A Punctum Saliens

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this editorial]

This is the edited transcription of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s closing remarks to the LaRouche PAC’s Town Hall, October 10, 2020.

I was asked what Schiller would do in a situation like this. Schiller was not a politician, but a writer of dramas. But all his dramas were great, strategic studies, which he wrote for every country in Europe—Spain, France, England, Germany, Poland, Switzerland. And when you read all of these great dramas, you find that there is always one point, which he called the punctum saliens, when the entire history has reached a certain point of decision. And in that moment, it depends on whether the person who is the main figure in the play, can mobilize within himself, or within herself, the kind of greatness, the nobleness of character, the quality of the sublime, to do that which is for the common good, in the interest of future generations.

Look at the United States as a drama, the history of the United States, starting in the Renaissance when the idea of a sovereign republic was developed by Nicholas of Cusa for the first time. These ideas were realized for the first time in the American Constitution. Then think about Columbus discovering America, a lot went into that. Then think about the American Revolution itself, which was a European project. Many forces went into it.

Then there was the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence, the development of the American System of economics through Alexander Hamilton, then with Lincoln and the Civil War. Then there was the unfortunate development in the First World War. Franklin D. Roosevelt brings the United States out of the Depression. Then the entire postwar period, Kennedy, the Moon program, the whole life’s work of Lyndon LaRouche, the most important intellectual influence of his time, not only in the United States, but way beyond.

And now, you come to this moment, where you have your punctum saliens of American history, the moment when all the beautiful things that America represents and has contributed, in the better parts of its history, to universal history are here. And now you have the effort by the British Empire to make a coup, to undo all of that, to finalize the subjugation of its American colony under the rule of the British Empire. And it is up to you, now.

You are the player on the stage of history. The American people are the sovereign. But you have to assert that power right now, and that means you have to evoke inside yourself that quality of love, of agapē, of really taking care not only of the United States, but of the entire world, because the fate of the world will depend on the outcome of this election.

So I think you have to really mobilize inside yourself a power which is greater than anything you have experienced in your life so far, because there is more at stake than at any moment before. So I count on you, that you will do it, and together we will make the biggest mobilization in the next two weeks. And I think the enemy can be defeated. One other lesson from Schiller is that you can bring down the arm of the tyrant if many people work together for a good plan—and that’s what we have.