Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American politician, and a perennial candidate for President of the United States. While he associates himself with the Democratic Party, he has never been that party's nominee for office and he is not accepted within the mainstream of the party, although he has won the acceptance of Democratic Party mavericks such as Senator Eugene McCarthy and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. He has also won some non-binding Democratic state primaries, including North Dakota in 1992 and Michigan in 2000. He believes that a monetary-financial crisis akin to the Great Depression is imminent, and was a candidate in the 2004 US Presidential Election. In his early political career LaRouche often used the pseudonym Lyn Marcus.

His political views are extremely controversial and are characterized by his belief in a number of complex conspiracy theories, involving global plots by such figures as the British Royal Family (especially the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh), George P. Shultz, and George H. W. Bush and other circles of international bankers engaging in what he has characterized as a "synarchist" political movement of the oligarchy. A typical claim is that the government of East Germany-- with the complicity of U.S. government and private organizations! -- attempted to frame him for the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. According to LaRouche followers, this claim was corroborated on Swedish national radio in August of 1992, by a leading former East German Stasi officer, Dr. Herbert Brehmer. Some of LaRouche's opponents on the political conservative right have characterized him as a fascist and a communist, while some of his opponents on the political liberal and socialist left have characterized him as a fascist, Bonapartist, and a right-wing populist. LaRouche currently characterizes himself as an Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat.

According to Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, however:


 * "Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.[1] Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a 'humanist' elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions."


 * Chip Berlet & Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, p. 273.

The views of Lyndon LaRouche cover a wide variety of topics including history, economics, politics, cultural issues, and various conspiracy theories. They are the source of much controversy, his critics and supporters often have difficulty agreeing on the meaning of statements he has made. This is complicated by the fact that LaRouche's views have changed considerably over time, particularly during the 1970s when he abandoned much of his Marxist philosophy, and moved towards the right.

While his followers see LaRouche's views as being those of a brilliant and original thinker, his critics see them as conspiratorial and in some cases, anti-semitic.

Overview
According to LaRouche's published writings, he regards government as an expression of the highest aspirations of the citizenry. He believes that the material and cultural progress of humanity is the proper concern of government, and that the state does not serve a merely negative function, e.g., to ward off hostile foreign powers or restrain criminals. LaRouche regards "freedom" as the right to participate in what he sees as the progress of humanity, which requires certain minimum standards of material well-being and universal public education to equip the citizen to play that role. In LaRouche's view, the political system that best enables this is the republic.

The LaRouche network has issued statements on a number of controversial issues:


 * They have called for a moratorium on Third World debt.
 * They have opposed the so-called counterculture, and the legalization of recreational drugs, arguing that these create a "bread and circuses" culture of self-centered hedonism, and a highly manipulable population. LaRouche calls for a revival of classical culture, particularly in the domain of public education. This is a view that the NCLC and descendent LaRouche organizations have held consistently since their beginnings in the late 1960s.
 * They have supported nuclear energy and other complex technologies often opposed by the environmentalist movement, arguing that human survival depends on a progression of technologies. (see LaRouche on Economics.)
 * They have called for the banning of HMOs, and LaRouche has formally endorsed H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act of 2005 or National Health Insurance Act.
 * They believe that the idea of man-made global warming is a "fraud", and have referred to the Oscar-winning documentary film An Inconvenient Truth as "the Great Luddite Hoax." Larouche proposes an alternate theory for the global climate change saying "The Crab Nebula emits cosmic rays which have significant effect on developments in the earth's atmosphere." LaRouche has endorsed the British TV documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
 * They defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment scandal, claiming that those who called for Clinton's resignation or impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky scandal were hiding their true motives.
 * They opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supported Argentina in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war, arguing that under the Monroe Doctrine, the United States was obliged to oppose European colonies in the Western Hemisphere.
 * They opposed, from 1979 onwards, the deregulation of trucking, airlines, telecommunications, public utilities, and financial services in the U.S., during a period when deregulation was embraced by the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
 * They oppose the United Nations and other international organizations, particularly the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in cases where LaRouche says they interfere with the concept of the Westphalian state and the Platonic ideal of a "perfectly sovereign nation-state republic". This holds especially true for their conduct toward the nations of the Third World, and LaRouche further argues that this conduct represents neo-colonialism.

Theory of history as a conflict between elites
According to LaRouche's published writings, his views on politics originated from his understanding of epistemology and intellectual history. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he wrote numerous essays in which he claimed the history of European civilization is a millennia long war between two groups of societal elites. In 1978 he wrote The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites, in which he interpreted conflict as a battle between two conflicting images of man, one proposed by Plato and the other proposed by Aristotle. LaRouche favors the Platonists and opposes the Aristoteleans. As LaRouche describes it, Plato and his followers saw the universe as an ongoing process of creation, in which man plays a central role through his powers of cognition. Aristotle and his followers, on the other hand, saw the universe as static and fixed, with humans being just another species of animal.

The political expression of Platonism is the republic, while the rival Aristotelean view is oligarchical. The republicans seek a form of society that cherishes the creative mental powers of the individual, and seeks to cultivate those powers as the key to economic and cultural progress. The oligarchs seek to suppress the mental powers of the individual, because they prefer a fixed, feudal form of society, and consider change to be disruptive and dangerous.

In LaRouche's opinion, the conflict between these two camps is the essence of politics, and all of the contemporary notions about "left vs. right" and "liberal vs. conservative" are nothing more than a red herring.

Journalist and LaRouche critic Dennis King wrote in his book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Chaps 28-30), that LaRouche focuses his critique on a supposed "oligarchical" elite--an age-old conspiracy based on usury, tax-farming, banking swindles and the like, that is depicted as unremittingly evil. LaRouche identifies the ancient incarnation of this elite with "the anti-human bestialists" and "parasites," "Babylonians and other non-Jews" who "cooked up the hoax known as the Old Testament." He associates the elite's medieval form with Italian banking families that he blames, according to King, for poisoning Popes and causing the Black Plague. As to the modern elite, LaRouche has connected it with a cabal of banking families in London. . According to King, LaRouche has described this elite in many of his articles as an alien race hostile to the human species. For instance, King cites LaRouche's The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites (1978):

"The ruling British elite are like animals--not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings."

LaRouche followed this statement with one in his Executive Intelligence Review in which he asserted that inner circles of the oligarchy recognize him as "the ancient and feared adversary of their own evil species" and consider him to be their "potential destroyer." LaRouche claimed in this article that when the oligarchy sees the influence of his work:

"they tense, growling such phrases as 'potential danger', 'more dangerous than Hitler', 'kill it before it succeeds in getting a real foothold in shaping events.'"

Opposing this alien species is what LaRouche calls the "humanist" elite--the force of good in his world view, who are led today by LaRouche himself. LaRouche claims that the struggle of the two elites is reflected in the opposing images of man proposed by Plato and Aristotle, and the camps that follow them. Additionally, he discusses internal battles within each major religion occurring between Platonic and Aristotelean factions. In the case of Judaism, he says that at the time of the Roman Empire, "...Judaism itself was divided between the reactionary 'orthodox' currents and the tendency for a humanistic, Neoplatonic transformation of Judaism."

Physical science
LaRouche associates himself with what he characterizes as the Platonic current in physical science. He writes of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's work, De Docta Ignorantia, that it "became the keystone of a series of scientific papers on which the principal line of progress of modern, and also viable European science depended: that best typified by the work of Cusa himself, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Pierre de Fermat, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl F. Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann." According to an official biographical sketch, LaRouche "rejects the empiricist, cartesian, and positivist notions of both 'objective science,' and the separation of science from art." He has made attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, alleging that he and his associates plagiarized Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation and arrived at an inferior version, as is illustrated by the Three Body Problem, although neither version gives a general solution. He also asserts that Newton's version of the Calculus is inferior to that of Leibniz. (see also Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy.) LaRouche has called Newton a "half-witted hoaxster and specialist in witchcraft." (see Isaac Newton's occult studies.)

LaRouche vs. the media
There are a number of characterizations of LaRouche's views that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, routinely appeared in many American and British news media, and are regarded by LaRouche and his organization as malicious distortions, or black propaganda. Referring to what it terms the "John Train Salon," a grouping which included Chip Berlet and Dennis King, the LaRouche organization writes: ";Train's documented function was to establish the common guidelines for the 'black propaganda' lies to be used jointly by the U.S. news media. During 1984–1988, virtually all of the often massive coverage of LaRouche in the U.S. major news media was lies based on the 1983–1984 formulas adopted by the Train salon."

One example that has appeared in many press accounts is the claim that LaRouche said "The Queen of England is a drug dealer." According to EIR, this "bit of black propaganda is a reference to the book Dope, Inc., first published in 1979, which laid bare the role of the London-centered offshore financial institutions and allied intelligence services, in running the global drug trade, from the time of Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars against China."

Marxist roots
Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Marxist but he and his National Caucus of Labor Committees abandoned this outlook in the 1970s. LaRouche no longer opposes capitalism as an economic system, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class. To LaRouche, the main enemy is now the conspiracy of financiers he calls the Synarchist International.

According to Tim Wohlforth, during and after the period of his break with orthodox Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" which was derived from Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realise their leading role in society. He was also influenced by Gramsci's concept of a hegemon as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as being able to become such a hegemonic force. He rejected, however, Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself.

LaRouche was also influenced by his readings of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Karl Marx's Capital developing his own "theory of reindustralization", arguing that the west would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimise costs (see neocolonialism.) This attempt would be unsuccessful, however, and would lead to catastrophic economic collapse. To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments have since been stripped of their quasi-Marxist language and citations, his core theories have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.

Wohlforth writes: "This scheme, which shaped LaRouche writings and agitation in the late '60s and early '70s, was presented in an increasingly frenetic manner, bolstered by predictions of economic doom. LaRouche was a crisis-monger of the highest order. LaRouche and his followers became increasingly convinced that the fate of the world rested with their group and their great leader. The problem lay with the stupidity of the nation's leaders and the boorishness of the masses. If only LaRouche were in power, all the world's troubles — perhaps even the rats problem in New York City — would be resolved swiftly."

Fascism
LaRouche himself frequently describes his enemies as fascists or proto-fascists. On the other hand, LaRouche himself is frequently described by some critics as a fascist. Journalist Dennis King used this thesis in the title of his book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.

Operation Mop-Up, which is said to have consisted of violent physical attacks on left-wing meetings, is the genesis of most accusations of LaRouche being a fascist.

Since the 1980s, a new set of theories about fascism has gained attention in academia. These include the work of Roger Griffin (fascism as a right-wing populist movement calling for heroic rebirth — palingenesis) and Emilio Gentile (the sacralization of politics). According to Griffin:

"[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence”"

Using these and related theories, critics such as Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons have described LaRouche as a neofascist.

According to research conducted by journalist Dennis King, LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism in the 1970s, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining an outward stance of anti-fascism. King generally claims that LaRouche's public statements do not reflect his actual views.

As for moving from the left to the right, historically a number of fascists started out as socialists, and critics argue this is the case with LaRouche.

Conspiracy theories
LaRouche steered the NCLC away from the Marxist left while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left. LaRouche's critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his new orientation as being a conspiracy theory worldview, or conspiracism. They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

LaRouche writes, "to conspire is human", and while dismissing what he calls the "populist forms of 'conspiracy theories,'" such as those of the John Birch Society, he also criticizes the critics of "conspiracy theorizing", as typified by Daniel Pipes:

"The pervasive fraud in Pipes' dogma, is that he evades the fact, that the primary issue is whether a certain type of, or particular report of a conspiracy is truthful, or not. On this account, he perpetrates the widely practiced fraud of petitio principii: asserting that the mere evidence that a conspiracy is implied in an argument of a case, is presumptive proof that that argument is therefore axiomatically false, without further consideration,"

In the 1960s and 1970s, LaRouche was particularly focused on the supposed danger posed by globalists such as Nelson Rockefeller believing that they were attempting to rescue a debt-strapped international financial system by imposing austerity and forced-labor programs on impoverished populations in order to facilitate debt collection. LaRouche called this "Fascism with a Democratic Face", and charged that it was similar to the tactics of German Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.

LaRouche has also argued that Adolf Hitler was brought to power by the British; Menachem Begin's "policies are indistinguishable… from Nazi policies"; The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications; and that rogue elements within the American military took part in, or planned, the September 11, 2001 attacks as part of a coup d'état.

In "An Open Letter to President Brezhnev" (June 2, 1981) LaRouche identified those pushing the world toward war as "the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."

LaRouche claims there is also a conspiracy by the "Establishment" and the press it allegedly controls to deny him coverage and prevent his views becoming known.

The "British" conspiracy
According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade. . In addition, "The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" (2004) names the British Fabian Society as a potential source of international conspiratorial authority, citing the membership of prominent British democratic socialists and social democrats, especially within the Labour Party and the British government.

LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. This is based primarily on three books authored by members of his organization:


 * Dope, Inc. by David Goldman, Konstandinos Kalimtgis and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978 (ISBN 0918388082): this book discusses the history of narcotics trafficking, beginning with the Opium War, and alleges that British interests continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money laundering in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of London. In an interview, LaRouche asserted that of the Queen, "Of course she's pushing drugs…that is in the sense of a responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it is happening and she isn't stopping it."


 * The Civil War and the American System by Allen Salibury, 1979 (ISBN : 0918388023): alleges that British interests encouraged and financed the secession movement and supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War, because they preferred North America to be a primitive agrarian economy that they could dominate through policies of free trade.


 * The New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White, 1980 (ISBN 093348805X): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells attempted to control scientific progress in order to keep the world backward and more easily managed by Imperialism. In this conspiracy theory, Wells wished Science to be controlled by some kind of priesthood and kept from the common man, while Russell wished to stifle it altogether by restricting it to a closed system of formal logic, that would prohibit the introduction of new ideas. This conspiracy also involved the promotion of the counterculture.

LaRouche publications have also frequently referred to a speech by Henry Kissinger made at Chatham House in 1982, as evidence for a theory that Kissinger was a British agent. In this speech, Kissinger said that he preferred the post-war policy of Churchill over that of FDR, and stated that "In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department."

An article published in 1998 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard claimed that LaRouche had said the Queen was involved in the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The LaRouche publication EIR responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to author Jeff Steinberg's appearance on the British ITV television program about the Diana controversy. Steinberg, however, "refused to rule out" the possibility that Prince Philip had ordered an assassination of Diana.

In 1999, an article in the LaRouche-controlled Executive Intelligence Review accused senior advisers to the Royal family and MI6 of threatening to assassinate him, after a British women's magazine called Take a Break published an article about him entitled "Shut This Man's Mouth." On August 2, 1999, Debra Hanania-Freeman, national spokeswoman for LaRouche, issued the following statement about the alleged threat: "After consulting with security experts familiar with the modus operandi of British intelligence networks, we are treating the piece as a cover for an MI6 order, probably with direct backing from someone in the royal household, to assassinate Lyndon LaRouche…. The inflammatory article … reflects a growing hysteria around Buckingham Palace, over the growing global influence of LaRouche's ideas and his continuing exposé of the British oligarchy…

"We are also passing the information on to the White House so they can assess whether the article also constitutes a threat to the security of President Clinton."

His director of counterintelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, has said that he "could not rule out" that Prince Philip was behind the death of Princess Diana.

Children of Satan
Beginning in 2003, LaRouche's presidential campaign committee distributed a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan", which were later consolidated into a book by the same name. The pamphlets charged that there was a conspiracy dominated by what are called Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss) within the Bush administration, and that the dominant personality in this conspiracy was Dick Cheney. LaRouche claimed that these conspirators deliberately misled the American public and the US Congress in order to initiate the US invasion of Iraq. They claimed that the Straussians created the Office of Special Plans in order to fabricate intelligence and bypass traditional intelligence channels.

An important part of this theory was the LaRouchian analysis of the ideas of Leo Strauss, which borrowed heavily from the writings of Shadia Drury. Neoconservative commentators, led by Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, have condemned LaRouche's views on this subject, and worry that it may have influenced other commentators who subsequently published a similar analysis, such as Seymour Hersch and James Atlas of the New York Times. Bartley quotes the pamphlet's assertion that a "cabal of [Leo] Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" have plotted a "not-so-silent coup." Alleging that "Mr. LaRouche has chosen an Aryan-nation phrase for Jews (descendants of Cain, who was the result of Satan seducing Eve, in this perfervid theology)," Bartley terms the "Children of Satan" title "overt anti-Semitism." He also suggests that the use of the terms "Straussian" and "Neo-conservative" may be coded anti-Semitism when used by LaRouche and other writers.

The Encyclopedia Judaica interprets the title "Children of Satan" to be a form of "masked anti-Semitism." An entry in the encyclopedia includes this passage: "A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the "Children of Satan," which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel. In a twisted irony, the pamphlets imply the neoconservatives are the real neo-Nazis."

Social engineering
LaRouche has charged that various projects were initiated in the post-World War II era to change the culture of the United States and Europe, in order to eradicate the vestiges of policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Among the key agencies of this social engineering project, according to LaRouche, were the Frankfurt School and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. LaRouche has also claimed that the British Tavistock Institute is a "psychological warfare organization" which launched the "practice of mass-indoctrination" in use of cannabis and LSD.

Conspiracies directed at himself
LaRouche has asserted that he is a target for assassination. He sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him. In leaflets supporting his application of concealed weapons permits for his bodyguards in Leesburg, Virginia, he wrote: "I have a major personal security problem…[Without the permits] the assassination teams of professional mercenaries now being trained in Canada and along the Mexico border may be expected to start arriving on the streets of Leesburg…If they come, there will be many people dead or mutilated within as short an interval as 60 seconds of fire.'" According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche says he has been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche made a speech in 1983, stating that, "Since late 1973, I have been repeatedly the target of serious assassination threats and my wife has been three times the target of attempted assassination…My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet President Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Gadaffi, Ayatollah Khomaini and the Malthusian lobby.'" Regarding LaRouche's paramilitary security force, armed with semi-automatic weapons, a spokesperson said that they were necessary because LaRouche was the subject of "assassination conspiracies". LaRouche testified 1986 that "I have been 'safe-housed' by friends and associates in many different places because of threats to my physical security". Later that same year his "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded by law enforcement officers during a search of his offices. While surrounded, LaRouche sent a telegram to President Ronald Reagan saying that an attempt to arrest him "would be an attempt to kill me. I will not submit passively to such an arrest, but . . . I will defend myself." During the subsequent federal trial he was driven to court in an armored limousine, and a bodyguard accompanied him into the courtroom, while another guard stood outside the door. When convicted he predicted that he would be assassinated in prison. A cellmate, televangelist Jim Bakker, later wrote, "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."

In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche says the raid on his operation was the work of Raisa Gorbachev, whom he describes as outranking her husband Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the nomenklatura due to her leadership of the Soviet Cultural Fund. LaRouche asserted in 2004 that the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was "used, and therefore probably intended, to set into motion an environment for what would later pass as a 'justified, retaliatory'" killing of LaRouche." In an interview the same year, he said that the Soviet Union opposed him because he invented the Strategic Defense Initiative. "The Soviet government hated me for it. Gorbachev also hated my guts and called for my assassination and imprisonment and so forth." LaRouche asserted that he has survived these threats because of protection by unnamed U.S. government officials. "Even when they don't like me, they consider me a national asset, and they don't like to have their national assets killed."

LaRouche has charged that much negative press coverage during the 1980s, as well as aspects of his trial, was orchestrated by powerful persons from outside the journalistic community. In particular he names John Train, who he says "took charge of key aspects of the propaganda and witness tampering." He also names Richard Mellon Scaife as a financier of the efforts against him. More recently, he has claimed that negative coverage in the British press was orchestrated by Baroness Elizabeth Symons.

Culture and identity
LaRouche wrote a series of articles while imprisoned for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax evasion in the 1990s, in which he discussed the relationship of artistic creativity to scientific creativity, and how an original discovery may be communicated to others; these articles were entitled "On the Subject of Metaphor."

LaRouche frequently recounts an incident which took place during his wartime service:


 * Later, as a young man, shortly after the close of World War II, I first heard a recorded performance by conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, while I was stationed temporarily at an army camp outside Calcutta, India. My recognition of the qualitative superiority of Furtwängler's conducting, an effect which I later identified with his use of the phrase "playing between the notes", had a profound impact, in its contribution to shaping my view of Classical artistic composition in general.

Central to LaRouche's theory of economics (see above) is the idea that there are certain higher mental capacities, associated with hypothesis formation, that are the essential topic of study in economics, and LaRouche came to believe that classical art, and in particular classical music, provided the most useful domain in which to investigate these capacities. Consequently, classical music has played a central role in the history of LaRouche and his network, and brought LaRouche into a collaborative relationship with artists such as Norbert Brainin and William Warfield.

LaRouche's views about several other areas of culture have been controversial; especially comments about Jews and the Holocaust, women and feminism, and AIDS and homosexuals.

Jews and the Holocaust
LaRouche condemns anti-Semitism in his published writings. He writes, "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today." However, he has been accused of anti-Semitism and also Holocaust denial.

From the early 1970s he regularly criticized Zionism. In NCLC publications during the 1970s, some Jewish individuals were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime, and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" significantly influenced the U.S. government. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk." However, during this period LaRouche publications such as Campaigner magazine often promoted Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides as positive examples of the "Platonic humanist current in Judaism", and most of the leadership of the NCLC was Jewish. In 1979 the LaRouche publication Campaigner published an issue entitled "Zionism is not Judaism."

Dennis King has described LaRouche as expressing anti-Semitic ideas in both open and coded form. As an example of the open form, King cites LaRouche's statement (under the pen name L. Marcus ) in The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), where he said that "Jewish culture … is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." As an example of the coded form, King alleges that when LaRouche and his followers use the term "British" in certain contexts which King characterizes as "conspiracist" or "racialist", they actually mean "Jewish." One example is an unsigned editorial in the official LaRouche newspaper New Solidarity in 1978 which states: "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." King also writes that a photograph from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of a fusion experiment, published in various LaRouche publications, was "reminiscent of the swastika."

LaRouche has also been accused of Holocaust denial. In 1978, LaRouche wrote (in "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism", New Solidarity, December 8, 1978) that only 1.5 million Jews died during World War II :


 * It is argued that the culmination of the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust proves that Zionism is so essential to 'Jewish survival' that any anti-Zionist is therefore not only an anti-Semite, but that any sort of criminal action is excusable against anti-Zionists in memory of the mythical 'six million Jewish victims' of the Nazi "holocaust."


 * This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive "appropriate technology" for the employment of "inferior races", a small fraction of the tens of million of others — especially Slavs — who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn proposes today. Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of Gypsies and the butchery of Communists.

LaRouche places the word "holocaust" in quotation marks (British: inverted commas), or scare quotes.

LaRouche's critics claim he is a "disguised anti-Semite", in that he takes the classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and substitutes the word "Zionist" for the word "Jew", and ascribes the classical anti-Semitic caricature of the "scheming Jew" to particular Jewish individuals and groups of Jews, rather than to the Jews as a whole. According to LaRouche:


 * The Czarist Okhrana's Protocols of Zion include a hard kernel of truth which no mere Swiss court decision could legislate out of existence. The fallacy of the Protocols of Zion is that it attributes the alleged conspiracy to Jews generally, to Judaism. A corrected version of The Protocols would stipulate that the evil oaths cited were actually the practices of variously a Paris branch of B'nai B'rith and the evidence the Okhrana turned up in tracing the penetration of the Romanian branch of B'nai B'rith (Zion) into such Russian centres of relevance as Odessa…

LaRouche's stated principal target in his article is "Zionism." Zionism is a Jewish political movement supporting the creation and, since 1948, defense of Israel as a Jewish state. LaRouche believes that Zionism is an underground conspiracy existing since the 16th century. "Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University", LaRouche says. LaRouche denies equating "Zionism" with Judaism.

In 1978, the same year LaRouche's article cited The Protocols, the LaRouche group published Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War against the U.S., which cited the Protocols and defended its authenticity, liking the "Elders of Zion" to the Rothschild banking family, the British Royal family, and the Italian Mafia, and the Israeli Mossad, General Pike, and the B'nai B'rith. (Dope, Inc.) Later editions left out cites to The Protocols. This is the genesis of the claim that LaRouche has said the Queen of England runs drugs. When asked by an NBC reporter in 1984 about the Queen of England and drug running, LaRouche replied, "Of course she's pushing drugs…that is in a sense of responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it." Also in 1978, LaRouche wrote the essay entitled "The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites," in which he refers to "the myth of the 'international Jewish conspiracy'" while discussing the "role of the Jewish financial houses in the horrors which have beset civilization since the eight century BC." LaRouche has said, Zionism is controlled by the financiers of London: "Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of the international Jewry", and "Zionist cultism is among the most important of the levers through which British criminality and miscalculation is plunging the world towards [war]." "You cannot be a Zionist and also a Jew", he writes.

LaRouche has never explicitly repudiated the views expressed in the 1978 article. In 1980, New York state Judge Michael Dontzin ruled that: "Upon consideration of the voluminous evidence presented to the court, it is clear that ADL's characterization of plaintiffs as anti-Semitic constitutes fair comment. Plaintiffs have continuously expressed highly critical views about prominent Jewish figures, families and organizations, such as ADL and B'nai Brith and have connected them with plaintiffs' critical views on Zionism, Zionists, Mid-East foreign policy and international monetary policies."

The charge of anti-Semitism in the LaRouche network resurfaced in the media in 2004 in accounts of the death of a young Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who had been attending a Schiller Institute event in Germany; and in criticism of how the LaRouche group framed the issue of the U.S.-led war in Iraq in ways that recalled anti-Semitic stereotypes.

LaRouche delivered a speech which was highly critical of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. This speech, and related articles from the LaRouche movement, attacked Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.

Chip Berlet argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses anti-Semitism through the use of "coded language" and by attacking neoconservatives.. According to Berlet:
 * Antisemitic conspiracism is aggressively peddled to progressives by several rightwing groups including the international network run by Lyndon LaRouche, a frequently unsuccessful US presidential candidate. While LaRouche rhetoric can seem bonkers, his followers are successful in recruiting students on college campuses and in networking with some Black Nationalist groups. Sometimes Arab publications circulate articles from LaRouche group analysts. When LaRouche publications condemn the neoconservative policy advisers to President Bush as the ‘Children of Satan’, it echoes historic antisemitic rhetoric about evil Jewish conspiracies tracing back to medieval Europe.

Daniel Levitas writes:


 * For almost three decades, Lyndon LaRouche has engaged in political activities that have been chameleonlike in their shifts from left to right; however, he has been consistent in creating and elaborating conspiracy theories that contain a strong dose of antisemitism.

Psycho-sexuality and political organizing
In the early 1970s, LaRouche published controversial comments about psycho-sexuality and political leadership.

In 1973, LaRouche authored an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis". In the article, he uses the ideas of Sigmund Freud and also Lawrence S. Kubie (author of The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process) as a springboard for a theory that the understanding of difficult concepts, and the realization of a political sense of identity, were often "blocked" by neurotic habits of thinking that were cultural in origin. He theorized that each culture had characteristic flaws that resulted in blocks to effective political organizing. LaRouche and his colleagues conducted studies of different "national ideologies," including Germen, French, Italian, English, Latin American, Greek, and Swedish.

In an article, "The Sexual Impotency of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party", LaRouche produced a harsh criticism of Machismo. He wrote that "the classical case is the sexually athletic Macho who regards himself as a successful performer in bed, the Macho who has much to say and think respecting his capacities for various modes of penetration and frequency and cubic centimeters of ejaculations. The ugly secret of the matter is that he is almost totally sexually impotent." Regarding the role of women, he adds, "The task of real women's liberation is to generally strengthen women's self-consciousness and their power and opportunities to act upon self-consciousness. ...Since the woman has a special, doubly-hard struggle to realize a socially potent intellectual life, it is necessary to go beyond mere self-consciousness of adult individual roles, to self-consciousness of the process of struggling against the special kinds of problems which confront women in their efforts to play a positive role in the socialist movement."

LaRouche's critics cite anonymous disaffected ex-members, who claim that LaRouche held theories of sexual dynamics and female domination of men which resulted in a breakdown of relations between the sexes and the break up of dozens of relationships as women were attacked for being "sadistic bitches" and "witches", and for "mother-dominating" men.

Several sources refer to an unpublished internal memo, dated August 16, 1973 and entitled "The Politics of Male Impotence." In this memo, LaRouche told his followers that the mother is the principal source of impotence. He wrote:

"I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS &mdash; by taking your bedrooms away from you … What I shall do is expose to you the cruel act of your sexual impotence . . . I will take away from you all hope that you can flee the terrors of politics to the safety of 'personal life.' I shall do this by showing to you that your frightened personal sexual life contains for you such terrors as the outside world could never offer you. I will thus destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical. I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee...Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?'"

A September 1973 editorial in the NCLC's Campaigner charged that "[c]oncretely, all across the U.S.A., there are workers who are prepared to fight. They are held back, most immediately, by pressure from their wives."

AIDS and gays
In 1974, LaRouche formed a "biological holocaust task force" to analyze the effects of International Monetary Fund austerity policies in Africa. The task force published reports warning that these policies would cause a collapse of nutrition and sanitation, and could create an environment where pandemics of old or new diseases could begin. The reports compared the situation to the collapse of public health conditions which lead to the Black Plague which killed 1/3 to 2/3 of the population of 14th Century Europe. When AIDS was first recognized as a medical phenomenon, LaRouche activists were convinced that this was the pandemic about which the task force had warned. The LaRouche organization continues to blame the IMF for the spread of AIDS.

LaRouche activists formed the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC) in 1986 and in 1988 the "Prevent AIDS Now In California" (also PANIC) committee, each of which placed initiatives on the state ballot. The measures would have required that AIDS be returned to the California state list of communicable diseases, which are subject to Public Health laws. Both measures were overwhelmingly defeated at the polls. The Wall Street Journal wrote:

"The Wall Street Journal"

The argument in support of Proposition 69 which appeared in the Voter's Guide published by the State of California said that "These measures are not new; they are the same health measures applied, [by law] every day, to every other contagious disease."

Opponents of these initiatives characterized them as anti-gay. Since the gay community was initially one of the major sectors of the population to be affected by AIDS in the United States, the relationship of the disease to so-called gay lifestyles was hotly contested; among the measures which could have been implemented, had the initiative passed, were sexual contact tracing, which was depicted as an invasion of privacy by opponents of the initiatives, and possibly the closing of bathhouses or other environments where anonymous sexual contacts might take place. Under public health law, persons with communicable diseases may be subject to quarantine at the discretion of the health department; this possibility was raised to suggest that LaRouche wished to use the measure to persecute gays. Jean V. Hardisty, then director of Political Research Associates, charged that the "initiatives sought, in effect, to require quarantine for people with AIDS."

In 1986, the LaRouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) published a transcript of a speech by LaRouche, which critics claim represents open homophobic bigotry:

We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word. Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay", they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw! The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users. There are 20 million cocaine sniffers in the United States, at least. Of course it does affect their mind; it affects the way they vote!

What was the problem? The problem was the cultural paradigm shift. If someone comes up and says, "Yeah, but you can't interfere with the civil rights of an AIDS victim" — what the devil is this? You can't interfere with an AIDS victim killing hundreds of people, by spreading the disease to hundreds of people, which will kill them, during the period before he himself dies? So therefore, should we allow people with guns to go out and shoot people as they choose? Isn't that a matter of the civil rights of gun carriers? Or, if you've got an ax — if you can't aim too well, and just have an ax or a broad sword — shouldn't we allow people with broad swords and axes to go out and kill people indiscriminately as they choose, as a matter of their civil rights?

Where did this nonsense come from? Oh, we don't want to offend the gays! Gays are sensitive to their civil rights; this will lead to discrimination against gays!

They're already beating up gays with baseball bats around the country! Children are going to playgrounds, they go in with baseball bats, and they find one of these gays there, pederasts, trying to recruit children, and they take their baseball bats and they beat them up pretty bad. They'll kill one sooner or later. In Chicago, they're beating up gays that are hanging around certain schools, pederasts; children go out with baseball bats and beat them up-which is perfectly moral; they have the civil right to do that! It's a matter of children's civil rights!|Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The End of the Age of Aquarius?" EIR (Executive Intelligence Review), January 10, 1986, p. 40.

In the 1970s and 1980s, LaRouche and his supporters frequently wrote articles containing animosity towards homosexuals. In 1986, an editorial in the LaRouche publication Illinois Tribunal wrote that "… as a category, gays and lesbians do not represent a valid voting constituency, and neither do prostitutes, drug pushers, child molesters, warlocks, witches, pornographers, or others who are morally equivalent."

LaRouche wrote that if there were continued government inaction on AIDS, history might not judge harshly those who murdered gays in mob attacks in order to stop the spread of AIDS:

...the refusal of governments to take credible action to stop the wildfire spread of the hideously fatal infection, is prompting the greatest rate of violence-tending qualities of fear among teenagers... The lynchers themselves are a small portion of the the total population of the social strata from which they are drawn, but see themselves as ad hoc representatives of those strata and the fears and objectives of those strata. They are a special variety of political revolutionary, and express, spontaneously, the conspiratorial and other ethical characteristics of political revolutionaries …

The impact of this pattern of developments on Britain's youth gangs of violence-prone football fans is predictable. One can read their general line of thinking in advance. Since the idea of touching the person of the carrier is abhorrent, stones and the nadiest approximation of a collection of baseball bats, come to mind. Certain individuals, of known haunts, first suggest themselves as easy targets…

The point is fast approaching, that increasing portions of these populations will focus upon the fact, that a dead AIDS carrier ceases to be a carrier. If governments were to proceed with repeated mass-screenings of the population, and isolation of carriers, the likelihood of a teenager lynch-mob phenomenon would be small. If not, then other ways of reducing the number of carriers will become increasingly popular.

In that case, the lynch-mobs might be seen by later generations’ historians, as the only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction.|Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Teenage Gangs’ Lynchings of Gays is Foreseen Soon", New Solidarity, February 9, 1987, p. 8.

Cultural outlook
LaRouche often disparages the counterculture. In 1978, he wrote that "The Beatles had no genuine musical talent, but were a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division (Tavistock) specifications, and promoted in Britain by agencies which are controlled by British intelligence." LaRouche publications have also criticized China's ten year Cultural Revolution, characterizing it as a British-directed project to weaken China by countering the movement of Sun Yat-Sen and reducing China to a "primativist hell." LaRouche wrote in 1975 that: "The paranoid state is characteristic of the 'village commune' culture. Objectively, the model 'oriental village commune' is characterized by the fixing of the mode of production with a rigidity paralleling the behavioral stagnation of lower animal life….All the cognitive and related cultural achievements of capitalist development in music, philosophy, and so forth, are symptomatically denounced as 'in favor of the philosophical and cultural ideological relics of pre-1949 China's long barbarian past. Out of this hideous muck comes first a reactionary, actually counterrevolutionary rejection of the working class…'"

LaRouche and his publications have routinely praised the tradition of Confucius, which has been marginalized by the Communist government.

What LaRouche supporters see as praising classic culture, LaRouche critics see as a bias against non-white, non-European, non-patriarchal, non-heterosexual cultures and identities.

Other Sourcewatch Resources

 * Citizens Electoral Council

Supportive

 * The Substance of Morality
 * LaRouche Political Action Committee
 * World Larouche Youth Movement
 * Schiller Institute

Critical

 * John Mintz, The Cult Controversy includes a 1995 series on LaRouche and links to other Washington Post articles on LaRouche
 * LaRouche's Virginia conviction, The Washington Post, December 17, 1988
 * No Joke (the effect LaRouche has on young recruits) – Washington Post, October 2004
 * Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents
 * Dennis King's LaRouche Watch site.
 * Articles about LaRouche from Political Research Associates.
 * Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam, Nizkor Project
 * Lyndon Larouche/Executive Intelligence Review Series of articles from the Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults
 * True History of Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche) and the Labor Committees 1975 article published by the International Workers Party whose members joined LaRouche's NCLC for a period in the early 1970s.
 * Terry Kirby, The cult and the candidate, July 2004 (The Independent of London)
 * Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents ~ Chip Berlet and Chicago Lawyer newspaper
 * Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag ~ Chip Berlet and Joel Bellman
 * Lyndon LaRouche's Long Campaign (Newsday article on LaRouche's record of eight consecutive Presidential campaigns)
 * LaRouche Exposed ~ Pasadena City College
 * Archive of reviews of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism ~ book by Dennis King
 * Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism ~ Review
 * Anti-LaRouche article from the Australian paper, The Age ~ from the website of Rick Ross
 * Dennis King's LaRouche Watch site ~ includes full text of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism

Pro-Larouche
Portions of this page were adapted from Wikipedia.
 * Executive Intelligence Review: LaRouche Publications
 * 'He's a Bad Guy, But We Can't Say Why'
 * Lyndon LaRouche 2004 Presidential campaign
 * Executive Intelligence Real estate