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Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organisations in the United States and other countries. He is a perennial candidate for President of the United States, but has never gained significant electoral support and is not accepted as a legitimate political figure. He is generally seen as an extremist or a cult leader, frequently accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. His followers, however, regard him as an important economist and a major political figure. In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment on charges involving illegally soliciting unsecured loans and tax code violations.

Early career

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and educated at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in India. During this period he read Karl Marx and became a Communist.

After leaving the Army in 1946, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern and took a factory job in Lynn, Massachusetts. By now LaRouche was disillusioned with orthodox Communism and in 1949 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party. In the SWP he used the pseudonym Lyn Marcus. In 1954 he moved to New York City and married a fellow SWP member, Janice Neuberger.

LaRouche remained in the SWP until 1966, making him a veteran member in a group which always had a high turnover of members. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism and stayed in the SWP only as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this, saying that he was a loyal and zealous party member, although this is not definitive evidence that he was not an FBI informer. During these years LaRouche developed interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. He separated from Janice in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956).

In 1966 LaRouche was expelled from the SWP and became a supporter of the British dissident Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League (ancestor of the later Workers Revolutionary Party). LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's conspiratorial world-view and his advocacy of violence and intimidation, something foreign to the intellectual tradition of mainstream Trotskyism. He was briefly linked with the U.S. Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth and also with the Spartacist League, another Trotskyist group.

In the late 1960s LaRouche moved in the growing radical milieu of New York as an independent Trotskyist, giving classes on "dialectical materialism" to members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and other radical groups. He was heavily involved in SDS despite not being a student, and in the PLP's internal battles despite not being a member. Once again, LaRouche now maintains that he was an FBI agent during all this activism, but his closest colleagues from this period dismiss this suggestion as absurd.

LaRouche and the NCLC

The turning point in LaRouche's career came in 1969, when he formed the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), a grouping of ex-SDS activists and other ex-Trotskyists. Despite its name, the NCLC had no connection with the labor movement, being composed mainly of students, ex-students and professional activists like LaRouche. The NCLC soon developed the hallmarks of a cult, with a charismatic leader (LaRouche), a catastrophist and conspiratorial ideology, and an esoteric vocabulary known only to initiates. NCLC members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader.

In the 1970s LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining (as he still does) an outward stance of anti-fascism. He began to regard himself and his followers as "Prometheans," superior to all other people, and under his direction the NCLC adopted the violent and disruptive tactics of fascist groups of the 1920s and '30s, physically attacking meetings of the SWP, the Communist Party and other groups, who were classed as "left-protofascists." During "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members engaged in a series of well-documented beatings of members of these groups. Some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.

During the 1970s LaRouche steered the NCLC away from the left and towards the extreme right, while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left (as did the founder of fascism, the ex-Socialist Benito Mussolini, and many others since). The Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a gigantic conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a secret cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations and other standard villains of the extreme right. LaRouche added some novel variations on this theme, including Queen Elizabeth II on his list of conspirators.

In the 1980s LaRouche's political rhetoric and accusations grew more detached from generally accepted reality. Hitler had been a British agent. Queen Elizabeth was a drug runner. Menachem Begin was a Nazi. The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." Both Communism or Fascism were facets of the great overarching conspiracy of the "Synarchy," an oligarchical network of financiers and manipulators who rule the world. Only LaRouche and his "humanist elite" fully understood this vast conspiracy, and possessed the willpower and knowledge to withstand it. LaRouche's personal egotism is a significant force driving his politics. In 1979 he wrote: "My principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date."

Some of LaRouche's conspiracy theories appear to border on self-parody, "Who is pushing the world toward war?" he asked in 1981. "It is the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."

LaRouche and the Jews

LaRouche has been regularly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Jewish organisations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have devoted much time and energy to documenting LaRouche's various writings and speeches on these subjects. LaRouche for his part has denied these accusations, asserting that those who accuse him are part of the oligarchic conspiracy to rule the world.

The truth about LaRouche's attitude to the Jews is not easy to determine. Indeed it is likely that there is no single truth, since many of LaRouche's statements on this as on other subjects have been obscure and contradictory. From the early 1970s LaRouche has regularly used the word "Zionist" as a term of abuse, and he must know that "Zionist" is the common extreme right code-word for "Jew". In the 1970s also, LaRouche developed connections with the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby, a leading extreme right group, both well-known for anti-Semitism.

In NCLC publications during the 1970s the Jews were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" controlled the U.S. government and the United Nations: only one step short of the "Zionist Occupied Government" fantasy of overt neo-Nazi organisations. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk."

In The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), LaRouche (under the pen name L. Marcus) said that "Jewish culture... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." In an editorial in New Solidarity in 1978 he wrote: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."

LaRouche has also been regularly accused of Holocaust denial, the hallmark of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 1978 LaRouche described the Holocaust as mostly "mythical," and his German second wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, dismissed it as a "swindle." (These references are sourced in Dennis King's book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.) In 1981 LaRouche said that "only" 1.5 million Jews died during World War II, and that their deaths were not the result of a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis. (This statement is also sourced by Dennis King. In January 1981 LaRouche's New Solidarity International Press Service issued a statement titled "LaRouche Reaffirms '1.5 millions' Analysis".)

In recent years, however, LaRouche appears to have modified his views on these subjects - without of course conceding that he has done so. In a 1999 LaRouche published an article called "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In this article he several times refers to "the Jew," a usage typical of anti-Semites and one which he must have known is offensive to Jews.

Nevertheless, in the course of a discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, LaRouche acknowledges the contribution made by Jews to European civilisation. He says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." The article contains several other statements in similar vein. There is even a word of praise for Walter Rathenau, an archetypal Jewish business figure of the kind so savagely denounced by LaRouche throughout his career.

In this article also LaRouche acknowledges that the Holocaust is not mostly mythological or a Zionist swindle. He says: "We can not allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." He explicity states that "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews," a direct repudiation of his 1981 statement that only 1.5 million died and those not as a result of a deliberate plan of extermination. This article can be seen as a significant (if unacknowledged) retreat by LaRouche from his anti-Semitic statements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Presidential bids

From the late 1970s to the present, LaRouche has pursued a dual strategy. He has continued to promote his apocalyptic conspiracy theories and to make regular predictions of imminent economic catastrophe. These are a staple of the extreme right, although also characteristic of Trotskyism. At the same time he has sought to enter the political mainstream by contesting elections and primary elections. In 1971 he founded the U.S. Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, but this achieved no success and was wound up in 1979. In 1976 he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%).

Since 1979 LaRouche has concentrated on infiltrating his followers into the Democratic Party. In 1979 he formed a body called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a name designed to convey the impression that it is part of the Democratic Party. Since 1980 LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States six times. He is running again in 2004, although as a convicted felon he is not eligible to be a registered voter in the state of Virginia, where he lives.

The Democratic Party has consistently asserted that LaRouche is not a Democrat, but the U.S. electoral system makes it possible for him and his followers to enter Democratic primaries. LaRouche himself has polled negligible vote totals, but continues to promote himself as a serious political candidate, a pretension which is sometimes accepted by elements of the media and some political figures.

The use of the NDPC name has, however, allowed LaRouche followers to compete seriously in Democratic primaries for lesser offices, and even occasionally to win them. The best known example was in 1986, when a LaRouche candidate, Mark Fairchild, won the Democratic primary for the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Senator Adlai Stevenson, III, refused to run on the same ticket as Fairchild and formed a new party for the election. Fairchild's victory was attributed to low voter turnout and a poor "regular" candidate, but also to some genuine support for the LaRouche anti-establishment message. NDPC have won several other Democratic primaries in various states, but LaRouche's organisations have never suceeded in entering the mainstream.

Some of the LaRouche organisation's successes have come from exploiting public fears about the AIDS epidemic, which they blame on international conspirators. In 1985 LaRouche wrote: "It is in the strategic interests of Moscow to see to it that the West does nothing to stop this pandemic; within a few years, at the present rates, the spread of AIDS in Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas would permit Moscow to take over the world almost without firing a shot." This, like most of LaRouche's apocalyptic predictions, has been proved totally inaccurate, but this has not prevented his followers continuing to depict him as a genius and a prophet.

Criminal charges

By the 1980s LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built a extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The International Caucus of Labor Committees claimed to have affiliates in France, Italy, Sweden, Canada and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group, the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), and regularly contest elections. The LaRouche organisation publishes a twice-weekly newspaper, The New Federalist and a weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review. The LaRouche publishing house, Benjamin Franklin Books, issues a steady stream of works by LaRouche and his followers. The real membership of LaRouche's organisation is not known.

The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. Like most cults, the LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also operates more sophisticated telemarketing groups, soliciting donations by phone, usually under the guise of various patriotic front organisations to conceal the real source of the phone calls. More seriously, however, LaRouche was accused of fraudently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people, sometimes giving completely misleading explanations for the loan ("funding the Strategic Defense Initiative" or "finding a cure for AIDS"). The funds thus raised were then directed into a maze of dummy companies so as to avoid both taxation and attempts to recover the "loans."

In October 1986 the FBI and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. He and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud, and LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return. In December 1988 a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted LaRouche and his associates, and LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served five.

The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983. The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.

In addition to LaRouche, his chief fund-raiser, William Wertz, was convicted on ten mail fraud counts. LaRouche's legal adviser, Edward Spannaus, and several other fundraising operatives were convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. LaRouche denied all the charges, calling them "an all-out frame-up by a state and federal task force," and said that the federal government was trying to kill him. "The purpose of this frame-up is not is not to send me to prison. It's to kill me," LaRouche said. "In prison it's fairly easy to kill me... If this sentence goes through, I'm dead." This proved to be another false prediction: LaRouche was released unharmed in 1993.

One of the most damning aspects of the trial was the revelation of LaRouche's personal corruption. While lenders were told that LaRouche had no money to repay their loans, he in fact spent US$4.2 million on real estate in Virginia and on "improvements" to his 200-acre Leesburg estate. These included a swimming pool and horse riding ring.

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