Harley Schlanger in France, A True Moment of Joy

Solidarité et Progrè;s President Jacques Cheminade wrote the following article which has been translated from the French, which is available at www.solidariteetprogres.org.

Harley Schlanger, the LaRouche spokesman for the Western region of the United States, has just completed a two-week stay in France. However, mentioning his official position, important as it may be, does not begin to express what he has contributed to us.

I will attempt to formulate it better here by saying that he opened to us the gateway to our capacity for human creativity in all domains, in art as in science, in poetry as in music, in politics as in economics.

As American as an all-terrain Jeep, Harley offered those who had the opportunity to hear him speak, the conviction that America can be the conveyor of the best of European culture, if the fight is taken up to uproot the influence of British oligarchism, both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. The stunning paradox is that this fight in the same time awakens the best of our own French culture, and leaving behind the today's underling mentality for the greatest moments of our history.

Those who accompanied Harley in Lyon during his visit to the Center for the History of the Résistance and of Deportation (Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de Déportation) profoundly felt this resonance between our international struggle today, as patriots and as world citizens, and that of the leadership and innumerable unknown individuals who sacrificed their lives back then.

In the three well-attended public meetings on the American situation, before more than 200 people in Paris, Lyon, and Rennes, Harley took the opportunity to convey to our activists and friends, the message of Aeschylus' Prometheus. He showed us that with this drama, not only was the principle of fire brought to men, but above all how the Titan had "planted hope inside them." It is this hope, immortal within man, whereas our bodies are themselves mortal, which is the foundation for any politics worthy of the name, transmitted from one human being to the other, and from one generation to another. Harley took as a contemporary example of this fight for hope, for which Prometheus accepted to suffer knowing the destiny that awaited him, the fight of Harley's own wife Susan, who had just died of cancer in July. He showed how she fought over more than two years up to the last moment, using the best of the universal Jewish culture, in order to nourish with both with ideas and financial contributions she raised, the youth of the LaRouche Youth Movement, who are our hope.

Hence, against the domineering and destructive mind of Zeus — the real tragic figure in the play, for he is incapable of knowing his destiny — each of us can bear within in himself a small Prometheus, which can grow stronger to the extent we each raise up against the challenges of injustice and pettiness, a principle of immortality that becomes expressed in serving the common good and those generations yet to be born.

Harley strolled through the streets of Paris, Rennes, and the old inner city of Lyon with immense pleasure. We exchanged tales of Yiddish humor that return small things back to their little importance, and make grow the larger ones by means of irony, the indispensable complement of tragedy. An expert of the three Moseses: the first Moses, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn, as well as of Sholom Aleichem and the renaissance of New York Yiddish theater that would inspire the collaboration of so many Jews and African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. He sees great hope in the rising ferment of the mass strike in the United States, provided we know how to inspire it.

Harley, himself an accomplished amateur violin player, gave the 40 members of the LaRouche Youth Movement in France also a magnificent presentation on the collaboration over time between Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, showing how the musical themes of the first were taken up and developed by the latter three, as in the five fugues of Mozart's K405, where he transcribes the four-voice fugues of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier for the four instruments of the string quartet.

This dialogue of voices from the past inspired all of us in the present, especially since Harley also showed us how, in Le Nozze di Figaro, Mozart politically attacked the oligarchy of the Habsburg world, based on the libretto of Beaumarchais, Franklin's collaborator in Paris, who financed the cannon of Rochambeau and the American Revolution, inflicting the decisive defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Harley also had the opportunity to meet several leading French economists who fully endorse the return, but internationally, of Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall Act, in order to uproot the current crisis.

He came to France 25 years ago. We all committed ourselves to having him back soon, as a Breton dairy producer told us, that he, too, hopes to bring a universal dimension to his struggle.