a year ago, we are back in the Trump administration.

And secondly, what kind of democracy is that? We do not know what that letter in which the Americans asked to have negotiations about this, when it was written and what the content of it was. But what we hear is that a little more than a year ago, we began some negotiations about this whole thing, that is behind the back of the parliament, and behind the back of the people, and then is presented more or less as a fait accompli. There will be an agreement. The question is only nitty-gritty, what will be in it.

In terms of substance, there is no doubt that any place where there would be American facilities based in sites, so whenever you’d call it, weapon stored will be the first targets in a war, seen as such in a war, under the best circumstances, seen by Russia. Russia’s first targets will be to eliminate the Americans everywhere they can in Europe, because those are the strongest and most dangerous forces.

Secondly, it is not true that there is a no to nuclear weapons in other senses than Denmark will keep up the principle that we will not have them stationed permanently. But with such an agreement where the Air Force, Navy and soldiers, military, shall more frequently work with, come in to visit, etc., there’s no doubt that there will be more nuclear weapons coming into, for instance, on American vessels than before, because the cooperation would be closer and closer.

Jan Oberg: And there the only thing the Danish government will do is, since they know that the “neither confirm nor deny policy” of the U.S., they would not even ask the question. If they are asked by journalists, they would say, “Well, we take for granted that the Americans honor or understand and respect that we will not have nuclear weapons on Danish territory, sea territory, or whatever. Now the Americans are violating that in Japan even. So, this is this is nonsense. There would be more nuclear weapons. I’m not saying they would go off or anything like that. I’m just saying there would be more undermining of Danish principles.

And then the whole thing, of course, has to do with the fact that Denmark is placing itself — and that was something the present government under Mette Frederiksen’s leadership did before this was made public — is to put 110 percent of your eggs in the U.S. basket. This is the most foolish thing you can do, given the world change. The best thing a small country can do is to uphold international law and the UN. Denmark doesn’t. It speaks like the U.S. for an international rules-based order, which is the opposite of, or very far away from the international law.

And secondly, in a world where you are going to want multipolarity, a stronger Asia, stronger Africa, another Russia from the one we have known the last 30 years, etc., and a United States that is, on all indicators except the military, declining and will fall as the world leader. This is, in my view, be careful with my words, the most foolish thing you can do at the moment, if you are a leader of Denmark, or if you leading the Danish security politics. You should be open — I wrote an article about that in a small Danish book some six or seven years ago, and said “Walk on two legs.” Remain friendly with the United States and NATO, and all that, but develop your other leg, so you can walk on two legs in the next 20, 30, 40 years. But there’s nobody that thinks so long term in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there’s nobody who thinks independently anymore in research institutes or ministries. It’s basically adapting to everything we think, or are told by Washington we should do. And that’s not foreign policy to me. There’s nothing to do with it.

Jan Oberg: A good foreign policy is one where you have a good capacity to analyze the world, do scenarios, discuss which way to go, pros and contras, and different types of futures, and then make this decision in your parliament based on a public discussion. That was what we did early, 60s, 70s and 80s. And then also when you become a bomber nation, when you become a militaristic one, when active foreign policy means nothing but militarily active, then, of course, you are getting closer and closer and closer down into the into the darkness of the hole, where suddenly you fall so deeply you cannot see the daylight, where the hole is. I think it’s very sad. I find it tragic. I find it very dangerous. I find that Denmark will be a much less free country in the future by doing these kinds of things. And, don’t look at the basis of this agreement as an isolated thing. It comes with all the things we’ve done, all the wars Denmark has participated in. Sorry, I said we, I don’t feel Danish anymore, so I should say Denmark or the Danes. And finally, I have a problem with democratically elected leaders who seem to be more loyal to a foreign government, than with their own people’s needs.

China and Xinjiang

Michelle Rasmussen: The last question is that, you just mentioned the lack of independence of analysis, and there’s not only an enemy image being painted against Russia, but also against China, with allegations of central government genocide against the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province as a major point of contention. And on March 8th, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a report The Uyghur Genocide, an examination of China’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights in Montreal, and the next month, April 27, last year, you and two others issued a report which criticized this report. What is the basis of your criticism and what do you think should be done to lessen tension with China?

And also as a wrap-up question in the end, if you wanted to say anything else about what has to be done to make a change from looking at Russia and China as the autocratic enemies of the West, and to, instead, shift to a world in which there is cooperation between the major powers, which would give us the possibility of concentrating on such great task as economic development of the poorer parts of the world?

Jan Oberg: Well, of course, that’s something we could speak another hour about, but what we did in our in our tiny think tank here, which, by the way, is totally independent and people-financed and all volunteer. That’s why we can say and do what we think should be said and done and not politically in anybody’s hands or pockets, is that those reports, including the Newlines Institute’s report, does not hold water, would not pass as a paper for a master’s degree in social science or political science. We say that if you look into not only that report, but several other reports and researchers who were contributing to this genocide discussion, if you look into their work, they are very often related to the military-industrial-media-academic complex. And they are paid for, have formerly had positions somewhere else in that system, or are known for having hawkish views on China, Russia and everybody else outside the western sphere.

So when we began to look into this, we also began to see a trend. And that’s why we published shortly after a 150 page report about the new Cold War on China, and Xinjiang is part of a much larger orchestrated — and I’m not a conspiracy theorist. It’s all documented, in contrast to media and other research reports. It’s documented. You can see where we get our knowledge from, and on which basis we draw conclusions.

Whereas now, significantly, for Western scholarship and media, they don’t deal with, are not interested in sources. I’ll come back to that. It’s part of a much larger, only tell negative stories about China. Don’t be interested in China’s new social model. Don’t be interested in how they, in 30 to 40 years did what nobody else in humankind has ever done. Uplifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and creating a society that I can see the difference from, because I visited China in 1983, and I know what it looked like back then when they had just opened up, so to speak.

And what we are saying is not that we know what happened and happens in Xinjiang, because we’ve not been there and we are not a human rights organization. We are conflict resolution and peace proposal making policy think tank. But what we do say is, if you cannot come up with better arguments and more decent documentation, then probably you are not honest. If there’s nothing more you can show us to prove that there’s a genocide going on at Xinjiang, you should perhaps do your homework before you make these assertions and accusations.

That’s what we are saying, and we are also saying that it is peculiar that the last thing Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, did in his office, I think on the 19th of January last year, was to say I hereby declare that Xinjiang is a genocide, and the State Department has still not published as much as one A4 page with the documentation.

So, I feel sad on a completely different level, and that is, Western scholarship is disappearing in this field. And those who may really have different views, analyses and question what we hear or uphold a plurality of viewpoints and interpretations of the world, we’re not listened to. I mean, I’m listening to elsewhere, but I’m not listened to in Western media, although I have forty five years of experience in these things and I’ve traveled quite a lot and worked in quite a lot of conflict and war zones. I can live with that, but I think it’s a pity for the Western world that we are now so far down the drain, that good scholarship is not what politics built on anymore. If it, I think it was at a point in time.

So what is also striking to me is, very quickly, the uniformity of the press. They have all written the day that the Newsline report that you referred to, was published, it was all over the place, including front pages of the leading Western newspapers, including the Danish Broadcasting’s website, etc., all saying the same thing, quoting the same bits of parts from it.

The uniformity of this is just mind boggling. How come that nobody said, “Hey, what is this Newlines Institute, by the way, that nobody had heard about before? Who are these people behind it? Who are the authors?” Anybody can sit on their chair and do quite a lot of research, which was impossible to do 20 years ago. If you are curious, if you are asked to be curious, if you are permitted to be curious, and do research in the media, in the editorial office where you are sitting, then you would find out lots of this here is B.S. Sorry to say so, intellectually, it’s B.S.

And so I made a little pastime, I wrote a very diplomatic letter to people at CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc. Danish and Norwegian, and Swedish media, those who write this opinion journalism about Xinjiang, and a couple of other things, and I sent the all our report, which is online, so it’s just a link, and I said kindly read this one, and I look forward to hearing from you. I’ve done this in about 50 or 60 cases, individually dug up their email addresses, et cetera. There is not one who has responded with anything. The strategy when you lie, or when you deceive, or when you have a political man, is don’t go into any dialogue with somebody who knows more or it’s critical of what you do.

That’s very sad. Our TFF Pressinfo goes to 20 people in BBC. They know everything we write about Ukraine, about China, about Xinjiang, et cetera. Not one has ever called.

These are the kinds of things that make me scared as an intellectual. One thing is what happens out in the world. That’s bad enough. But when I begin to find out how this is going on, how it is manipulated internally in editorial offices, close to foreign ministries, etc. or defense ministries is then I say, we are approaching the Pravda moment. The Pravda moment is not the present Pravda [newspaper], but the Pravda that went down with the Soviet Union. When I visited Russia, the Soviet Union at a time for conferences, et cetera, and I found out that very few people believed anything they saw in the media. Now, to me, it’s a question of whether the Western media, so-called free media want to save themselves or they want to become totally irrelevant, because at some point, as someone once said, you cannot lie all the time to all of the people, you may get away with lying to some, to some people, for some of the time.

Michelle Rasmussen: President Lincoln

Jan Oberg: Yeah. So the long story short is this is not good. This deceives people. And of course, some people, at some point, people will be very upset about that. They have been lied to. And also don’t make this reference anymore to free and state media. Viewers may like to hear that may not like it, but should know it, the US has just passed a law — They have three laws against China — How to intervene in all kinds of Chinese things, such as, for instance, trying to influence who will become the successor to Dalai Lama, and things like that. They are not finished at all about how to influence Taiwan, and all that, things they have nothing to do with, and which they decided between Nixon and Zhou Enlai that America accepted the One-China policy and would not mix themselves into Taiwanese issues. But that is another broken promise. These media are state media in the U.S. If you take Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, they are those, particularly the latter, who have disseminated most of these Xinjiang genocide stories, which then bounce back to BBC, etc. These are state media. As an agency for that in in Washington, it’s financed by millions of dollars, of course, and it has the mandate to make American foreign policy more understood, and promote U.S. foreign policy goals and views. Anybody can go to a website and see this. Again, I’m back to this, everybody can do what I’ve done. And that law that has just been passed says the U.S. sets aside 15 hundred million dollars, that’s one point five billion dollars in the next five years, to support education, training courses, whatever, for media people to write negative stories about China, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative. Now I look forward to Politiken [Danish newspaper] or Dagens Nyheter [Swedish newspaper] or whatever newspapers in the allied countries who would say, “This comes from a state U.S. media” when it does.

And so, my my view is there is a reason for calling it the military-industrial-media-academic complex, because it’s one cluster of elites who are now running the deception, but also the wars that are built on deception. And that is very sad where, instead, we should cooperate. I would not even say we should morally cooperate. I would say we have no choice on this Earth but to cooperate, because if we have a new Cold War between China and the West, we cannot solve humanity’s problems, whether it’s the climate issue, environmental issues, it’s poverty, it’s justice, income differences or cleavages, or modern technological problems or whatever. You take all these things, they are, by definition, global. And if we have one former empire, soon former empire, that does nothing but disseminate negative energy, criticize, demonize, running cold wars, basically isolating itself and going down.

We lack America to do good things. I’ve never been anti-American, I want to say that very clearly. I’ve never, ever been anti-American. I’m anti empire and militarism. And we need the United States, with its creativity, with its possibilities, with what it already has given the world, to also contribute constructively to a better world, together with the Russians, together with Europe, together with Africa, together with everybody else, and China, and stop this idea that we can only work with those who are like us, because if that’s what you want to do, you will have fewer and fewer to work with.

The world is going towards diversity. And we have other cultures coming up who have other ways of doing things, and we may like it or not. But the beauty of conflict resolution and peace is to do it with those who are different from you. It is not to make peace with those who already love, or are already completely identical with. This whole thing is, unfortunately, a conflict and peace illiteracy that has now completely overtaken the western world. Whereas I see people thinking about peace. I hear people mentioning the word peace. I do not hear Western politicians or media anymore mention the word peace. And when that word is not, and the discussion and the discourse has disappeared about peace, we are very far out.

Combine that with lack of intellectualism and an analytical capacity, and you will end up in militarism and war. You cannot forget these things, and then avoid a war. So in my view, there are other reasons than Russia, if you will, that we’re in a dangerous situation, and that the danger has to do with the West operating, itself, at the moment. Nobody in the world is threatening the United States or the West. If it goes down, it’s all of its own making. And I think that’s an important thing to say in these days when we always blame somebody else for our problems. That is not the truth.

Michelle Rasmussen: Thank you so much, Jan.

Udgivet på Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) tidsskrift bind 49, række 2 den 14. januar 2022. Her er en pdf-version:

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Kortet på side 15 viser NATO udvidelse, hvis Ukraine og Georgien bliver medlemmer.

The following is an edited transcription of an interview with Russia expert Jens Jørgen Nielsen, by Michelle Rasmussen, Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Demark, conducted December 30, 2021. Mr. Nielsen has degrees in the history of ideas and communication. He is a former Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken in the late 1990s. He is the author of several books about Russia and the Ukraine, and a leader of the Russian-Danish Dialogue organization. In addition, he is an associate professor of communication and cultural differences at the Niels Brock Business College in Denmark.

Michelle Rasmussen: Hello, viewers. I am Michelle Rasmussen, the Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Denmark. This is an interview with Jens Jørgen Nielsen from Denmark.

The Schiller Institute released a [[memorandum]][[/]] December 24 titled “Are We Sleepwalking into Thermonuclear World War III.” In the beginning, it states, “Ukraine is being used by geopolitical forces in the West that answer to the bankrupt speculative financial system, as the flashpoint to trigger a strategic showdown with Russia, a showdown which is already more dangerous than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which could easily end up in a thermonuclear war which no one would win, and none would survive.”

Jens Jørgen, in the past days, Russian President Putin and other high-level spokesmen have stated that Russia’s red lines are about to be crossed, and they have called for treaty negotiations to come back from the brink. What are these red lines and how dangerous is the current situation?

%%Russian ‘Red Lines’

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Thank you for inviting me. First, I would like to say that I think that the question you have raised here about red lines, and the question also about are we sleepwalking into a new war, is very relevant. Because, as an historian, I know what happened in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War—a kind of sleepwalking. No one really wanted the war, actually, but it ended up with war, and tens of million people were killed, and then the whole world disappeared at this time, and the world has never been the same. So, I think it’s a very, very relevant question that you are asking here.

You asked me specifically about Putin, and the red lines. I heard that the Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, and many other American politicians, claim that we don’t have things like red lines anymore. We don’t have zones of influence anymore, because we have a new world. We have a new liberal world, and we do not have these kinds of things. It belongs to another century and another age. But you could ask the question, “What actually are the Americans doing in Ukraine, if not defending their own red lines?”

Because I think it’s like, if you have a power, a superpower, a big power like Russia, I think it’s very, very natural that any superpower would have some kind of red lines. You can imagine what would happen if China, Iran, and Russia had a military alliance, going into Mexico, Canada, Cuba, maybe also putting missiles up there. I don’t think anyone would doubt what would happen. The United States would never accept it, of course. So, the Russians would normally ask, “Why should we accept that Americans are dealing with Ukraine and preparing, maybe, to put up some military hardware in Ukraine? Why should we? And I think it’s a very relevant question. Basically, the Russians see it today as a question of power, because the Russians, actually, have tried for, I would say, 30 years. They have tried.

I was in Russia 30 years ago. I speak Russian. I’m quite sure that the Russians, at that time, dreamt of being a part of the Western community, and they had very, very high thoughts about the Western countries, and Americans were extremely popular at this time. Eighty percent of the Russian population in 1990 had a very positive view of the United States. Later on, today, and even for several years already, 80%, the same percentage, have a negative view of Americans. So, something happened, not very positively, because 30 years ago, there were some prospects of a new world.

There really were some ideas, but something actually was screwed up in the 90s. I have some idea about that. Maybe we can go in detail about it. But things were screwed up, and normally, today, many people in the West, in universities, politicians, etc. think that it’s all the fault of Putin. It’s Putin’s fault. Whatever happened is Putin’s fault. Now, we are in a situation which is very close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which you also mentioned. But I don’t think it is that way. I think it takes two to tango. We know that, of course, but I think many Western politicians have failed to see the compliance of the western part in this, because there are many things which play a role that we envisage in a situation like that now.

The basic thing, if you look at it from a Russian point of view, it’s the extension to the east of NATO. I think that’s a real bad thing, because Russia was against it from the very beginning. Even Boris Yeltsin, who was considered to be the man of the West, the democratic Russia, he was very, very opposed to this NATO alliance going to the East, up to the borders of Russia.

And we can see it now, because recently, some new material has been released in America, an exchange of letters between Yeltsin and Clinton at this time. So, we know exactly that Yeltsin, and Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs at this time, were very much opposed to it. And then Putin came along. Putin came along not to impose his will on the Russian people. He came along because there was, in Russia, a will to oppose this NATO extension to the East. So, I think things began at this point.

And later on, we had the Georgian crisis in 2008, and we had, of course, the Ukraine crisis in 2014, and, also, with Crimea and Donbass, etc.

And now we are very, very close to—I don’t think it’s very likely we will have a war, but we are very close to it, because wars often begin by some kind of mistake, some accident, someone accidentally pulls the trigger, or presses a button somewhere, and suddenly, something happens. Exactly what happened in 1914, at the beginning of World War I. Actually, there was one who was shot in Sarajevo. Everyone knows about that, and things like that could happen. And for us, living in Europe, it’s awful to think about having a war.

We can hate Putin. We can think whatever we like. But the thought of a nuclear war is horrible for all of us, and that’s why I think that politicians could come to their senses.

And I think also this demonization of Russia, and demonization of Putin, is very bad, of course, for the Russians. But it’s very bad for us here in the West, for us, in Europe, and also in America. I don’t think it’s very good for our democracy. I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t see very many healthy perspectives in this. I don’t see any at all.

I see some other prospects, because we could cooperate in another way. There are possibilities, of course, which are not being used, or put into practice, which certainly could be.

So, yes, your question is very, very relevant and we can talk at length about it. I’m very happy that you ask this question, because if you ask these questions today in the Danish and Western media at all—everyone thinks it’s enough just to say that Putin is a scoundrel, Putin is a crook, and everything is good. No, we have to get along. We have to find some ways to cooperate, because otherwise it will be the demise of all of us.

%%NATO Expansion Eastward

Michelle Rasmussen: Can you just go through a little bit more of the history of the NATO expansion towards the East? And what we’re speaking about in terms of the treaties that Russia has proposed, first, to prevent Ukraine from becoming a formal member of NATO, and second, to prevent the general expansion of NATO, both in terms of soldiers and military equipment towards the East. Can you speak about this, also in terms of the broken promises from the Western side?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Actually, the story goes back to the beginning of the nineties. I had a long talk with Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, in 1989, just when NATO started to bomb Serbia, and when they adopted Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO. You should bear in mind that Gorbachev is a very nice person. He’s a very lively person, with good humor, and an experienced person.

But when we started to talk, I asked him about the NATO expansion, which was going on exactly the day when we were talking. He became very gloomy, very sad, because he said,

[[[begin quote indent]]]

Well, I talked to James Baker, Helmut Kohl from Germany, and several other persons, and they all promised me not to move an inch to the East, if Soviet Union would let Germany unite the GDR (East Germany) and West Germany, to become one country, and come to be a member of NATO, but not move an inch to the East.

[[[end quote indent]]]

I think, also, some of the new material which has been released—I have read some of it, some on WikiLeaks, and some can be found. It’s declassified. It’s very interesting. There’s no doubt at all. There were some oral, spoken promises to Mikhail Gorbachev. It was not written, because, as he said, “I believed them. I can see I was naive.”

I think this is a key to Putin today, to understand why Putin wants not only sweet words. He wants something based on a treaty, because, basically, he doesn’t really believe the West. The level of trust between Russia and NATO countries is very, very low today. And it’s a problem, of course, and I don’t think we can overcome it in a few years. It takes time to build trust, but the trust is not there for the time being.

But then, the nature of the NATO expansion has gone step, by step, by step. First, it was the three countries—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—and then, in 2004, six years later, came, among other things—the Baltic republics, and Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. And the others came later on—Albania, Croatia, etc. And then in 2008, there was a NATO Summit in Bucharest, where George Bush, President of the United States, promised Georgia and Ukraine membership of NATO. Putin was present. He was not President at this time. He was Prime Minister in Russia, because the President was [Dmitry] Medvedev, but he was very angry at this time. But what could he do? But he said, at this point, very, very clearly, “We will not accept it, because our red lines would be crossed here. We have accepted the Baltic states. We have retreated. We’ve gone back. We’ve been going back for several years,” but still, it was not off the table.

It was all because Germany and France did not accept it, because [Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [President François] Hollande, at this time, did not accept Ukraine and Georgia becoming a member of NATO. But the United States pressed for it, and it is still on the agenda of the United States, that Georgia and Ukraine should be a member of NATO.

So, there was a small war in August, the same year, a few months after this NATO Summit, where, actually, it was Georgia which attacked South Ossetia, which used to be a self-governing part of Georgia. The incumbent Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili did not want to accept the autonomous status of South Ossetia, so Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Russian soldiers were deployed in South Ossetia, and 14 of them were killed by the Georgian army. And you could say that George W. Bush promised Georgian President Saakashvili that the Americans would support the Georgians, in case Russia should retaliate, which they did.

The Russian army was, of course, much bigger than the Georgian army, and it smashed the Georgian army in five days, and retreated. There was no help from the United States to the Georgians. And, I think, that from a moral point of view, I don’t think it’s a very wise policy, because you can’t say “You just go on. We will help you”—and not help at all when it gets serious. I think, from a moral point of view, it’s not very fair.

%%A Coup in Ukraine

But, actually, it’s the same which seems to be happening now in Ukraine, even though there was, what I would call a coup, an orchestrated state coup, in 2014. I know there are very, very different opinions about this, but my opinion is that there was a kind of coup to oust the sitting incumbent President, Viktor Yanukovych, and replace him with one who was very, very keen on getting into NATO. Yanukovych was not very keen on going into NATO, but he still had the majority of the population. And it’s interesting. In Ukraine, there’s been a lot of opinion polls conducted by Germans, Americans, French, Europeans, Russians and Ukrainians. And all these opinion polls show that a majority of Ukrainian people did not want to join NATO.

After that, of course, things moved very quickly, because Crimea was a very, very sensitive question for Russia, for many reasons. First, it was a contested area because it was, from the very beginning, from 1991, when Ukraine was independent—there was no unanimity about Crimea and it´s status, because the majority of Crimea was Russian-speaking, and is very culturally close to Russia, in terms of history. It’s very close to Russia. It’s one of the most patriotic parts of Russia, actually. So, it’s a very odd part of Ukraine. It always was a very odd part of Ukraine.

The first thing the new government did in February 2014, was to forbid the Russian language, as a language which had been used in local administration, and things like that. It was one of the stupidest things you could do in such a very tense situation. Ukraine, basically, is a very cleft society. The eastern southern part is very close to Russia. They speak Russian and are very close to Russian culture. The western part, the westernmost part around Lviv, is very close to Poland and Austria, and places like that. So, it’s a cleft society, and in such a society you have some options. One option is to embrace all the parts of society, different parts of society. Or you can, also, one part could impose its will on the other part, against its will. And that was actually what happened.

So, there are several crises. There is the crisis in Ukraine, with two approximately equally sized parts of Ukraine. But you also have, on the other hand, the Russian-NATO question. So, you had two crises, and they stumbled together, and they were pressed together in 2014. So, you had a very explosive situation which has not been solved to this day.

And for Ukraine, I say that as long as you have this conflict between Russia and NATO, it’s impossible to solve, because it’s one of the most corrupt societies, one of the poorest societies in Europe right now. A lot of people come to Denmark, where we are now, to Germany and also to Russia. Millions of Ukrainians have gone abroad to work, because there are really many, many social problems, economic problems, things like that.

And that’s why Putin—if we remember what Gorbachev told me about having things on paper, on treaties, which are signed—and that’s why Putin said, what he actually said to the West, “I don’t really believe you, because when you can, you cheat.” He didn’t put it that way, but that was actually what he meant: “So now I tell you very, very, very, very clearly what our points of view are. We have red lines, like you have red lines. Don’t try to cross them.”

And I think many people in the West do not like it. I think it’s very clear, because I think the red lines, if you compare them historically, are very reasonable. If you compare them with the United States and the Monroe Doctrine, which is still in effect in the USA, they are very, very reasonable red lines. I would say that many of the Ukrainians, are very close to Russia. I have many Ukrainian friends. I sometimes forget that they are Ukrainians, because their language, their first language, is actually Russian, and Ukrainian is close to Russian.

So, those countries being part of an anti-Russian military pact, it’s simply madness. It cannot work. It will not work. Such a country would never be a normal country for many, many years, forever.

I think much of the blame could be put on the NATO expansion and those politicians who have been pressing for that for several years. First and foremost, Bill Clinton was the first one, Madeline Albright, from 1993. At this time, they adopted the policy of major extension to the East. And George W. Bush also pressed for Ukraine and Georgia to become members of NATO.

And for every step, there was, in Russia, people rallying around the flag. You could put it that way, because you have pressure. And the more we pressure with NATO, the more the Russians will rally around the flag, and the more authoritarian Russia will be. So, we are in this situation. Things are now happening in Russia, which I can admit I do not like, closing some offices, closing some media. I do not like it at all. But in a time of confrontation, I think it’s quite reasonable, understandable, even though I would not defend it. But it’s understandable. Because the United States, after 9/11, also adopted a lot of defensive measures, and a kind of censorship, and things like that. It’s what happens when you have such tense situations.

We should just also bear in mind that Russia and the United States are the two countries which possess 90% of the world’s nuclear armament. Alone, the mere thought of them using some of this, is a doomsday perspective, because it will not be a small, tiny war, like World War II, but it will dwarf World War II, because billions will die in this. And it’s a question, if humanity will survive. So, it’s a very, very grave question.

I think we should ask if the right of Ukraine to have NATO membership—which its own population does not really want— “Is it really worth the risk of a nuclear war?” That’s how I would put it.

I will not take all blame away from Russia. That’s not my point here. My point is that this question is too important. It’s very relevant. It’s very important that we establish a kind of modus vivendi. It’s a problem for the West. I also think it’s very important that we learn, in the West, how to cope with people who are not like us. We tend to think that people should become democrats like we are democrats, and only then will we deal with them. If they are not democrats, like we are democrats, we will do everything we can to make them democrats. We will support people who want to make a revolution in their country, so they become like us. It’s a very, very dangerous, dangerous way of thinking, and a destructive way of thinking.

I think that we in the West should study, maybe, a little more what is happening in other organizations not dominated by the West. I’m thinking about the BRICS, as one organization. I’m also thinking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in which Asian countries are cooperating, and they are not changing each other. The Chinese are not demanding that we should all be Confucians. And the Russians are not demanding that all people in the world should be Orthodox Christians, etc. I think it’s very, very important that we bear in mind that we should cope with each other like we are, and not demand changes. I think it’s a really dangerous and stupid game to play. I think the European Union is also very active in this game, which I think is very, very—Well, this way of thinking, in my point of view, has no perspective, no positive perspective at all.

%%Diplomacy to Avert Catastrophe

Michelle Rasmussen: Today, Presidents Biden and Putin will speak on the phone, and important diplomatic meetings are scheduled for the middle of January. What is going to determine if diplomacy can avoid a disaster, as during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Helga Zepp-LaRouche has just called this a “reverse missile crisis.” Or, if Russia will feel that they have no alternative to having a military response, as they have openly stated. What changes on the Western side are necessary? If you had President Biden alone in a room, or other heads of state of NATO countries, what would you say to them?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: I would say, “Look, Joe, I understand your concerns. I understand that you see yourself as a champion of freedom in the world, and things like that. I understand the positive things about it. But, you see, the game you now are playing with Russia is a very, very dangerous game. And the Russians, are a very proud people; you cannot force them. It’s not an option. I mean, you cannot, because it has been American, and to some degree, also European Union policy, to change Russia, to very much like to change, so that they’ll have another president, and exchange Putin for another president.”

But I can assure you, if I were to speak to Joe Biden, I’d say, “Be sure that if you succeed, or if Putin dies tomorrow, or somehow they’ll have a new President, I can assure you that the new President will be just as tough as Putin, maybe even tougher. Because in Russia, you have much tougher people. I would say even most people in Russia who blame Putin, blame him because he’s not tough enough on the West, because he was soft on the West, too liberal toward the West, and many people have blamed him for not taking the eastern southern part of Ukraine yet—that he should have done it.

“So, I would say to Biden, “I think it would be wise for you, right now, to support Putin, or to deal with Putin, engage with Putin, and do some diplomacy, because the alternative is a possibility of war, and you should not go down into history as the American president who secured the extinction of humanity. It would be a bad, very bad record for you. And there are possibilities, because I don’t think Putin is unreasonable. Russia has not been unreasonable. I think they have turned back. Because in 1991, it was the Russians themselves, who disbanded the Soviet Union. It was the Russians, Moscow, which disbanded the Warsaw Pact. The Russians, who gave liberty to the Baltic countries, and all other Soviet Republics. And with hardly any shots, and returned half a million Soviet soldiers back to Russia. No shot was fired at all. I think it’s extraordinary.

“If you compare what happened to the dismemberment of the French and the British colonial empires after World War II, the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact was very, very civilized, in many ways. So, stop thinking about Russia as uncivilized, stupid people, who don’t understand anything but mere power. Russians are an educated people. They understand a lot of arguments, and they are interested in cooperating. There will be a lot of advantages for the United States, for the West, and also the European Union, to establish a kind of more productive, more pragmatic relationship, cooperation. There are a lot of things in terms of energy, climate, of course, and terrorism, and many other things, where it’s a win-win situation to cooperate with them.

“The only thing Russia is asking for is not to put your military hardware in their backyard. I don’t think it should be hard for us to accept, certainly not to understand why the Russians think this way.”

And we in the West should think back to the history, where armies from the West have attacked Russia. So, they have it in their genes. I don’t think that there is any person in Russia who has forgot, or is not aware of, the huge losses the Soviet Union suffered from Nazi Germany in the 1940s during World War II. And you had Napoleon also trying to—You have a lot of that experience with armies from the West going into Russia. So, it’s very, very large, very, very deep.

Michelle Rasmussen: Was it around 20 million people who died during World War II?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: In the Soviet Union. There were also Ukrainians, and other nationalities, but it was around 18 million Russians, if you can count it, because it was the Soviet Union, but twenty-seven million people in all. It’s a huge part, because Russia has experience with war. So, the Russians would certainly not like war. I think the Russians have experience with war, that also the Europeans, to some extent, have, that the United States does not have.

Because the attack I remember in recent times is the 9/11 attack, the twin towers in New York. Otherwise, the United States does not have these experiences. It tends to think more in ideological terms, where the Russians, certainly, but also to some extent, some people in Europe, think more pragmatically, more that we should, at any cost, avoid war, because war creates more problems than it solves. So, have some pragmatic cooperation. It will not be very much a love affair. Of course not. But it will be on a very pragmatic—

%%The Basis for Cooperation

Michelle Rasmussen: Also, in terms of dealing with this horrible humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and cooperating on the pandemic.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Of course, there are possibilities. Right now, it’s like we can’t even cooperate in terms of vaccines, and there are so many things going on, from both sides, actually, because we have very, very little contact between—

I had some plans to have some cooperation between Danish and Russian universities in terms of business development, things like that, but it turned out there was not one crown, as our currency is called. You could have projects in southern America, Africa, all other countries. But not Russia, which is stupid.

Michelle Rasmussen: You wrote two recent books about Russia. One is called, On His Own Terms: Putin and the New Russia, and the latest one, just from September, Russia Against the Grain. Many people in the West portray Russia as the enemy, which is solely responsible for the current situation, and Putin as a dictator who is threatening his neighbors militarily and threatening the democracy of the free world. Over and above what you have already said, is this true, or do you have a different viewpoint?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Of course, I have a different point of view. Russia for me, is not a perfect country, because such a country does not exist, not even Denmark! Some suppose it is. But there’s no such thing as a perfect society. Because societies are always developing from somewhere, to somewhere, and Russia, likewise. Russia is a very, very big country. So, you can definitely find things which are not very likable in Russia. Definitely. That’s not my point here.

But I think that in the West, actually for centuries, we have—if you look back, I have tried in my latest book, to find out how Western philosophers, how church people, how they look at Russia, from centuries back. And there has been kind of a red thread. There’s been a kind of continuation. Because Russia has very, very, very often been characterized as our adversary, as a country against basic European values. Five hundred years back, it was against the Roman Catholic Church, and in the 17th and 18th Centuries it was against the Enlightenment philosophers, and in the 20th century, it was about communism—it’s also split people in the West, and it was also considered to be a threat. But it is also considered to be a threat today, even though Putin is not a communist. He is not a communist. He is a conservative, a moderate conservative, I would say.

Even during the time of Yeltsin, he was also considered liberal and progressive, and he loved the West and followed the West in all, almost all things they proposed.

But still, there’s something with Russia—which I think from a philosophical point of view is very important to find out—that we have some very deep-rooted prejudices about Russia, and I think they play a role. When I speak to people who say, “Russia is an awful country, and Putin is simply a very, very evil person, is a dictator,” I say, “Have you been in Russia? Do you know any Russians?” “No, not really.” “Ok. But what do you base your points of view on?” “Well, what I read in the newspapers, of course, what they tell me on the television.”

Well, I think that’s not good enough. I understand why the Russians—I very often talk to Russian politicians, and other people, and what they are sick and tired of, is this notion that the West is better: “We are on a higher level. And if Russians should be accepted by the West, they should become like us. Or at least they should admit that they are on a lower level, in relation to our very high level.”

And that is why, when they deal with China, or deal with India, and when they deal with African countries, and even Latin American countries, they don’t meet such attitudes, because they are on more equal terms. They’re different, yes, but one does not consider each other to be on a higher level.

And that’s why I think that cooperation in BRICS, which we talked about, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, I think it’s quite successful. I don’t know about the future, but I have a feeling that if you were talking about Afghanistan, I think if Afghanistan could be integrated into this kind of organization, one way or another, I have a feeling it probably would be more successful than the 20 years that the NATO countries have been there.

I think that cultural attitudes play a role when we’re talking about politics, because a lot of the policy from the American, European side, is actually very emotional. It’s very much like, “We have some feelings—We fear Russia. We don’t like it,” or “We think that it’s awful.” And “Our ideas, we know how to run a society much better than the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Muslims,” and things like that. It’s a part of the problem. It’s a part of our problem in the West. It’s a part of our way of thinking, our philosophy, which I think we should have a closer look at and criticize. But it’s difficult, because it’s very deeply rooted.

When I discuss with people at universities and in the media, and other places, I encounter this. That is why I wrote the latest book, because it’s very much about our way of thinking about Russia. The book is about Russia, of course, but it’s also about us, our glasses, how we perceive Russia, how we perceive not only Russia, but it also goes for China, because it’s more or less the same. But there are many similarities between how we look upon Russia, and how we look upon and perceive China, and other countries.

I think this is a very, very important thing we have to deal with. We have to do it, because otherwise, if we decide, if America and Russia decide to use all the fireworks they have of nuclear [armament] power, then it’s the end.

You can put it very sharply, to put it like that, and people will not like it. But basically, we are facing these two alternatives: Either we find ways to cooperate with people who are not like us, and will not be, certainly not in my lifetime, like us, and accept them, that they are not like us, and get on as best we can, and keep our differences, but respect each other. I think that’s what we need from the Western countries. I think it’s the basic problem today dealing with other countries.

And the same goes, from what I have said, for China. I do not know the Chinese language. I have been in China. I know a little about China. Russia, I know very well. I speak Russian, so I know how Russians are thinking about this, what their feelings are about this. And I think it’s important to deal with these questions.

%%‘A Way to Live Together’

Michelle Rasmussen: You also pointed out, that in 2001, after the attack against the World Trade Center, Putin was the first one to call George Bush, and he offered cooperation about dealing with terrorism. You’ve written that he had a pro-Western worldview, but that this was not reciprocated.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes, yes. Afterwards, Putin was criticized by the military, and also by politicians in the beginning of his first term in 2000, 2001, 2002, he was criticized because he was too happy for America. He even said, in an interview in the BBC, that he would like Russia to become a member of NATO. It did not happen, because—there are many reasons for that. But he was very, very keen—that’s also why he felt very betrayed afterward. In 2007, at the Munich Conference on Security in February in Germany, he said he was very frustrated, and it was very clear that he felt betrayed by the West. He thought that they had a common agenda. He thought that Russia should become a member. But Russia probably is too big.

If you consider Russia becoming a member of the European Union, the European Union would change thoroughly, but they failed. Russia did not become a member. It’s understandable. But then I think the European Union should have found, again, a modus vivendi.

Michelle Rasmussen: A way of living together.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes, how to live together It was actually a parallel development of the European Union and NATO, against Russia. In 2009, the European Union invited Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, to become members of the European Union, but not Russia. Even though they knew that there was really a lot of trade between Ukraine, also Georgia, and Russia. And it would interfere with that trade. But they did not pay attention to Russia.

So, Russia was left out at this time. And so eventually, you could say, understandably, very understandably, Russia turned to China. And in China, with cooperation with China, they became stronger. They became much more self-confident, and they also cooperated with people who respected them much more. I think that’s interesting, that the Chinese understood how to deal with other people with respect, but the Europeans and Americans did not.

%%Ukraine, Again

Michelle Rasmussen: Just before we go to our last questions. I want to go back to Ukraine, because it’s so important. You said that the problem did not start with the so-called annexation of Crimea, but with what you called a coup against the sitting president. Can you just explain more about that? Because in the West, everybody says, “Oh, the problem started when Russia annexed Crimea.”

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, if you take Ukraine, in 2010 there was a presidential election, and the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] monitored the election, and said that it was very good, and the majority voted for Viktor Yanukovych. Viktor Yanukovych did not want Ukraine to become a member of NATO. He wanted to cooperate with the European Union. But he also wanted to keep cooperating with Russia. Basically, that’s what he was like. But it’s very often claimed that he was corrupt. Yes, I don’t doubt it, but name me one president who has not been corrupt. That’s not the big difference, it’s not the big thing, I would say. But then in 2012, there was also a parliamentary election in Ukraine, and Yanukovych’s party also gained a majority with some other parties. There was a coalition which supported Yanukovych’s policy not to become a member of NATO.

And then there was a development where the European Union and Ukraine were supposed to sign a treaty of cooperation. But he found out that the treaty would be very costly for Ukraine, because they would open the borders for European Union firms, and the Ukrainian firms would not be able to compete with the Western firms.

Secondly, and this is the most important thing, basic industrial export from Ukraine was to Russia, and it was industrial products from the eastern part, from Dniepropetrovsk or Dniepro as it is called today, from Donetsk, from Luhansk and from Kryvyj Rih (Krivoj Rog), from some other parts, basically in the eastern part, which is the industrial part of Ukraine.

And they made some calculations that showed that, well, if you join this agreement, Russia said, “We will have to put some taxes on the export, because you will have some free import from the European Union. We don’t have an agreement with the European Union, so, of course, anything which comes from you, there would be some taxes imposed on it.” And then Yanukovych said, “Well, well, well, it doesn’t sound good,” and he wanted Russia, the European Union and Ukraine to go together, and the three form what we call a triangular agreement.

But the European Union was very much opposed to it. The eastern part of Ukraine was economically a part of Russia. Part of the Russian weapons industry was actually in the eastern part of Ukraine, and there were Russian speakers there. But the European Union said, “No, we should not cooperate with Russia about this,” because Yanukovych wanted to have cooperation between the European Union, Ukraine, and Russia, which sounds very sensible to me. Of course, it should be like that. It would be to the advantage of all three parts. But the European Union had a very ideological approach to this. So, they were very much against Russia. It also increased the Russian’s suspicion that the European Union was only a stepping-stone to NATO membership.

And then what happened was that there was a conflict, there were demonstrations every day on the Maidan Square in Kiev. There were many thousands of people there, and there were also shootings, because many of the demonstrators were armed people. They had stolen weapons from some barracks in the West. And at this point, when 100 people had been killed, the European Union foreign ministers from France, Germany and Poland met, and there was also a representative from Russia, and there was Yanukovych, a representative from his government, and from the opposition. And they made an agreement. Ok. You should have elections this year, in half a year, and you should have some sharing of power. People from the opposition should become members of the government, and things like that.

All of a sudden, things broke down, and Yanukovych left, because you should remember, and very often in the West, they tend to forget that the demonstrators were armed. And they killed police also. They killed people from Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, and things like that. So, it’s always been portrayed as innocent, peace-loving demonstrators. They were not at all. And some of them had very dubious points of view, with Nazi swastikas, and things like that. And Yanukovych fled.

Then they came to power. They had no legitimate government, because many of the members of parliament from these parts of the regions which had supported Yanukovych, had fled to the East. So, the parliament was not able to make any decisions. Still, there was a new president, also a new government, which was basically from the western part of Ukraine. And the first thing they did, I told you, was to get rid of the Russian language, and then they would talk about NATO membership. And Victoria Nuland was there all the time, the vice foreign minister of the United States, was there all the time. There were many people from the West also, so things broke down.

%%Crimea

Michelle Rasmussen: There have actually been accusations since then, that there were provocateurs who were killing people on both sides.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Yes, exactly. And what’s interesting is that there’s been no investigation whatsoever about it, because a new government did not want to conduct an investigation as to who killed them. So, it was orchestrated. There’s no doubt in my mind it was an orchestrated coup. No doubt about it.

That’s the basic context for the decision of Putin to accept Crimea as a part of Russia. In the West, it is said that Russia simply annexed Crimea. It’s not precisely what happened, because there was a local parliament, it was an autonomous part of Ukraine, and they had their own parliament, and they made the decision that they should have a referendum, which they had in March. And then they applied to become a member of the Russian Federation. It’s not a surprise, even though the Ukrainian army did not go there, because there was a Ukrainian army. There were 21,000 Ukrainian soldiers. 14,000 of these soldiers joined the Russian army.

And so, that tells a little about how things were not like a normal annexation, where one country simply occupies part of the other country. Because you have this cleft country, you have this part, especially the southern part, which was very, very pro-Russian, and it’s always been so. There’s a lot of things in terms of international law you can say about it.

But I have no doubt that you can look upon it differently, because if you look it at from the point of people who lived in Crimea, they did not want—because almost 80-90% had voted for the Party of the Regions, which was Yanukovych’s party, a pro-Russian party, you could say, almost 87%, or something like that.

They have voted for this Party. This Party had a center in a central building in Kiev, which was attacked, burned, and three people were killed. So, you could imagine that they would not be very happy. They would not be very happy with the new government, and the new development. Of course not. They hated it. And what I think is very critical about the West is that they simply accepted, they accepted these horrible things in Ukraine, just to have the prize, just to have this prey, of getting Ukraine into NATO.

And Putin was aware that he could not live, not even physically, but certainly not politically, if Sevastopol, with the harbor for the Russian fleet, became a NATO harbor. It was impossible. I know people from the military say “No, no way.” It’s impossible. Would the Chinese take San Diego in the United States? Of course not. It goes without saying that such things don’t happen.

So, what is lacking in the West is just a little bit of realism. How powers, how superpowers think, and about red lines of superpowers. Because we have an idea in the West about the new liberal world order. It sounds very nice when you’re sitting in an office in Washington. It sounds very beautiful and easy, but to go out and make this liberal world order, it’s not that simple. And you cannot do it like, certainly not do it like the way they did it in Ukraine.

Michelle Rasmussen: Regime change?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes, regime change.

%%The Importance of Cultural Exchanges

Michelle Rasmussen: I have two other questions. The last questions. The Russian-Danish Dialogue organization that you are a leader of, and the Schiller Institute in Denmark, together with the China Cultural Center in Copenhagen, were co-sponsors of three very successful Musical Dialogue of Cultures Concerts, with musicians from Russia, China, and many other countries. You are actually an associate professor in cultural differences. How do you see that? How would an increase in cultural exchange improve the situation?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, it cannot but improve, because we have very little, as I also told you. So, I’m actually also very, very happy with this cooperation, because I think it’s very enjoyable, these musical events, they are very, very enjoyable and very interesting, also for many Danish people, because when you have the language of music, it is better than the language of weapons, if I can put it that way, of course. But I also think that when we meet each other, when we listen to each other’s music, and share culture in terms of films, literature, paintings, whatever, I think it’s also, well, it’s a natural thing, first of all, and it’s unnatural not to have it.

We do not have it, because maybe some people want it that way, if people want us to be in a kind of tense situation. They would not like to have it, because I think without this kind of, it’s just a small thing, of course, but without these cultural exchanges, well, you will be very, very bad off. We will have a world which is much, much worse, I think, and we should learn to enjoy the cultural expressions of other people.

We should learn to accept them, also, we should learn to also cooperate and also find ways—. We are different. But, also, we have a lot of things in common, and the things we have in common are very important not to forget, that even with Russians, and even the Chinese, also all other peoples, we have a lot in common, that is very important to bear in mind that we should never forget. Basically, we have the basic values we have in common, even though if you are Hindu, a Confucian, a Russian Orthodox, we have a lot of things in common.

And when you have such kind of encounters like in cultural affairs, in music, I think that you become aware of it, because suddenly it’s much easier to understand people, if you listen to their music. Maybe you need to listen a few times, but it becomes very, very interesting. You become curious about instruments, ways of singing, and whatever it is. So, I hope the corona situation will allow us, also, to make some more concerts. I think it should be, because they’re also very popular in Denmark.

Michelle Rasmussen: Yes. As Schiller wrote, it’s through beauty that we arrive at political freedom. We can also say it’s through beauty that we can arrive at peace.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes, yes.

%%The Role of Schiller Institute

Michelle Rasmussen: The Schiller Institute and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, its founder and international President, are leading an international campaign to prevent World War III, for peace through economic development, and a dialogue amongst cultures. How do you see the role of the Schiller Institute?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, I know it. We have been cooperating. I think your basic calls, appeals for global development, I think it’s very, very interesting, and I share the basic point of view. I think maybe it’s a little difficult. The devil is in the details, but basically, I think what you are thinking about, when I talk about the Silk Road, when I talk about these Chinese programs, Belt and Road programs, I see much more successful development that we have seen, say, in Africa and European countries developing, because I have seen how many western-dominated development programs have been distorting developments in Africa and other parts of the world. They distort development.

I’m not uncritical to China, but, of course, I can see very positive perspectives in the Belt and Road program. I can see really, really good perspectives, because just look at the railroads in China, for instance, at their fast trains. It’s much bigger than anywhere else in the world. I think there are some perspectives, really, which I think attract, first and foremost, people in Asia.

But I think, eventually, also, people in Europe, because I also think that this model is becoming more and more—it’s also beginning in the eastern part. Some countries of Eastern Europe are becoming interested. So, I think it’s very interesting. Your points of your points of view. I think they’re very relevant, also because I think we are in a dead-end alley in the West, what we are in right now, so people anyway are looking for new perspectives.

And what you come up with, I think, is very, very interesting, certainly. What it may be in the future is difficult to say because things are difficult.

But the basic things that you think about, and what I have heard about the Schiller Institute, also because I also think that you stress the importance of tolerance. You stress the importance of a multicultural society, that we should not change each other. We should cooperate on the basis of mutual interests, not changing each other. And as I have told you, this is what I see as one of the real, real big problems in the western mind, the western way of thinking, that we should decide what should happen in the world as if we still think we are colonial powers, like we have been for some one hundred years. But these times are over. There are new times ahead, and we should find new ways of thinking. We should find new perspectives.

And I think it goes for the West, that we can’t go on living like this. We can’t go on thinking like this, because it will either be war, or it’ll be dead end alleys, and there’ll be conflicts everywhere.

You can look at things as a person from the West. I think it’s sad to look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and those countries, Syria to some extent also, where the West has tried to make some kind of regime change or decide what happens. They’re not successful. I think it’s obvious for all. And we need some new way of thinking. And what the Schiller Institute has come up with is very, very interesting in this perspective, I think.

Michelle Rasmussen: Actually, when you speak about not changing other people, one of our biggest points is that we actually have to challenge ourselves to change ourselves. To really strive for developing our creative potential and to make a contribution that will have, potentially, international implications.

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Definitely

Michelle Rasmussen: The Schiller Institute is on full mobilization during the next couple of weeks to try to get the United States and NATO to negotiate seriously. And Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called on the U.S. and NATO to sign these treaties that Russia has proposed, and to pursue other avenues of preventing nuclear war. So, we hope that you, our viewers, will also do everything that you can, including circulating this video.

Is there anything else you would like to say to our viewers before we end, Jens Jørgen?

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: No. I think we have talked a lot now. Only I think what you said about bringing the U.S. and Russia to the negotiation table, it’s obvious. I think that it should be, for any prudent, clear-thinking person in the West, it should be obvious that this is the only right thing to do. So of course, we support it 100%.

Michelle Rasmussen: Okay. Thank you so much, Jens Jørgen Nielsen

Jens Jørgen Nielsen: I thank you.

Resumé:

Den hurtigt skiftende situation på jorden i Afghanistans peger på den øgede, presserende nødvendighed af at forstå  Lyndon LaRouches livsværk, der, med stadig større klarhed, præsenterede sin vision for Jordens næste 50 år, og derudover. Mens COVID-19’s deltavariant blotlægger hvor utilstrækkelige verdens sundhedssystemer er, ser vi en brændende nødvendighed for at udvikle et produktionsniveau i stand til at understøtte yderlige milliarder af mennesker med en leve- og kulturel standard, passende til menneskehedens kreative potentiale.

Det andet panel af LaRouche Legacy Foundations begivenhed: ”Nå, så er I endelig villige til at lære økonomi?” tog fat i emnet om LaRouches vision for ”Jordens Næste 50 År” i forbindelse med bestræbelserne anført af Helga Zepp-LaRouche for at realiserer disse revolutionære mål.

Ordfører, Megan Dobrodt, kasserer for LaRouche Legacy Foundations bestyrelse, åbnede panelet med en video af LaRouches nære ven og samarbejdspartner, Norbert Brainin, førsteviolin for den legendariske Amadeus-kvartet.

Brainin begyndte en masterclass på Dona Krupa slot i Slovakiet i 1995 ved at introducere ideen om Motivführung, eller ”motivisk grundig komposition”, en tilgang til klassisk komposition udviklet af Haydn og forfinet af Mozart og Beethoven – grundig komposition i overensstemmelse med et princip. Brainin forklarede til tilhørerne, at han ofte snakkede om Motivführung med professionelle kolleger og studenter, som genkendte idéen, men at den eneste person, som forstod det fuldstændigt, var Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche sagde ofte, at Brainin havde introduceret begrebet til ham, men at han forstod det som en universel proces, hvormed ikke blot stor musik, men også naturlige og menneskelige kompositioner af alle arter kunne udvikles. Velvidende om dette forklarede Brainin at sande klassiske komponister er ”videnskabsmænd”.

Dette blev efterfulgt af en optagelse af LaRouche, hvor han tog fat på spørgsmålet om menneskelig kreativitet på Schiller Instituttets europæiske konference, den 3. juli, 2011. Han fastslog, at mennesket er den eneste kendte kreative art, og forklarede at ”klassisk, kunstnerisk kultur” kan overføres til ”afdelingen for fysisk videnskab” med Riemanns ord. LaRouche forklarede at han bestemte sig for at bygge en bevægelse, da han indså at ingen andre end ham selv forstod katastrofen, som de finansielle forstyrrelser skabte i 1960’erne. Han begyndte ved at besøge universiteter og diskutere sine idéer. Han beskrev kort sin forståelse af sit fundamentale princip:

”Man ser en demonstration af dette i området indenfor for klassisk, kunstnerisk komposition, hvor sindet eksperimenterer med at opdage principper og udtrykker længslen efter dette eksperimentelle resultat, som opmuntringen til menneskesindets kreativitet. Det er kreativitet. Det, at bevæge sig ud over de almene vaner, eller livets rutine…”

Han afsluttede med en enkel udtalelse: ”Det er ikke magi: Det er virkelig menneskeheden.”

Den første gæst på panelet var Jacques Cheminade, langvarig samarbejdspartner med LaRouche, præsident for partiet Solidarité et Progrés i Frankrig og en tidligere præsidentkandidat. Han beskrev hvordan han, som fransk diplomat, først havde mødt LaRouche ved en begivenhed i Manhattan, og senere, mens han studerede LaRouches skrifter, blev konfronteret med et indlæg i New York Times, hvor han så et fotografi af franske soldater i 1. verdenskrig med teksten ”Endnu engang sortering – Hvem vil leve? Hvem vil dø?” Flere sider senere var der et billede af en etiopisk mor og hendes barn med ”sønderreven hud” med teksten: ”Hvem vil få mad og hvem vil dø?” Dette fik ham til at beslutte, at på trods af hans udsigter som en ung diplomat, var ”disse mine folk, også selv om jeg bliver nødt til at betale en høj pris for at blive en del af dem.”

Han beskrev sit samarbejde med LaRouche om at skrive en bog, på fransk og engelsk, med titlen ’Frankrig efter de Gaulle’ (La France aprés de Gaulle), som fremsatte idéen om at få Frankrig tilbage på det republikanske spor for udvikling, som karakteriserede general Lafayettes engagement i Den amerikanske Frihedskrig. Maurice Allais, den eneste franske borger som nogensinde har vundet en nobelpris i økonomi, forfattede et brev til Cheminade den 27. november, 2009, hvor han skrev, at han ”helt og holdent støtter LaRouches anstrengelser for at skabe en bred offentlig debat om radikalt at genskabe kreditsystemet og det internationale valutasystem”, og gav Jacques lov at offentliggøre dette. Cheminade sagde, at den tidligere statsminister, Michel Rocard, også delte LaRouches økonomiske syn.

I 1983 ledte LaRouche og hans kone, Helga, en Club of Life-begivenhed i Paris. Klubben blev stiftet af Helga Zepp-LaRouche, som et modspil til den yderliggående Romklubben. Den verdensberømte onkolog, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, og de Gaulles samarbejdspartner og krigshelt i 2. Verdenskrig, General Jean-Gabriel Revault d’Allonnes, deltog i begivenheden i Paris. Alle disse skrev anmodninger for LaRouches frihed, da han blev en politisk fange i 1989. LaRouches universelle budskab blev demonstreret gennem den støtte han fik af førende medlemmer i det franske kommunistparti, såvel som udenrigsministeren under Præsident Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Pierre Christian Taittinger.

Efter Cheminade benyttede to repræsentanter fra Argentina, Robert Fritzsche og Eduardo Fernandez, opdagelserne fra den store russiske bio-geokemiker, Vladimir Vernadsky, til at forklare LaRouches begreb om den ”relative potentielle befolkningstæthed” i forhold til ”energigennemstrømningstæthed” og forbedringer i levestandarden. Menneskets rolle i dette kompleks blev forklaret gennem forholdet til Vernadskys begreb om tre eksistensdomæner: den ikke-levende litosfære, den levende biosfære og det kognitive, erkendelsesmæssige, domæne, kaldet noösfæren. Mennesket er herre over alle tre, og deltager, som LaRouche har forklaret dette, også i det fjerde domæne, et kognitivt domæne som vi erkender i universets design og vækst, selvom vi ikke endnu kender dennes oprindelse på samme måde, som vi ved hvordan menneskeheden kan opdage universets udformning og” love”. De brugte Vernadskys beregninger og mere avanceret viden til at demonstrere, at, med nye energikilder på horisonten, kan Jorden understøtte en menneskelig befolkning på 3 billioner.

Dette blev efterfulgt af hilsner fra Carlos Gallardo, præsidenten for det Kristne demokratiske Parti i Peru.

Harley Schlanger, også en mangeårig leder af LaRouche-bevægelsen, fulgte efter med en ironisk fortælling om den virkelige oprindelse til Richard Nixons katastrofale bekendtgørelse den 15. august 1971. Mere end ti år senere, den 23. januar 1983, var John Connally fra Texas, som havde været finansminister under Præsident Nixon, tilfældigvis tilstede ved en tvangsauktion, da Connallys ejendele blev solgt, og sagde ja til et interview. Schlanger spurgte om beslutningen den 15. august 1971, og Connally erklærede stolt, at det havde været hans beslutning og en kæmpe succes. Da Schlanger udfordrede ham med LaRouches forklaring om at denne beslutning var årsagen til de efterfølgende katastrofer, som, blandt andre ting, var årsagen til Connallys personlige nedtur, blev han nedtrykt og sneg sig til sidst væk.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bicKvoNFYM; 58 minutter inde)

Daisuke Kotegawa, tidligere højtstående embedsmand i Japans finansministerium og Japans administrerende direktør ved IMF, sendte en hilsen som støttede LaRouches skel mellem investeringer i den reelle økonomi på den ene side, og  spekulation på den anden, og opfordrede til genindførelsen af Glass/Steagall-loven.

Fred Huenefeld, en landbrugsøkonom, som har siddet i mange regeringspositioner i Louisiana, og er et langvarigt bestyrelsesmedlem i Schiller Instituttet, gav en levende beskrivelse af sine år med at agitere for LaRouches idéer og jage den amerikanske kongres for at få dem til at vågne op.

Tidligere statssenator fra South Carolina, Theo Mitchell, en leder i det Demokratiske Parti og et bestyrelsesmedlem i Schiller Instituttet, diskuterede sit arbejde med at blotlægge FBI’s uretfærdige retsforfølgelse af LaRouche, samt” Frühmenschen”-kampagnen, som forfulgte sorte folkevalgte, inklusive ham selv.

Den konkluderende del, om LaRouche på universiteterne, gav ungdomsledere fra LaRouche-bevægelsen mulighed for, at diskutere deres engagement i at få LaRouches idéer ud på universiteterne og andre steder. Gretchen Small, en leder af den sydamerikanske gren af LaRouche-bevægelsen og Præsident for LaRouche Legacy Foundations bestyrelse, åbnede denne del med et videoudsnit af den berygtede debat på City University i New York i 1971 mellem LaRouche og den førende keynesianske økonom, Abba Lerner, hvor LaRouche fik Lerner til at indrømme, at Nixons, og hans egen, økonomiske politik var i overensstemmelse med Hitlers rigsbankdirektør og finansminister, Hjalmar Schacht. Sidney Hook, den daværende, førende, akademiske ”filosof” og agent for efterretningstjenesten, som havde ansvar for at lukke låg på uønskede diskussioner, fortalte en LaRouche-tilhænger, efter at have været vidne til LaRouches effekt på den besejrede mester, Lerner, at LaRouche aldrig igen ville få lov til at deltage i en sådan debat.

Den første unge taler var fra Filippinerne, Carlos ”Itos” Valdes, søn af Carlos ”Butch” Valdes, stifter og leder af Philippine LaRouche Society og mange andre organisationer. Itos Valdes gav en oprigtig og bevægende beskrivelse af hvordan hans forståelse af bevægelsen forandrede hans liv, hvilket begyndte i hans barndom med hans families engagement med LaRouche-bevægelsen, og fortsatte med hans organisering af andre med idéer fra Platon, Leibniz, Franklin Roosevelt og LaRouche.

Carolina Dominguez, en ekstraordinær leder af bevægelsen i Mexico og overalt i Sydamerika, talte om kampagnen for at gøre LaRouches livsværk tilgængeligt gennem universitetssystemet, og præsenterede videoer af unge kolleger fra Mexico og Columbia. Hun beskrev problemet ved at fremhæve en økonomiprofessor, som sagde at en uddannelses formål var at blive en del af de rigeste 50%, frem for det at løfte de fattigste 50% ud af fattigdom.

José Vega fra Bronx (i New York) afsluttede præsentationerne med en video, som han havde lavet, der diskuterede LaRouches politik for de næste 50 år, inklusive idéen om et ”Civilt Konstruktionskorps for Rumfart”, baseret på FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, for at rekruttere unge til at deltage i et genoplivet rumfartsprogram.

De forberedte præsentationer blev efterfulgt af en eftertænksom diskussion blandt deltagerne om betydningen af det som de lige havde oplevet, og det som fremover måtte opnås. Et kort indspark fra Jacques Cheminade understregede hemmeligheden til LaRouches succes. Han sagde at han var fornøjet over at se tre generationer af LaRouches ungdomsbevægelser: den tidlige rekrut, Paul Gallagher, rekrutteret fra universitetet i 1960’erne; folk som er i 40’erne og 50’erne, som nu har en ledende rolle i bevægelsen; og dem i begyndelsen af 20’erne, der nu modnes til en højst effektiv politisk kraft.

Se også Panel 1 her: LaRouche Legacy Foundations konference – Verden bør lytte til Lyndon LaRouches kloge ord.

Udgivet af LaRouche-organisationen i USA den 17. august 2021.

Hvordan kineserne lærte om økonomisk udvikling fra Det amerikanske System, der var promoveret af Lyndon LaRouches organisation, som amerikanerne har glemt.

18. august 2021 — I går udgav LaRouche-Organisationen en ny dokumentar med titlen: „Genoplivelsen af det Amerikanske System med kinesiske Karaktertræk”, som er et bidrag til at få USA til at deltage i Kinas Bælte- og Vejinitiativ (BVI) og endelig løsrive sig fra det britisk centrerede, geopolitiske system. Videoen viser hvordan dette ikke blot er det rigtige at gøre, men at BVI er baseret på de samme principper der ligger til grund for det der historisk er kendt som det ’Amerikanske System’ – hvis USA afviser BVI, ville det dermed afvise sin egen historiske identitet.

Videoen begynder med fejringen af hundredårsjubilæet for Uafhængighedserklæringen i Philadelphia i 1876, som var centralt i udbredelsen af det Amerikanske System til resten af verden. Den viser adskillige eksempler på dette – blandt andet i Kina – og hvordan det Britiske Imperium manøvrerede for at stoppe denne eksistentielle trussel til deres maritimt dominerede kontrol over verdens begivenheder, ved at spille alle de nationer, som deltog i det, ud mod hinanden – en konflikt der er nu er kendt som 1. Verdenskrig.

Videre viser den genoplivelsen af det Amerikanske System, først med livsværket af Sun Yat-sen – grundlæggeren af det moderne Kina – og hvordan Deng Xiaoping – efter ødelæggelsen forårsaget af 2. Verdenskrig, den kinesiske borgerkrig og kulturrevolutionen – i hvert fald implicit, videreførte Suns vision for Kina, som derefter begyndte at udvikle sig til en moderne, industriel nation.

Med sammenbruddet af Sovjetunionen begynder Lyndon og Helga LaRouche en kampagne for Den eurasiske Landbro og opfinder navnet ’Den nye Silkevej’. Dette program, baseret på idéerne fra Henry C. Carey og det Amerikanske System, blev vedtaget af det kinesiske lederskab og genkendes i dag i af Bælte- og Vejinitiativets omsiggribende succes.

Men spørgsmålet forbliver: Vil USA blive en del af dette ”Amerikanske System”-initiativ, eller vil det afvise sin egen historiske identitet og fortsætte sin underdanighed til en britisk centreret, geopolitisk ideologi, der allerede er ved at bringe verden tættere og tættere på en krig, som kun få ville overleve længe nok til at berette om? Det kapitel er stadig ikke nedskrevet – et kapitel som vi alle spiller en mulig rolle i.

Download (PDF, Unknown)

Se en videomaraton, der fejrer Lyndon LaRouches liv og arbejde i dag den 12. februar

Til minde om Lyndon LaRouches bortgang den 12. februar 2019, inviterer vi dig til at stifte bekendtskab med, eller gense, LaRouche, et sind og en personlighed som var et af ​​de største genier i de sidste 100 år.

Genialitet uden skønhed er slet ikke genialt.

Deltag i vores LaRouche-maraton, og tag dine venner med, både store og små. Den 24-timers videomaraton begynder kl. 12 dansk tid.

6. februar (EIRNS) —Følgende er en oversættelse af Helga Zepp-LaRouches hovedartikel i det tyske tidsskrift Neue Solidarität, nr. 6, den 11. februar 2021:

Forholdet til Amerika vil ikke være let endnu et stykke tid fremover. I betragtning af de forskellige strategidokumenter mod Rusland og Kina samt udsagn fra førende militærofficerer lyder præsident Bidens meddelelse i hans første udenrigspolitiske tale – ”Amerika er tilbage” – som en skjult trussel. Under hans ledelse sagde han, at de dage, hvor USA vil ”lægger sig fladt ned”, når de står over for Ruslands aggressive handlinger, er forbi, og Kinas aggressive tvangsforanstaltninger vil blive imødegået. Titlen på hans tale var ”Amerikas plads i verden”, og ifølge Biden er denne plads overalt i verden. Regeringer såvel som ansvarlige borgere overalt i verden skal straks begynde at reflektere over, hvordan de vil reagere på de erklæringer om politisk hensigt, der er hørt i forbindelse med Bidens tiltrædelse.

De mest chokerende udsagn kom fra adm. Charles Richard, chef for den Amerikanske Strategiske Kommando, der skrev i februarudgaven af USA Flådeinstitutetts Proceedings:

”Der er en reel mulighed for, at en regional krise med Rusland eller Kina hurtigt kunne eskalere til en konflikt, der involverer atomvåben, hvis de opfatter, at en konventionel krigs nederlag ville true regimet eller staten. Derfor må det amerikanske militær flytte sin hovedantagelse fra ’brug af atomvåbner er ikke mulig’ til ’brug af atomvåbner er en meget reel mulighed’ …. ”

Det burde være klart, at admiral Richard her taler om 3. verdenskrig, hvilket sandsynligvis ville betyde tilintetgørelse af menneskeheden. Som MIT-atomvåbenekspert Theodore Postol blandt andet gentagne gange og overbevisende har hævdet, er den afgørende forskel mellem konventionelle krig og en atomkrig faktisk det, at en atomkrig ikke forbliver begrænset. Men NATO’s utopiske fraktion mener tværtimod, at en begrænset atomkrig kunne blive ”vundet”. Og hvilke ”regionale konflikter” kunne man overveje? En konflikt ved den russiske grænse på grund af Aegis-baserede missilforsvarssystemer i Polen og Rumænien? Eller vedrørende det østlige Ukraine, hvor Europa bliver krigsskuepladsen? En konflikt mellem Israel og Iran eller en eskalering af spændingerne omkring Taiwan?

Admiral Richards uhyrlige bemærkninger skal betragtes på baggrund af adskillige forskellige strategiske papirer og doktriner, hvor det meste perfide er et dokument udgivet af Atlanterhavsrådet den 28. januar. Dokumentet er underskrevet ”Anonym”, som er ”en tidligere senior regerings embedsmand med dybdegående ekspertise og erfaring med at beskæftige sig med Kina,” ifølge beskrivelsen i forordet af Frederick Kempe, lederen af Atlanterhavsrådet. Dokumentet på 85 sider, der er beskrevet som et af de vigtigste, Rådet nogensinde har offentliggjort, har titlen ”Det længere telegram: Hen imod en ny amerikansk Kina-strategi (The Longer Telegram: Toward a New American China Strategy)”, i eksplicit henvisning til dokumentet ”Lang telegram (Long Telegram)” fra 1946, der også blev offentliggjort anonymt i sin tid af George Kennan, hvor han opfordrede til en inddæmningspolitik mod Sovjetunionen.

Denne nye anonyme forfatter opfordrer åbent til et kup imod præsident Xi Jinping og hans ”indre kreds” for at erstatte ham med oppositionsledere inden for det kinesiske kommunistparti. Da styrtningen af hele det kommunistiske parti med sine 91 millioner medlemmer ikke har nogen chance for at få succes, siger han, at den amerikanske strategi skal forblive ”laserfokuseret” på Xi Jinping og sigte mod at opsplitte CCP-ledelsen, hvor højtstående partimedlemmer er uenige i Xis politiske retning og hans uendelige krav om absolut loyalitet. Man skal hjælpe disse kredse i CCP-ledelsen med at komme til magten, der i modsætning til Xi Jinping ikke ønsker at implementere deres egen kinesiske model for en international orden, men vil underkaste sig den USA-dominerede verdensorden. Xi har ifølge ”Anonym” til hensigt at projicere Kinas autoritære system over hele verden og udgør ikke længere et problem kun for den USA-ledede liberale internationale orden og amerikanske forrang, men et alvorligt problem for hele den demokratiske verden.

Lad os forstille os følgende tænkeeksperiment. Hvordan ville den tyske regering reagere, hvis en førende russisk tænketank offentliggjorde en undersøgelse, der opfordrede til at kansler Merkel og hendes inderkreds skulle væltes med laserlignende præcision, for at hjælpe med til, at en fraktion i CDU, der ville være underordnet Moskvas interesser tager magten, mens chefen for de strategiske våben samtidig talte om, at en atomkrig er sandsynlig? Der ville være et hidtil uset oprør i hele Tyskland! Det bør ikke overraske nogen, at chefredaktøren for Kinas Global Times, Hu Xijin, reagerede på artiklen af admiral Richards med en opfordring til Kina om, at opbygge et atomarsenal på 1.000 atomvåben for at gøre Kinas anden-strejke-kapacitet troværdig.

Både i Atlantic Council-dokumentet og i det officielle papir fra USA’s Udenrigsministeriums Kontor for politisk planlægning (Office of Policy Planning) med titlen ”Elementerne i den kinesiske udfordring (The Elements of the Chinese Challenge)” er det klart, at det er succesen med den kinesiske økonomiske model og hastigheden af dens teknologiske innovation, der betragtes som truslen mod amerikansk dominans i verden. Det var en forkert beregning at antage, at Kinas integration på verdensmarkedet, ved at tilslutte sig WTO, automatisk ville føre til, at nationen ville vedtage den vestlige neoliberale demokratimodel, siger Udenrigsministeriets papir. For Kina opbyggede også sin egen “marxist-leninistiske” model af en autoritær stat, domineret af “partiets ekstreme fortolkning af kinesisk nationalisme.” Derudover fortsætter det, at Kina er fast besluttet på at skabe en ”national foryngelse”, der skal kulmineres i transformation af den internationale orden.

Vi kan selvfølgelig ikke kommentere på alle de ekstremt fjendtlige beskyldninger i de to papirer, da Udenrigsministeriets dokument er 72 sider langt. Sammenfattende kan det siges, at stort set alle anklager, der påstås mod Kinas politik, er en projicering af deres egne politikker og intentioner. Der gøres ikke noget forsøg på at forstå Kina ud fra dets 5.000-årige historie og kultur, og der erkendes heller ikke, hvor stor en civilisationspræstation det var for Kina at løfte 850 millioner mennesker ud af ekstrem fattigdom i løbet af de seneste årtier. Fra dette perspektiv betragtes naturligvis Silkevejsinitiativet ikke som en økonomisk politik, der tillader udviklingslande at overvinde deres underudvikling for første gang nogensinde, men som bevis på Kinas intentioner om at opnå overherredømme.

I betragtning af det Nationale Sikkerhedsagenturs samlede overvågning af ikke kun dens egen befolkning, men siden 11. september 2001 hele verden og censur af endog den daværende siddende præsident for USA (Donald Trump) fra TV-netværkerne og IT-giganterne i Silicon Valley, kræver det en meget speciel form for optik for at beskylde Kina for at have spioneret på og overvåget sine borgere. Virkeligheden er, at digitalisering i Kina har muliggjort meget effektiv kontaktsporing i coronaviruspandemien, og at det sociale kreditsystem har overvældende populær støtte, fordi belønningen med positiv adfærd for samfundet også gavner hver enkelt.

Fælles for begge dokumenter er, at deres forfattere genfortolker absolut alt om kinesisk kultur, som i tusinder af år har sat interesse for det fælles gode over individets interesse, og som strømmer fra et dybtliggende behov for en harmonisk udvikling af alle, og de gør det til den vestlige ordens fjendebillede.

Det er ikke det kinesiske kommunistparti, der søger verdensherredømme, men snarere at den unipolære verdensordens nyliberale etablissement frygter, at det vil miste sit overherredømme og har bevæget sig kilometer væk fra de universelle principper, med hvilket Amerika blev grundlagt, og som det hævder at repræsentere. Og hvad Biden-administrationen synes om respekt for andre landes suverænitet er indlysende i dens modstand mod Nord Strøm 2-gasprojektet.

I øvrigt tjener hele hurlumhejet omkring Vladimir Putins påståede forgiftning af Alexey Navalny, som er støttet af vestlige efterretningsagenturer, det samme formål, om at sætte en farverevolution i gang og derved skabe en opposition inden for Putins inderkreds, der kunne bruges til at fjerne ham fra embedet.

Alle ansvarlige og tænkende mennesker opfordres til gennem deres mobilisering at bidrage til at forhindre, at Europas regeringer trækkes videre ind i den bebudede kampagne mod Kina og Rusland. Kansler Merkel understregede korrekt i sin tale til World Economic Forums online-begivenhed, at hun afviste enhver form for blokdannelse imellem USA og Kina, hvor Europa derefter skulle vælge side, og sagde, at den multilateralismes time var kommet.

I lyset af admiral Richards farlige udsagn må de europæiske lande ikke kun udtrykkeligt distancere sig fra en sådan politik, de skal også trække sig ud af NATO og søge en sikkerhedsarkitektur, der afspejler deres befolkningers interesser. Det, der står på spil, er Europas overlevelse.

zepp-larouche@eir.de

Billede: DOD/Lisa Ferdinando

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Helga Zepp-LaRouches tale:

Hele programmet med taler af bl.a. Harley Schlanger:

As with September 11, 2001, the strategic realities of world politics were suddenly altered by the violent suppression of the challenge to the results of the United States Presidential elections on January 6.

However the attack on the Capitol actually occurred, the response to the attack, in the form of new draft bills calling for the re-impeachment of President Trump (despite the fact that Trump’s term ends in only twelve days;) the statement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that “Trump gave Putin the greatest gift” through the lethal attack; and Pelosi’s letter imploring the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, to, in effect, illegally assume the powers of the Presidency with respect to thermonuclear war, have worsened everything, and only further alarmed all responsible world leaders. A higher concept of humanity, and therefore a higher concept of self-government, must now guide the American Republic, and the world. These concepts exist, and were often discussed by the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche. Today, Schiller Institute founder and chairman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, joined by Harley Schlanger and Diane Sare, will discuss how any citizen, anywhere in the world, who seeks to reverse the impending doom being brought about by the failed trans-Atlantic “world order,” should one think in this time of crisis.

Med formand Tom Gillesberg.

Video: Klik her for at se via YouTube

Lyd: Klik her for at høre via Soundcloud.

Talere:

Tom Gillesberg, formand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark:
Kan Trump og den amerikanske befolkning forsvare Trumps valgsejr imod valgsvindlen? (på dansk)

Gæstetaler: Hussein Askary, Schiller Instituttets koordinator for Sydvestasien, bestyrelsesmedlem, Bælte- og Vejinitiativ Institut i Sverige (brixsweden.org):
Nu skal USA og Europa tilslutte sig Kinas nye Silkevej, og mobilisere fødevareressourcer til bekæmpelse af sult i Afrika. (på engelsk)

Michelle Rasmussen, næstformand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark:
Beethoven 250 år. (på dansk)

Lyd:

Hussein Askarys præsentation som skærskilt video:

Hussein Askary’s presentation as a separate video in English:

Kan Trump og den amerikanske befolkning forsvare Trumps valgsejr imod valgsvindlen?

Tom Gillesberg, formand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark

Resumé
USA: Valgsvindel med stemmerne i svingstaterne for at få Joe Biden valgt som USA’s præsident er en del af den farvede revolution i USA for at få et regimeskifte og få afsat Donald Trump.

Dette regimeskifte har været fokus for efterretningstjenesterne og deres partnere i medierne siden Trump vandt præsidentvalget i 2016. Først med beskyldningerne om tråde til Rusland (Steel-rapporten fra britiske efterretningstjeneste, der kom med falske beskyldninger), så løgnen om Russigate, der er blevet modbevist, rigsretssagen og 4 års angreb fra medierne.

Mediernes erklæring af, at Biden har vundet valget og NATO-landes lykønskning af Biden, er et forsøg på at etablere et fait accompli og forhindre at valgsvindlen bliver afsløret.

Trump forsøger at få valgene i delstaterne undersøgt så valgsvindlen kan blive afdækket og retfærdigheden ske fyldest. Mobilisering af vælgerne for at forsvare demokratiet og beskytte Trumps valgsejr.

Massiv censur i medierne og på sociale medier for at forhindre præsident Trump i at tale til befolkningen.

Trump fik over 7 millioner flere stemmer end i 2016 selvom ikke alle stemmerne på ham er blevet tilskrevet ham.

Konkrete historier om valgsvindelen begynder at komme frem.

Tidligere NSA tekniker beskriver hvorledes programmet “Scorecard” kan bruges til at ændre stemme rapporterne fra valgstederne.

Vil USA’s befolkning lykkes med at forsvare den demokratiske proces og Trumps valgsejr?

Hvis kuppet lykkes vil demokraterne forsøge at vinde de to sidste senatspladser i Georgia så Bidens kontrollører også kan kontrollere Senatet, udvide Højesteret og få magten der.

Hvis Biden bliver præsident er der konfrontation med Rusland og Kina på dagsorden. Vil vi få krig? Atomkrig?

Oveni COVID-19 krisen i USA og dens økonomiske effekter venter en nedsmeltning af finanssystemet. Med en grøn New Deal vil utilfredsheden i befolkningen blive enorm. Hvad følger efter den censur imod dissidenter, der allerede er i gang?

Topmøde i Davos 9.-11. november med blandt andet Mark Carney, den nye chef for Bank of England Andrew Bailey, Blackrocks Fink, IMF, ECB, Bill Gates etc. om at gennemtvinge kredittørke imod alle investeringer, der ikke er “grønne”. Digitale valutaer så centralbankerne får den fulde økonomiske magt.

Der er en verden uden for Vestens og NATO’s kontrol. Kina og Rusland er ikke kuede.

COVID-19 var et lille bump på vejen for Kina. Man har igen vækst og Bælte- og Vej-Initiativet og international økonomisk opbygning fortsætter.

Vesten kan ikke stoppe Kina. Vil man forsøge krig? En atomkrig kan ikke vindes, men vil gale hoveder i Vesten forsøge alligevel?

Vil vi i stedet få en “Sputnik-effekt”, hvor Vesten må skifte kurs tilbage til økonomisk, videnskabeligt og teknologisk fremskridt for at kunne konkurrere med Kina og alle de, der vil samarbejde med Kina? Eller vil Vesten blive irrelevant?

De, der satser på økonomisk vækst drevet af menneskelig kreativitet og videnskabeligt og teknologisk fremskridt vinder i det lange løb.

Vi lever i farlige tider men står også potentielt over for det største spring fremad i menneskehedens historie.

Lyt til hele talen her.

Nu skal USA og Europa tilslutte sig Kinas nye Silkevej, og mobilisere 
fødevareressourcer til bekæmpelse af sult i Afrika.

Gæstetaler: Hussein Askary, Schiller Instituttets koordinator for Sydvestasien, bestyrelsesmedlem, Bælte- og Vejinitiativ Institut i Sverige (brixsweden.org):

Hussein Askary præsenterede den akutte voksende sultekatastrofe i Afrika og hvordan den kan løses. Dels gennem en nødaktion for at fragte fødevarer fra USA, Europa, Rusland og Kina, men også gennem at opbygge Afrikas egne fødevareproduktion og skabe økonomisk udvikling, især infrastrukturprojekter og industrialisering i samarbejde med Kinas Bælte- og Vej-Initiativ. 

Hussein Askary præsenterede Afrikas egne udviklingsplaner, Kinas rolle i at virkeliggøre dem, og hvorfor USA og Europe skal deltage.  

Hussein Askary brugte en Powerpoint præsentation til illustration under talen, som også findes, som en særskilt video på engelsk her.

Beethoven 250 år og menneskehedens æstetiske opdragelse

Michelle Rasmussen, næstformand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark

Vi har en civilisationskrise: en konfrontationspolitik, som kan føre til krig med Rusland og Kina, en COVID-19-pandemi, økonomiske og finansielle kriser og en voksende sultkatastofe i Afrika.  
Vil vi etablere en ny retfærdig økonomisk verdensorden eller vil det ende i kaos og krig? 
  
Det er en kamp mellem helt forskellige menneskesyn. 
LaRouche understregede altid: hvad er forskellen mellem mennesker og dyr? 
Er vi dyriske? 
Eller har vi en iboende kreativ erkendelsesevne, som gør os i stand til at opdage nye principper — noget nyt, som ingen andre har tænkt på. 
I videnskab opdager vi nye naturvidenskabelige principper. 
I kunst opdager vi nyt om vores egne kreative evner, som kan deles med andre, som i et orkester eller kor eller med tilhørerene. 
  
Skønhed, som Schiller sagde, forædle vores følelser og vores intellekt — 
ikke kun rå følelser som dominerer os uden intellekt,  
ikke kun intellekt uden medfølelse og næstekærlighed. 
  
Men gennem at lege, speciel gennem kunst, at spille, kan de to går op i en højere enhed, som vi kalder en æstetisk tilstand, når vi er omfavnet af skønhed.  
  
Det var Schillers løsning efter den franske revolution, som ikke endte som den amerikanske, men i et blodbad. 
  
Platon skrev, at den vigtigste uddannelse for sjælen var musik — at fylde sjælen med skønhed og gøre den skøn. 
Mennesket ville så lovprise skønhed, modtage den med glæde i sin sjæl, og blive til en skøn sjæl. 
  
Den 16. december fejrer vi Beethoven 250-års fødselsdag. 
Vi fejrer ham, som en af de mest kreative sjæle i historien, men vi fejrer også menneskehedens erkendelsesmæssige evner.  
  
Studér Beethoven for bedre at forstå, hvad vi mennesker er. 
Beethoven, selv da han ikke var i stand til at høre sin egne musik, hørte den alligevel i sit sind, og udfordrede sig selv til at lave det ene gennembrud efter det anden. 
  
Der var ingen stilstand eller entropi, men hvad LaRouche kalder ikke-entropi.  
  
At viljemæssigt blive mere og mere bevist om, at kende sine egne erkendelsesmæssige evner, og presse dem til det yderste for at kunne stige op til det næste niveau, og som han skrev, at nærme sig Guds egen skaberkraft. 
  
Og han havde et formål: at opløfte den trængende menneskehed.  
Han var bevidst om musikkens rolle med at forædle menneskene.  
  
Gennem at spille, synge eller lytte, kan Beethovens kreativitet deles med andre —  
noderne på papiret, er ikke kun toner, men nøglen til Beethovens kreative sind.  
  
Og dermed kan andre mennesker bekræfte et positivt menneskesyn, som også havde en politisk dimension for Beethoven — stræben efter frihed.  
Som Schiller sagde, vejen til frihed går gennem skønhed. 
  
For at fejre Beethoven så lyt til eller syng og spil hans værker. Genoplev hans åndelige gennembrud, bekræft den menneskelig kreativitet, skab et samfund, hvor vi kan genopdage den tabte kunst at skabe skøn musik,  
måske endnu mere kreativ end Beethoven, og udvikle vores erkendelsesmæssige evner, for hele menneskehedens skyld. 
  
Så blev der spillet den første del af 2. sats af Beethovens 7. symfoni, dirigeret af Wilhelm Furtwängler, som eksempel.  
Ud fra en enkel begyndelse tilføjes flere og flere stemmer for at skabe noget stort og opløftende. 

Billede af det amerikanske flag. WikiImages fra Pixabay 

Den 25 august (EIRNS) – Demokraternes konvent i sidste uge demonstrerede for hele verden, at mindet om Franklin D. Roosevelt og John F. Kennedy er blevet fuldstændigt udslettet fra grødhovederne i partiets elite, både de ældre ‘boomere’ og den narkotikaplagede yngre generation. Der var ingenting om FDR’s store infrastrukturelle programmer, som skabte den elektrificerede nation, der var i stand til at frembringe “demokratiets arsenal”, som besejrede fascismen. Der var heller ikke tilnærmelsesvis en antydning af inspiration, som i JFK’s erklæring om, at ”Vi vælger at rejse til Månen i dette årti samt gøre de andre ting, ikke fordi de er lette, men fordi de er svære, fordi dette mål vil tjene til at organisere og målrette vores energier og færdigheder”. I stedet for dette præsenterede det smuldrende Demokratiske Parti et racistisk portræt af “identitetspolitik”.

Som Kamala Harris udtrykte det – giver vi folk chancen for at stemme på mennesker, der “ligner dem selv”. Eller som manikæiske Joe udtrykte det: stem på mig, fordi: “Jeg vil være en allieret med lyset, ikke med mørket.” (https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manik%C3%A6isme, –red.)

Nancy Pelosi rasede i dag i medierne, i en tilstand af høj ængstelse, at præsident Donald Trump og hans tilhængere i Kongressen er “statens fjender… indenlandske fjender”, der forsøger at “skræmme folk fra at stemme”, og til at ”bifalde russisk indgriben i vores valg ved at tillade Putin at beslutte, hvem der skal være præsident i stedet for det amerikanske folk”.

Til anerkendelse for det Republikanske Parti, modvirkede de den første aften af deres konvent demokraternes racistiske “identitetspolitik” med optimisme og tro på fremtiden. En række sorte valgte embedsmænd og personligheder pegede på præsident Trumps bekymring for den mest grundlæggende af de menneskerettigheder, der bliver nægtet mindretallene i USA – hvad FDR kaldte “frihed for mangel”. Senator Tim Scott fra South Carolina lukkede konventet og drøftede ”mulighedszoner”, som han og præsidenten har lanceret i de indre byer i Amerika med det formål at skabe job og jobtræning for nationens ”glemte mænd og kvinder”. Han talte om “udviklingen af det sydlige ’hjerte’ [af USA]” og pegede på sin valgsejr over sønnen til en berygtet racist og bemærkede, at hans bedstefar, der droppede ud af skolen i tredje klasse for at plukke bomuld, levede for at se sit barnebarn blive den første sorte mand, der blev valgt til Kongressen og derefter til senatet fra South Carolina. En anden sort valgt embedsmand, statsrepræsentant Vernon Jones, en demokrat fra Georgia, sagde, at det Demokratiske Parti “ikke ville have, at sorte mennesker skulle forlade plantagen,” og roste Trump for at yde finansiering til de historiske sorte universiteter og for at gennemføre kriminalretsmæssige reformer samt for at forsvare politiet mod anarkiet på gaderne.

Matt Gaetz, en republikaner fra Florida, bemærkede, at Donald Trump er den første præsident siden Ronald Reagan, der ikke har startet en krig.

Men republikanerne har endnu ikke taget fat i de foranstaltninger, der kræves for at vende den eksistentielle trussel, som nationen og verden nu står overfor, som LaRouche-bevægelsen præsenterede i programmet: ”The LaRouche Plan To Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”  (LaRouche-planen for at genåbne den amerikanske økonomi: Verden har behov for 1,5 milliarder nye, produktive job).

Ironisk nok har præsident Trump selv på forskellige tidspunkter taget fat på flere af de vigtigste punkter i dette program. Han forsøgte at afslutte de ”uendelige krige”, alt imens han forsøgte at opbygge venskab og samarbejde med Rusland og Kina. Men det var ikke kun demokraterne, der samarbejdede med den britiske efterretningstjeneste i “Russiagate” og nu “Chinagate” for at stoppe ethvert amerikansk venskab med Rusland eller Kina – de republikanske kredse, der omgiver præsident Trump – med udenrigsminister Mike Pompeo i spidsen – er lige så opmærksomme på at bryde denne indsats, at dæmonisere både Rusland og Kina og drive verden til randen af krig.

Trump må tage ved lære af Ronald Reagan, der brød med det britiske imperiums kontrollerede miljø for den imperialistiske opdeling af verden i øst mod vest, ved at arbejde med Lyndon LaRouche, og vedtage LaRouches forslag om at samarbejde med russerne (det daværende Sovjetunionen) om opbygning af et rumbaseret forsvar mod atomvåben, for dermed at ”gøre kernevåben forældede”, som Reagan udtrykte det i sin berømte tv-tale til nationen den 23. marts 1983. Hvis præsident Trump fulgte dette eksempel og accepterede LaRouche-planen om et møde mellem lederne af USA, Rusland, Kina og Indien, for at stå op imod det britiske imperiums “del og hersk” og tackle de mange trusler mod civilisationen, som menneskeheden står overfor i dag, kunne disse problemer løses. Putin har foreslået en variation af LaRouches ”fire magts-forslag”, med et topmøde mellem de fem faste medlemmer af FN’s Sikkerhedsråd, hvilket er blevet accepteret af alle fem ledere, men uden en bestemt dato.

 Schiller Instituttets konference, der er planlagt til 5.-6. september, vil være et eksempel på den slags samarbejde mellem nationer der er påkrævet, med en dagsorden der dækker hele spektret af den globale krise – strategisk, videnskabelig, økonomisk og kulturel. Mobiliser alle I kender til at deltage i denne virtuelle begivenhed. Tilmeld jer til konferencen: “På krigsstien mod Armageddon”, eller “Et nyt paradigme blandt suveræne nationer, der er forenet af de fælles mål for menneskeheden?”