Schiller Institute Youth Take the Lead

Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism

by Marcia Merry Baker

[Print version of this article]

Oct. 15—In Manhattan, the Schiller Institute held a day-long international policy conference today in-person and online titled, “Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism.” The powerful event was designed and conducted by “next generation” leaders, and involved 26 speakers (some live, some online, and some by pre-recorded video) of all ages from seven nations (China, France, Germany, Haiti, South Africa, the U.S., and Yemen). The two panels of speakers featured lively discussion sessions, with questions from the room, and around the world, including from Peru and Uganda.

The audience directly attending numbered in the range of over 600 (with over 100 at the full house in Manhattan), and there were hundreds more, counting the group meetings in many nations, at universities, other institutions, and informal settings.

The video of the full conference, including a list of all speakers, is available here. The following account, by topic, reports on a few of the speakers, and gives an idea of the breadth of the discussion.

The sessions opened with music, beginning the morning with a solo spiritual, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand,” and for the afternoon session, a 12-voice youth chorus, singing the canon, “Dona nobis pacem,” and J.S. Bach’s setting of the chorale, “Jesu, meine Freude.”

Daniel Burke, a leading Schiller Institute educator based in the New York-New Jersey region, presided over both the in-person and livestream audience. Burke himself is known in New Jersey for his run in 2020 as an independent (“LaRouche Was Right” Party) against incumbent U.S. Senator Cory Booker, who currently is a national Democratic Party spokesman for wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, and who backs sweeping legalization of narcotics at home.

“We gather here today in the midst of extreme danger,” Burke opened, and described the purpose of the event: “to strengthen and grow an international movement with powerful youth leadership.” Saying that “We see an era of the World Land-Bridge” as now possible, Burke began the deliberations with an historic video from statesman-economist Lyndon LaRouche, who stressed the point that, “We must choose a new road” for mankind. In particular, we are called upon “to use the crisis to discredit the enemy of ours within.”

Zepp-LaRouche: ‘One Humanity First’

There were two conference keynotes. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the first panel. Independent-LaRouche candidate for U.S. Senate from New York Diane Sare opened Panel Two.

Zepp-LaRouche began by stating her view that “the war can be won for a better future,” and then made reference to the dramatic example of what had happened only three days earlier in New York, when two young men succeeded in “ripping apart the sheep’s clothing from the warhawks!”

On Oct. 12 at a Town Hall in the Bronx, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) was confronted publicly by LaRouche movement organizers Kynan Thistlethwaite and José Vega, for her complicity in causing the danger of nuclear war, her total backing of U.S. arms to Ukraine, including funding known Nazi elements, and her hypocrisy in claiming to be a “progressive.” The pair contrasted her with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who had the courage and leadership to quit the Democratic Party earlier this week, denouncing the Democratic Party warhawks. The AOC confrontation video has gone viral, with multiple millions of views internationally, and coverage all over in print.

Vega and Thistlethwaite spoke on the second panel. Thistlethwaite quoted from poet and political activist Percy Shelley, and urged everyone to intervene by going to see their Congressmen, and “break the complacency of people in the West, and the United States.” Vega, likewise, urged action, quoting from Shakespeare that, “there is a tide in the affairs of men, that taken in the flood, leads on to fortune….”

Zepp-LaRouche summed up the present situation as being “an early phase of a world revolution.” If we can pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, the world youth movement is playing a major role in building a new system. And this conference is a major part of that. She stressed the importance of the upcoming Schiller Institute conference Oct. 27, instigated by a recent meeting of Ibero-American current and former legislators who seek to collaborate with leaders from all around the world, to sound the voice of reason and policy. The Invitation is elsewhere in this issue.

It is morally unacceptable that billions of people lack water, food, electric power, and other means of life, which amounts to conditions of “colonialism in new clothes,” she said. It is time we create an “international movement of world citizens” to change this. We need a “one humanity first” movement.

Candidate Sare: Culture of the Good

U.S. Senatorial candidate Diane Sare, saying that she wanted to address arming ourselves spiritually, emotionally, and culturally for the fight we’re in, presented some history of the psychological subversion of Western society done by Bertrand Russell, his fellow-criminal Theodor Adorno, and others. Sare provoked the audience to think through the difference between shallow thinking and “soggy sentimentalism” on one hand, and cultural depth on the other, by having everyone sing two well-known songs of these two types. Then she analyzed the thought in each. First “Amazing Grace,” and then the spiritual, “Were You There?” She concluded her talk with a video of Elvira Green, former Metropolitan Opera singer, performing, “Were You There?” at a concert a few years ago sponsored by the Schiller Institute New York Chorus, which Sare co-founded.

A report on beautiful work for classical music in grade school was given by a young teacher from Chicago, Dana Anex. She is teaching violin and other stringed instruments, and has an after-school strings program. Anex presented the principles of the curriculum she has developed and wants to spread elsewhere, in collaboration with other educators.

Economic Crises, Green Fascism

Several presentations and the exchanges in the discussion periods addressed questions of physical economic crises and the green fraud. Many spoke out forcefully that the “energy poverty” in Africa and elsewhere must end. From South Africa, Princy Mthombeni, founder of Africa4Nuclear, scored the disgusting hypocrisy of UN’s COP26, the Group of Seven, and other Western institutions trying to prevent modern power development in Africa by using the excuse of “Clean Green” and “Global Gateway” programs. This is “green fascism,” she said.

Jackson Hinkle, a U.S. journalist, blasted the “de-growth, depopulation, Malthusian” operations going on today, which are targeted against specific groups. He detailed different sectors, from farmers who are experiencing “death by debts,” to others. Look at the impact of the international sanctions. Do we “need to sanction Russia into oblivion?”

Fox Green, of the U.S. “Space Commune,” reported on New York’s Hudson Valley, once home to productive economic activity—textiles, brick-making, cement, which has now been degraded. We are seeing the “de-growth economy” reaching the stage of “controlled demolition.”

Green and many other speakers drew out the picture of devastation from green mandates. Sameera Khan, for example, another U.S. journalist, discussed how she personally had been involved in anti-climate change activities, but “then I grew up.” She asserted that “there is no climate emergency,” as many scientists have informed the UN. But there are censorship operations being prepared, which go beyond stigmatizing those who say that, to charging anyone with that view, as guilty of hate speech.

Science, and Relative Population Potential

Eminent physicist Dr. Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Emeritus, Princeton University, prepared a short video debunking the idea that CO₂ is a menace. Rather, he said it is “the stuff of life.” He provided key aspects of context, pointing out that relative to our geological history, CO₂ levels today “are much lower than they ought to be.” Greenhouse owners double or triple their CO₂ levels in order to get much-improved plant growth, he reported.

Megan Dobrodt, President of the Schiller Institute USA, began her presentation by pointing out that “the world is very underpopulated.” If we apply science and technology, and build projects that express technological improvements, we have a vast potential for more people. How many? Lyndon LaRouche, in a December 1988 speech to the Schiller Institute Food for Peace conference in Chicago, spoke of 100 billion. The great Ukrainian-Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1930s spoke of 3 trillion people on Earth!

In making scientific breakthroughs, and applying them, we literally create our environment. We are not confined by happenstance resources. That is how to look at the challenge of travelling and establishing settlements in space.

This concept of development was implicit in the report given on China’s infrastructure projects in Africa, by Shexiu Huang, a postgraduate at the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies, at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She presented maps of the new railroads in Ethiopia and Kenya, and other aspects of development, including education.

Jason Ross, Executive Director of The LaRouche Organization, addressed head-on the approach required for what he called, “A Thought-Through Plan for the Future.” We are involved in expanding the “human carrying capacity on Earth.” To provide perspective on how deliberate we must be, he gave a history of improvements from the period of the Iron Age to the present. He also gave a history of the myriad development programs presented by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche and their associates over the past half century, from Africa, to India, to Eurasia and the Americas. Ross denounced the way that “the discovery process” is not addressed at all in schools, yet it is, in fact, fundamental.

Ross urged his listeners to be deliberate about “what you are willing to take on, to make yourself a leader for the future.” He will be working with others on a series of classes in science, music and other subjects to prepare the leadership that the world demands of us today.

A ‘Voice of Reason’

There were many other presentations—from Haiti, Yemen, the U.S., and elsewhere, which cannot be summarized here, but most importantly, they included several from France and Germany on the severity of the economic breakdown in Europe and the related, imminent threat of nuclear war.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche summarized our situation at the end of the discussion after the first panel. We are, she said, in a very short countdown to World War III, but at the same time, at the beginning phase of a world revolution. “We have to make a break,” so therefore we have to think differently. Nations have to give up their self-perceptions of having exclusive interests, in a world misconceived as a zero-sum calculus. Instead, we have to make the jump to think as world citizens. If we do that, and speak as a chorus of voices, demanding a different order, we can succeed.

Zepp-LaRouche called on young people, especially, to play a leading role—to be ambassadors—in creating an international movement: “World citizens of all countries, unite to stop World War III and create a better world.”