International Youth Dialogue With Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Oct. 30—The Schiller Institute held an international online youth discussion October 23, in which more than one hundred young people from twenty-two different countries on five continents participated. They came from: the Americas—from Haiti, Brazil, USA, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Canada, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile; from Asia—from the Philippines, India, Syria, and Yemen; from Europe—from France, Germany, Serbia, and Spain; and from Africa—from Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia. The event was the latest in a series of such public forums involving direct discussion among youth and Schiller Institute Founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, beginning in the early months of 2020 with the onset of the COVID pandemic, to support understanding and concerted international action. Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened this meeting with a wide-ranging presentation titled, “The Coming Fall of the Cult of Gaia.” The full text of that presentation follows this article, and the video of it is available here.

The current world youth focus of the Schiller Institute is a commitment to secure the future, which has been fundamental since the founding of the Schiller Institute in 1984, to bring reason and culture to statecraft. Over the years, there have been many initiatives and collaborative efforts, for example, the 1988 founding of the international Food for Peace effort; the 1991 participation in the Committee to Save the Iraqi Children; and others. The most recent effort is the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, founded in June 2020 by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders.

The need for action on Haiti figured strongly in the discussion. A group of Haitians, now living in the Dominican Republic, encouraged wider discussion of the recently released Schiller Institute Development Program within Haiti and in the wider international community. The needless and worsening world food crisis also came up. Zepp-LaRouche expressed her intent to include more agriculture specialists in the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.

One Haitian participant discussed his group of about forty young people who are circulating the 18-page report, “The Schiller Institute Plan to Develop Haiti,” which is also available in French and in Spanish. He told the group, “What is happening in Haiti today is much more than a simple violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” emphasizing that, “until today there has never been a development plan for Haiti like the one proposed by economist LaRouche.”

Ibero-American participants reported that reading groups have been studying the pedagogy of Nicholas of Cusa and will soon be focusing on the works of Johannes Kepler, Friedrich Schiller, and Lyndon LaRouche. These groups, and associated political and intellectual outreach are being expanded into other Central and South American nations. A young Brazilian engineer told the conference organizers, “It was an excellent discussion. Unprecedented in importance. Very good. I enjoyed it a lot. It provides integration with all the other countries also!”

Fouad Al Ghafari transmitted a message to the participants from Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. He noted, “For seven years, we have been suffering from aggression by land, sea and air. But for seven years we have also been studying Lyndon LaRouche’s Five Metrics of Progress, … from financial independence to managing water resources.” Al Ghafari added, “Your discussion of the age of reason represents a way out of the savage world. Thinking of human intellectual progress versus the biological progress of animals only.” The September 2019 Schiller initiative, “The Age of Reason in the Stars,” he happily reported, was published in Arabic “in an experimental university textbook for students that is still used today.”

After the conference, an extended discussion took place on the need for an affirmative conception of man and the science of the human mind—as a prerequisite for victory against the Malthusians—among participants in the meeting from the New York City area, and plans for a follow-up panel discussion about Malthusianism were made.