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“The content of policy is the method by which it is made.” That was the idea of statecraft espoused by Lyndon LaRouche, founder of Executive Intelligence Review and co-founder of the Schiller Institute. The question of method in statecraft was the topic of a two-day-plus conference just concluded by the Schiller Institute in Paris. The conference, led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and by Jacques Cheminade, former French Presidential candidate and president of Solidarité et Progrès (Solidarity and Progress), was titled “Emancipation of Africa and the Global Majority, A Challenge for Europe.”
Why, despite the increasing potential for thermonuclear war between NATO and Russia; despite the mounting panic regarding the looming financial meltdown of the hopelessly bankrupt trans-Atlantic system; despite the depopulation of Gaza, and the destruction ongoing in Sudan and several other locations—why was it the self-development of the African continent which was chosen in Paris as the focus of deliberation for the international participants, many of them young people, including from several African nations?
To understand this, contrast two speeches given on Nov. 9. One was by the President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The other was by Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Under the guise of commemorating “the significance of the date Nov. 9 in German history—in 1918 (abdication of German Kaiser and proclamation of the Weimar Republic), 1938 (beginning of the Kristallnacht/”Night of the Broken Glass” violence against Germany’s Jewish population and their various establishments), and 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall), German President Steinmeier chose to stoke fear, claiming that there had been a rise of antisemitism since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. His remarks led to calls for constitutional bans on emerging German political parties and other forms of censorship—the politics of fear.
Fortunately for current history, there are people that actually understand the role of the Classical artist in universal history, and therefore the role of poet Friedrich Schiller in Germany—including in the events of Nov. 9, 1989. Instead of the politics of fear, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, speaking to an audience in Paris, invoked the life, the work and living presence of the poet Friedrich Schiller.
“I can only advise you to read Schiller. Schiller, apart from LaRouche and Cusa and Plato and some others, but Schiller is one of the most important, because he came to the conclusion that in his time, people were already barbaric. He said, why is it that we are still barbarians? He said the most important task of our time—meaning his time—is to develop the Empfindungsvermögen. I have never found a good English translation, because if you just say ‘compassion,’ or ‘empathy,’ it does not quite capture it. What Schiller meant with Empfindungsvermögen is that you have to be able to educate your soul and your mind in such a way that you are able to absorb the world in an all-encompassing manner and feel compassion with the whole world; which means everything. It doesn’t just mean pity or empathy with people who are suffering; it also means to be able to always take in whatever is happening in the world, in your heart and your mind. It’s still not capturing it entirely, but it’s larger than the word empathy.…”
This is the idea that must immediately become the basis and the method of international policy. This is the soul of the idea of “promoting the General Welfare” contained in the United States Constitution’s Preamble.
Schiller, born on November 10, 1759, besides being a great historian and dramatist, was also Germany’s greatest poet. The Ninth Symphony of composer Ludwig van Beethoven is a setting of the spirit and a portion of the text of Schiller’s poem, An Die Freude (Ode To Joy). During the great transformation of 1989 that would culminate in the sudden, miraculous Nov. 9 fall, “by the consent of the governed,” of the Berlin Wall, which had stood for more than 27 years at the most lethal checkpoint in the world, the Ninth Symphony was not “the soundtrack of the revolution. “ The Ninth Symphony—the whole composition, not just its Fourth Movement—was the embodiment of the idea of Hope, hope for a better humanity that chooses, as did those who brought down the Berlin Wall, to deserve that freedom which is, according to the American Declaration of Independence, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
The right to self-development, particularly for youth, such as the still-living children of Gaza, the 600 million African youth today under the age of 19, and the 1.2 billion African youth under the age of 25 who will be here in 25 years, is the policy; Schiller’s mission, for humanity to develop the Empfindungsvermögen required for such self-development, is the method by which that policy would be made. Guaranteeing that right through establishing a new international security and development architecture, discussed by Zepp-LaRouche in her Ten Principles, and a vigorous campaign worldwide by youth, for that purpose, including in work in national electoral and other processes as appropriate, is the immediate task before us.
