The first panel of the second day of the May 24-25 weekend Schiller Institute conference was introduced with a performance of the first movement of Franz Schubert’s last piano sonata, the Opus 960 in B-flat. An exceptionally thoughtful rendition was given by the young European pianist Martin Kaptein. This is a demanding and complex work, at once sublimely uplifting and deeply searching, as processions of musical ironies are posed, qualities which Kaptein illuminated through choices of poetic phrasing and transformation of repeated passages from the early to late sections of the movement.
These qualities presaged the content of the discussion of the panel, moderated by Dennis Small, who heads the LaRouche Legacy Foundation (LLF) advisory council. Small briefly reviewed the creation of the Foundation in the wake of LaRouche’s death in 2019, and indicated the vast extent and wealth of his writings and speeches, from the 1950s well into this century—recorded in 2,000 articles and more than 1,000 videos now being digitized for public access. A third volume of LaRouche’s Collected Works, centered on his work in science, will be produced this year. Small noted that LaRouche was a unique genius, who, amidst a full life as a statesman and scientist, recruited and developed two youth movements, one in the 1960s and another in the early 2000s, with effects that have reverberated, and continue to resonate, in actively changing world history profoundly.
The purpose of framing and imprisoning him in the late 1980s, carried out by the international oligarchy threatened by his work, was not so much to break LaRouche, which never happened, but “to break you,” Small said. Today, we will work to achieve LaRouche’s exoneration, but we must exonerate you, said Small, liberating you from the false reality of the conceptions you have been provided to leave you powerless.
Small introduced LaRouche movement leader and former two-time U.S. Senate candidate from New York, Diane Sare, who opened by likening the situation of today’s population to that of the “Lydian interval over the Asteroid Belt,” which lies in an in-between state. The only way to resolve this, she said, is to “lean into the tension of instability.”
Sare presented LaRouche as among the few Americans in modern history to have represented the quality of mind and commitment worthy of leading the nation as President. Not only his repeated, uncannily insightful forecasts of political developments, but his unwavering determination to provide the method of his approach to American and world leaders, as he did, for instance, in his 1999 book, The Road to Recovery, an assessment of the potential courses which current history could take and ways to shape a successful outcome, delivered after five years in prison, a uniquely accurate assessment then, and powerfully prescient in today’s circumstances.
The tyranny, against which many great minds over the centuries have fought, is not an imagined powerful force; rather, said Sare, it lies “in your neighbor’s belief” in the lies purveyed by the mass media in service to the oligarchy.
In an especially poignant moment, Sare recalled the influence of LaRouche on her life as an individual. Had I not met Lyn, she said, I would never have known the beautiful ideas of countless great minds of the past; and, of course, she would never have learned what Lyn saw in her soul as what is most truly human in everyone. With Memorial Day tomorrow, in memory of Lyndon LaRouche, and in honor of all those who have died—not just American soldiers, but the Palestinian children killed in Israel’s ongoing genocide, and countless others worldwide in the oligarchy’s created conflicts, it is “time for us to ‘stand up on our hind legs,’ as Lyn would say.”
Small then introduced a series of video excerpts from presentations made by LaRouche between 1975 and 2009, an hour in total, giving a hint of the comprehensive extent of his vast knowledge in a plethora of disciplines and fields, and confirming his impassioned commitment to uplifting humanity from the burdens of colonial and neocolonial subjugation, to free the individual to participate in the mission of mankind to rebuild our world as we look outwards to challenges of exploring a universe of galaxies. Our moral purpose, LaRouche asserted, is to live our lives so that we build a foundation upon which our posterity can build better than we have. Organizationally, this means, in part, creating the restoration of the government to an institution that can return America to being a true republic.
The video segments included polemical speeches, elaborations of principle, and dialogues with American elected officials, as well as with youth coming around the recruitment of the second youth movement. In 1975, LaRouche spoke to members of the movement about the international impact of their actions already, following the publication of his International Development Bank proposal and further interventions in policyshaping circles globally. In 1999, he spoke to a conference in Germany about the implication of a then-recent discovery of 400,000-year-old throwing spears in that country, products, he said, showing from the work of their makers’ hands the cognition of their minds and marking them thereby as humans. History, he noted, is the history of ideas, of universal physical and artistic principles.
After the videos, Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke of the crime of her late husband’s having been associated in the popular mind with all things they should wish to avoid. He was the Socrates of our time, she said. Appealing especially to those watching the conference on the internet, she urged viewers to put out of the their heads all those preconceptions about LaRouche once and for all and to study his writings, as well as seeking out videos of him speaking, some of which are available through the LLF site now. Don’t accept summaries, she said; it may not be easy to grasp his ideas, but the effort must be made to discover the richness of his thought, so desperately needed by humanity today.
You can not kill ideas, Zepp-LaRouche asserted. We can bring LaRouche’s ideas, and other beautiful discoveries and ideas from the past to life, to actively employ in creating a new renaissance.
