On Saturday, January 20, 2024, the Schiller Institute hosted an International Youth Dialogue to discuss the “Ten Principles for A New Development and Security Architecture,” proposed by Schiller Institute Founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Over the course of the dialogue, youth leaders from nations across the globe discussed the historical and epistemological precedents of—as well as the required solutions for—the current, expanding world military and economic crisis, which now threatens to become a global, potentially thermonuclear, catastrophe.
The participants of that youth dialogue now release this statement of unequivocal solidarity with the application of South Africa in the International Court of Justice, which suit has unmistakably helped to bend the course of universal world history towards Justice.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted that, “According to Friedrich Schiller, the great German Poet of Freedom, after whom the Schiller Institute is named, there is no contradiction between being a patriot of your own country and thinking and acting as a world-citizen.”
We young women and men—from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, Tanzania, Germany, France, Nicaragua, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, El Salvador, Bangladesh, the U.S.A., and several other countries—affirm this elevated conception of patriotism, and recognize that it must be at the core of any substantial development towards international peace, in Southwest Asia and around the world.
Patriotism and world-citizenry combine in the dual invocation of both Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in South Africa’s application. South Africa did not take up its suit as merely an “exceptional” country ready to use its “forces” in order to “police” its cousin Israel. Rather, in the spirit of 1776, South Africa raised its voice as one sovereign nation among many. In the redemptive dimension of its particular history, South Africa represents the species-characteristic capacity of the whole of humanity: the capacity for progressive perfection through moral, cultural and economic development.
Having the sublime courage not to deny its own history of legalized injustice, and accepting the heavy responsibility of its accession to the 1948 Genocide Convention, South Africa has swiftly demonstrated to the world, through the universality of its individual intention, how One can become Many and Many become One; in so doing, South Africa has triumphed over the “logic” of permanent war, through the power of Reason and agapic Love.
In 1963, King warned the United States of an impending “spiritual death,” the result of “this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane.” King’s warning was given new form by Pope John Paul II, in 1987, when he wrote of “a world which is divided into blocs, sustained by rigid ideologies, and in which instead of interdependence and solidarity different forms of imperialism hold sway.” Pope John Paul II called this “a world subject to structures of sin.”
The illusory power of these “structures of sin” has been radically challenged by the moral authority of South Africa’s suit, confirming Mandela’s statement that “the march towards freedom and justice is irreversible.”
With the aid of South Africa’s moral guidance, we refuse—as King refused—to be “mesmerized by uncertainty.”
We soberly reaffirm Mandela’s imperative:
“Let each one of you and all of our people, give the enemies of peace and liberty no space to take us back to the dark hell of apartheid. It is only disciplined mass action that assures us of the victory we seek. Go back to your factories, schools, mines, and communities; build on the massive energies that recent events in our country have released by strengthening disciplined mass organization. We are going forward.”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s introductory remarks:
