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Jeremiah 'Jerry' Duggan was a British student at La Sorbonne in Paris. The circumstances of his death, at the age of 22, after attending a conference held by the Lyndon LaRouche organization are controversial. He was killed on March 27, 2003 near Wiesbaden, Germany after running in front of cars on a busy road, apparently deliberately.
Jeremiah, who was Jewish, had been attending a conference and "cadre school" organized by the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Youth Movement, which are part of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. The 82-year-old former American presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was himself a speaker at the conference. This was Jeremiah's first involvement with the organization.
After spending six days with members of the movement in Wiesbaden, Jeremiah telephoned his mother in England to tell her: "I am in deep trouble." His mother says he sounded terrified. Then they were cut off. Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead.
Wiesbaden is believed to be the European center of the LaRouche network, as well as the LaRouche Youth Movement, which was formed in 1999. Many Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith say the network is anti-Semitic and fascistic. LaRouche, a former Trotskyist, was released from jail in 1994 after serving five years of a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations (see United States v. LaRouche). The Schiller Institute is run by his German-born wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who is also president of the German "Civil Rights Movement of Solidarity" party (Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität or BüSo.)
Background
Jeremiah was in Paris when he decided to attend what he believed was an anti-war conference in Wiesbaden to protest the United States invasion of Iraq, which had just begun. He travelled to Germany on March 21, 2003 with Benoit Chalifoux, who edits Nouvelle Solidarité, the French-language newspaper of the LaRouche movement, and around eight other men in a convoy of cars.
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Jeremiah's first contact with the Schiller Institute came about when he bought one of Chalifoux's newspapers in the street, and was encouraged to join Chalifoux at the Wiesbaden conference. Jeremiah told his mother, Erica, that the Institute was "very extreme," but he believed it had "solutions to problems he was worried about," she told the British inquest into his death, which was held in Hornsey, north London.
The German authorities initially pronounced Jeremiah's death a suicide, but the British inquest concluded there was nothing in the German police report or in Jeremiah's background that suggested suicide. Jeremiah had no history of mental illness, the court heard. The coroner ruled that Jeremiah was in a "state of terror" when he died.
The LaRouche organization strongly denies any involvement in Jeremiah's death. Lyndon LaRouche himself has issued a statement saying the Duggan affair is a "hoax" constructed by supporters of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney. It is "such an obvious fabrication that no further comment is necessary," said LaRouche.
Mrs. Duggan's allegations
The coroner, Dr. William Dolman, reached his conclusion after studying evidence presented by Jeremiah's mother, a retired school teacher living in Golders Green, London, who has conducted an 18-month investigation into her son's death, and who has spent her life savings and sold her home to raise funds to pursue the case.
In court, Mrs. Duggan described the Schiller Institute as a "dangerous and political cult with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics." The court heard that the German police (BKA) investigation had relied on statements made to them by members of the Schiller Institute, many of which had turned out to be untrue.
Mrs. Duggan believes her son was a victim of mind-control techniques used by cults to snare people into joining them. She is being supported by the British Foreign Office in her quest for a new German investigation. Baroness Elizabeth Symons, head of Consular Services at the Foreign Office has helped Mrs. Duggan launch the Justice for Jeremiah website. Nikolas Becker, a Berlin-based lawyer who represented former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker during the Berlin Wall shootings trial, is representing the Duggan family in their efforts to have the German suicide verdict overturned.
The LaRouche organization is regarded by many as an extremist cult. Erica Duggan has told reporters that, when German police broke the news of her son's death, they said: "Go nowhere near these people. They are dangerous." The inquest heard that a Scotland Yard report describes the LaRouche organization as "a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections."
LaRouchies, as they are known to American journalists, believe that the British royal family is involved in the international drug trade; that the Secret Intelligence Service and Prince Philip killed Princess Diana; that rogue elements within the U.S. military were involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; and that the Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division (Tavistock) specifications, and promoted in Britain by agencies . . . controlled by British intelligence."
During his stay in Wiesbaden, Jeremiah said in telephone calls to his parents and his French girlfriend, Maya, that he found the conference stimulating. However, Mrs. Duggan says that, after her son's death, she met Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, a scientific adviser to the Schiller Institute, who told her that Jeremiah had reacted strongly when he heard Schiller Institute members blame Jews for the Iraq war. Jeremiah allegedly stood up during a meeting and exclaimed: "But I'm a Jew!"
As well as the two-day conference, Jeremiah decided to attend what the inquest heard was a "cadre school" held by the LaRouche Youth Movement in a Wiesbaden youth hostel, attended by about 50 members.
Six days after he arrived in Germany, in the early hours of Thursday, March 27, Jeremiah telephoned his girlfriend in France. In a statement to Scotland Yard, Maya said Jeremiah sounded incoherent and faint. He told her: "I'm under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more, or what are lies." He said his arms and legs hurt and he had discovered some "very grave things". He told her he would be returning to Paris the next day, though he had previously said he had no money for a train or plane ticket and could not get a lift with the LaRouche Youth Movement members until Sunday, March 30.
After this phone call, Jeremiah telephoned his mother just before 4:30 a.m. and said: "Mum, I'm in terrible trouble, deep trouble. I want to be out of this. It's too much for me. I can't do this. I want out ..." His mother said he was speaking quietly, as though afraid of being overheard. The line went dead. He called back seconds later and said, "I am frightened." She told him she loved him. At this, he shouted, "I want to see you now," and began to spell out the name of the town he was in. At that point, the line went dead again.
Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah ran out onto the Berliner Strasse, a busy road five kilometers from the youth hostel where he was staying, and was killed. The first car only grazed him, knocking off the vehicle's wing mirror. According to witness statements pieced together by the police, it seems he ran for another kilometer down the road. A second car knocked him down, then a third car ran over him. Drivers have told police he looked as though he was running for his life, not trying to end it. The second driver who hit him said Jeremiah ran toward the car with his arms outstretched and his mouth open. His mother told the inquest she believes Jeremiah was trying to flag down someone to help him, and that his mouth was open because he was screaming.
Erica Duggan, whose father was a German Jew, told the Times: “It is ironic that my father fled the Holocaust and my son ended up dying on Berliner Strasse."
After her son had telephoned her, but before news of his death reached her, Erica Duggan managed to obtain a telephone number for the youth hostel Jeremiah was staying in. A woman she believes to be a manager at the Schiller Institute, Ortrun Cramer, came to the telephone. Ms. Cramer was among a group of international observers at the Michigan Democratic Caucuses on March 11, 2000 who watched the count of votes for Lyndon LaRouche. At the time, she was an authorized representative of the Vienna-based International Progress Organization.
Duggan told The Times she heard Cramer say: "It's the mother." Duggan and Cramer had a brief conversation during which Cramer said Nouvelle Solidarité was a news agency and did not "take responsibility for an individual’s actions."
The coroner's inquest heard that, after Jeremiah's death, Ms. Cramer was found to be in possession of his passport, which he would have needed to get home to France. One of the issues the family wants to resolve is whether Ms. Cramer took possession of Jeremiah's passport before his death, which would indicate the organization may have tried to restrict his movements.
The allegations of mind control
The Duggan family's lawyer, Nicholas Becker, told a British newspaper: "There is enough evidence was probably in a hopeless psychotic situation and there is no evidence that there was any mental illness in his family. It is known these kind of organizations produce this kind of psychotic breakdown."
Lyndon LaRouche wrote extensively during the 1970s on how psychoanalytic techniques might be used to address "neurotic blocks to creativity."
Under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche wrote in 1973 that: "the short-term focal objective of the Labor Committees' work in applied psychology is the willful development of powers of creative mentation in . . . the organization's cadres . . . The direct conscious perception of the fundamental emotion (love = creative mentation) . . . has been classically identified by the subject as an overwhelming (“oceanic”) and absolutely terrifying “non-erotic” feeling of “love-death” . . . Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion . . . Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse."
The LaRouche organization's rebuttal
In a June 2004 article in the organization's weekly magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, Larouche's Director of Counter-Intelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, writes that Jeremiah had told his room-mates at the conference that he had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an illness that Steinberg alleges can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia.
Steinberg writes that Jeremiah had begun to show signs of emotional stress the day before his suicide and had fled from the youth hostel where he was staying at 3:30 in the morning. On the Sunday prior to his death, according to Steinberg, Duggan had tried to find a pharmacy where he could obtain some prescription drugs. When a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer telephoned Jeremiah's girlfriend, Maya, in Paris to ask whether she had heard from him, she allegedly asked, in what Steinberg calls a cynical tone: "Is there a river nearby?", the implication being that Jeremiah was already known to have suicidal tendencies. Maya has told reporters she asked this only because she was trying to find Wiesbaden on a map.
In the same article, Steinberg also writes that Jeremiah, Erica Duggan and her divorced husband attended group counseling sessions at the Tavistock Clinic in London when Jeremiah was seven years old.
Erica Duggan does not deny this. One of the claims of the Lyndon LaRouche organization is that the Tavistock Institute is itself involved in mind control. Mrs. Duggan is worried that Jeremiah may have questioned the group's views on the Tavistock.
Steinberg also writes that, just after her son's death, Mrs. Duggan met with representatives of the Schiller Institute -- one of whom Erica Duggan says was Ortrun Cramer -- for several hours in what Steinberg describes as a "sympathetic" meeting. He alleges that Mrs. Duggan's attitude toward the Schiller Institute changed only after British minister Baroness Elizabeth Symons intervened in the affair. According to Steinberg, Baroness Symons is a member of the "trans-Atlantic network" that is out to get LaRouche because of his opposition to what LaRouche calls the Blair-Cheney war in Iraq.
References
- The Schiller Institute
- The LaRouche Youth Movement
- Full proceedings of the Schiller Institute Conference which Jeremiah attended
- A Guardian article on Jeremiah Duggan's inquest
- Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität or The Civil Rights Movement of Solidarity
- A summary by Jeremiah's family of the coroner's summing up
- A 1985 Washington Post article with testimony from former LaRouche members
- A 2004 Washington Post article on Jeremiah Duggan and allegations that the LaRouche organization uses "brainwashing" techniques on recruits
- Article detailing LaRouche claim about the Beatles
- The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons. The LaRouche response to the press accounts of the Duggan case
- Observer article on Erica Duggan's investigation
- Erica Duggan's version of her conversation with Dr. Tennenbaum of the Institute
- A London Times article on Jeremiah Duggan
- The Tavistock Grin from LaRouche's Campaigner magazine, 1968
- The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party by Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche), 1973
- Executive Intelligence Review
Other external links
- The Cult and the Candidate
- The Justice for Jeremiah website
- Information about LaRouche on the Cults on Campus website
- BBC news article on Jeremiah Duggan's death
- Beyond Psychoanalysis by Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche), 1973
- Disinfopedia article on the Tavistock Clinic
- Video of BBC television report on British response to Jeremiah's death