Friedrich Schiller and a Future for the Youth of Europe

“GIVE me just one generation of youth,” wrote Vladimir Ilich Lenin, “and I'll transform the whole world.” If we study the manner in which our own children have lost their way in the first three decades of the twenty-first century, one could be forgiven for agreeing with the menacing observations of this state-socialist demagogue. The famous poet-philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, expressed a rather similar sentiment when he said:

“Let a beneficent deity carry off in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother, let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained manhood, let him come back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight it with his apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of Agamemnon.”

Whilst Lenin was discussing the transformation of youth within the environs of his own country, Schiller's words relate to the temporary exile of a returning liberator. In practice, of course, the worst excesses of this reconstructed commentary on antiquity were possibly best demonstrated by the abducted sons of Christian Greece who, in 1453, reappeared as Ottoman Janissaries in the capture of Constantinople. In effect, these long-lost orphans had been reunited with their families - now unrecognisable - on the battlefield and at the point of a sword.

With the advent of modern technology, it has become far easier to supplant the fledgling mindset of one's youthful neighbours and when you consider the sinister role of the mass media it is hardly surprising that - in the words of Rammstein - “we're all living in America”. Unlike Schiller's beneficent deity, however, the manipulators of the adolescent mind who have long infected the shores of Europe with their debilitating anti-culture today have no desire to cleanse, but simply to darken and despoil. In a further effort to undermine the natural and unfettered expression of youth, these professional denigrators are filling our countries with millions of people who were never here to begin with. The strategy is one of racial and cultural obfuscation, with the subject becoming little more than a stricken passenger aboard a rudderless ship which drifts aimlessly across a vast ocean of confusion. Are these vilified 'millennials' from the university campuses and merciless streets really to blame for the innumerable sins of the fathers? It is doubtful.

On a more positive note, Schiller is correct in the sense that the only solution to this wanton destruction of youth lies in the severance of the child “from the breast of its mother” so that it can have access to “the milk of a better age”. The mother, in this case, may be seen as the nanny-state, whilst the “better age” is surely a place that transcends the corrosion of the modern world completely and thus provides young people with an environment that is more conducive to their real needs. For the Greeks, this place was known as Arcadia (Ἀρκαδία) and if we don't begin creating our own pockets of sanity and resistance very soon then our youth will continue to be absorbed by the enveloping cloud of global despair.