Schiller Institute International Youth Conference

The World Has a Choice:
Extinction, or Era of LaRouche

September 26, 2020

PANEL 1

The World Needs the Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche

Speakers List, in order of appearance

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder and Chairman, Schiller Institute

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (Video excerpt from 1995 Independent Hearings on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice.)

Paul Gallagher, Economics Editor, EIR; Former Political Prisoner

Odin Anderson, Esq., Lead Defense Attorney, LaRouche Alexandria Trial. (Video excerpt from 1995 Independent Hearings on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice.)

Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General. (Video excerpt from 1995 Independent Hearings on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice.)

Dr. Jozef Mikloško, Former Deputy Prime Minister, Czech and Slovak Federative Republic

Theo Mitchell, Former State Senator, South Carolina

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, Chairwoman, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine; Former Presidential Candidate

Marino Elsevyf, Attorney-at-Law, Dominican Republic

Dennis Small, Ibero-American Editor, EIR; Former Political Prisoner

Note: We present here an overview and the edited transcripts of three of the speakers at the first of two panels of the Schiller Institute conference. A fuller report on second panel, “The Science, Culture, and Great Projects of a Global Renaissance,” will be published in a future issue. The videos of the conference are available here.

Where Might Humanity Have Been Today?
Recapturing the Lost Ground with the Power of Reason

The reason why the complete exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is synonymous with the fate of the United States, lies both in the threat which his opponents pose to the very existence of the U.S.A. as a republic, and thus for the entire world, and also in the implications of his ideas for America’s future survival.

—Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Where might humanity be today if Lyndon LaRouche—and his ideas—had not been unjustly imprisoned through what has been described as “deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power” and a “tragic miscarriage of justice”?[fn_1] If his ideas had been allowed to be heard without prejudice in national and international policy debate, perhaps we would have already developed a scientific colony on the Moon, ended poverty for good, and mastered fusion power, leading to a global economic and scientific renaissance.

Today, the need for his exoneration is perhaps more urgent than ever. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has warned that if civilization is to survive the current breakdown crisis gripping the entire globe—the COVID-19 pandemic, looming financial blowout, growing famine, and threat of war—then we must succeed in creating a new paradigm, an entirely new system, which is as different from the current system as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages that preceded it. Such a change in system would be akin to a creative act: humanity choosing to reject the old mode, and beginning to establish its activity, including relations among nations, upon a new, truthful set of beliefs and principles.

Of such truthful quality are the ideas and policies of Lyndon LaRouche.

But how to achieve such a monumental change within a global dynamic that seems to be moving with such momentum toward chaos? The only way to break from the current trajectory is to intervene into it by letting the future shape the present: build a youth movement which will rapidly qualify themselves to lead.

Liberate LaRouche’s Ideas

To that end, on September 26, 2020, the Schiller Institute convened an extraordinary online conference on the subject of LaRouche’s exoneration. Participants were young people from more than 25 countries on all continents of the world. The case for LaRouche’s exoneration was presented to them by some of those who knew its nature best: LaRouche’s widow, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, leaders who fought for his parole and subsequent exoneration—Jozef Mikloško, Former Deputy Prime Minister of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic; Marino Elsevyf, Attorney-at-Law in the Dominican Republic; and Theo Mitchell, former State Senator from North Carolina—and collaborators of LaRouche who were sent to prison with him, Paul Gallagher and Dennis Small.

Video clips of LaRouche’s lead attorney Odin Anderson, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and Lyndon LaRouche himself discussing the LaRouche case at the Independent Hearings on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1995, filled out the picture of the crimes committed.

All of the panelists touched on the political motivation for the frame-up of LaRouche. Panelist Marino Elsevyf expressed it thus:

My observation in this process was that the facts which led to the jailing of Lyndon LaRouche were a charade, or procedural fraud, to carry out a witch-hunt against the ideas and anti-Establishment protests of citizen Lyndon LaRouche. The universal principles that he called for in his writings and speeches, as well as the conferences that he held across the U.S. and the world, opposed and exposed the nonsense and the failure of the economic policies in the U.S. and world. The Renaissance approach of Lyndon LaRouche, as well as having revived the ideas of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, of Kepler, of Leibniz, of Riemann, confronted the free trade system and the false competition of neo-liberalism, otherwise known as the savage capitalism of globalization.

Former political prisoner Dennis Small highlighted the contrast between the thousands of leaders who signed in support of LaRouche’s exoneration in the 1990s and the few though very powerful people whom LaRouche had crossed, by referencing “the great intellectual ‘crimes’ which got him the attention of Kissinger and the British establishment,” and then asking:

What is it, one might ask, that earned him being so beloved of so many people around the world—not just in the United States, but in every single country he visited? It was because he always fought, from a totally selfless standpoint, for the common good of all mankind.

The effect of the powerful presentations, which established the fraud of LaRouche’s imprisonment on moral as well as legal grounds, was expressed by one young participant, who said:

The real crime is the fact that his work was hidden and buried, and the real victims are people like me! How frustrating it is to know that there was someone screaming from the mountaintop about this concept of moral and intellectual genius, and he was shut up.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche ended her remarks with a challenge to the young participants. After stating that the world today would be a much more beautiful place had LaRouche’s ideas been implemented, she charged the participants: “That task is now yours. You will be the people who have to design a new era of mankind.”

A New Generation of Statesmen and Thinkers

The second panel of the conference, “The Science, Culture, and Great Projects of a Global Renaissance,” had two effects: Its presentations gave a taste of what the world could look like if LaRouche’s policies and ideas were implemented—from large scale infrastructure building to develop the world, to reviving a scientific method of creative discovery, to replacing the culture of digital addiction with one of beauty—and they also demonstrated how to build a qualified youth movement; the presentations were given by young people to young people in a worldwide process of dialogue and deliberation on matters of great import to the future of civilization.

A series of presentations discussed specific infrastructure development proposals and accompanying policies that would have a transformative effect on the productivity and prosperity of each presenter’s respective region. Among the projects discussed were the Bering Strait connection, the NAWAPA and PLHINO/PLIGON water projects in North America, the refilling of Lake Chad in central Africa, and the maglev train and fusion research projects in Europe.

In her presentation on the Bering Strait connection, Anastasia Battle made clear her understanding of the geopolitical implications of such a project:

What if we could get the United States and Russia to break on this geopolitical game? How would that change the global dynamic?... If we can organize the United States and Russia around this proposal and force that change of thought, this would radically change the whole geopolitical atmosphere, not just between the U.S. and Russia, but globally…. That’s what I want to see. In my country, in other countries—I’m an American—I don’t want to see the United States being used as a pawn for manipulating other nations into war, or for our nation to go into war. I want to see a new chapter of humanity: a new system.

Participants asked the presenters quite serious questions: How do we enable smaller countries to finance such large projects? What about the objections to growth raised by those who see it as a threat to the environment? Why and how have oligarchical forces moved to stop big development projects?

A second series of presentations took a close look at the culture, both artistic and scientific. A challenging presentation by Chérine Sultan took on the pandemic of digital addiction, and addressed—

[the] victims of digital technology who recognize very well that they can no longer restrain themselves when they give in to the temptation to connect to a screen: “We know it’s not good for us, we know, but we do it anyway.” Yes, we can see that we are less creative when we fall into this addiction, and that’s exactly the purpose of the oligarchy. We’ll see how consistent the digital giants are in using an anti-creative means for an anti-creative purpose.

And yet, she offered an antidote in the inborn spark of curiosity and creative hypothesis which exists in each human mind. But how to foster that?

Presentations challenging the idea that human beings know things via their senses, one on music and one on science, gave examples of how the playful activity of the mind can be fostered through investigating paradoxes. Central to LaRouche’s recruitment of young people has always been to create a culture of education of youth through rediscovery, rather than memorization of facts. In that way, the student has certain knowledge of the truth of something for him or herself—for example, that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than the other way around—instead of accepting it on “good authority.”

Asuka Burke introduced her group’s presentation by stating, “Today, we are inundated with information and opinions, but how do we know which opinion is right? What is the method by which you might come to know anything? As Lyndon LaRouche pointed out repeatedly in the past, a German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, presents us with a crucial insight into that question of knowledge.”

The panel ended with a discussion by Madison Hirst of LaRouche’s “Four Laws to Save the USA Now,” and the principle of credit: creating the ability to build the future that our nations and humanity as a whole require.

Perhaps more important than any of the particular topics presented, or the particular questions asked, was the nature of the process that unfolded: On Saturday, September 26, dozens of young people from six continents and more than two dozen nations came together for six hours to deliberate on profound matters that will determine whether or not there will be a future for civilization. These young people come from all walks of life. They are just the beginning of what is now emerging as a growing youth cadre that is qualifying itself to design and lead a new era of mankind.

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