We have some LaRouchite’s in our valley, and I hope to “stake out” there sites here-and-there as they talk to unsuspecting people. One lady today said she was just fed up with Obama, and I presume just grasping at straws in her political dissatisfaction. When I mentioned that they are technically a political cult she responded that, “she doesn’t judge the way ‘he is’ [Larouche] because she wants the government to run properly.” I can only laugh to myself and wag my head at the thought of how bad government would be (worse than Obama’s made it) if these guys were in charge. She later said “I want what God wants me to do,” somehow equating her giving $25 dollars to a political cult who practices brainwashing techniques, anti-Semitism, large swings in policy, and its members indicted in murder as something God wants her to do. The lack of thinking in today’s culture (religious, non-religious, Democratic or Republican) never ceases to amaze me. Never. (It reminds me of the recent story of Pastor Terry Jones saying God told him to burn the Qur’an and then telling him to not burn it, and then saying God said to postpone it with a possibility of burning [rain]. God is made into a weather forecaster for the person’s current emotional likes or dislikes and the exegetical study of the Bible and the already spoken “plan” for us is rejected in light of these emotional whims.)
So lets deal with a few items of interest for those walking up to their table. Anti-Semitism:
Given such views, it should be no surprise that the LaRouche organization has demonized the U.S. Justice Department unit charged with tracking down and deporting Nazi war criminals; indeed, the LaRouche organization, including such fronts as the Schiller Institute and the Fusion Energy Foundation, went all out in the 1980s to defend (as patriotic Americans and innocent victims of a Zionist vendetta) the likes of John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk of the Treblinka death camp; Karl Linnas, the butcher of the Tartu camp; Waffen SS mass murderer Tscherim Soobzokov; and Nazi rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph (who ran the an underground factory using slave labor from the Dora-Nordhausen camp—over 5,000 of his slaves died or were killed by the SS). (See “Old Nazis and New Dreams” in Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, pp. 75-81.)
9/11 Trutherism:
“This Israeli spy network inside the United States was unable to achieve their objective [war with Iraq] until President Bush was entrapped by the events of Sept. 11, 2001….Lyndon LaRouche demands to know: Is this not the motive that explains the who and why of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?” — “The Pollard Affair Never Ended!” leaflet issued in 2002 by “LaRouche in 2004” (LaRouche’s Democratic primary Presidential campaign committee).
“Under no circumstances, LaRouche assesses, could the attacks of Sept. 11 have been organized and directed by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda apparatus, based out of Afghanistan. […] LaRouche also emphasizes that the recent years’ massive Israeli espionage against and covert-operations penetration of the United States—including the U.S national security and military institutions—may suggest a more direct Israeli involvement in the military coup activities that facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. […] This apparatus is part of the “Mega” network of prominent wealthy North American Zionists led by Edgar Bronfman, Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt, et al., who are the leading promoters of Ariel Sharon’s suicidal war drive, and who wish to draw the United States into that effort to assure a global conflagration on a scale of the First World War or worse.” “Lyndon H. LaRouche Exposes Sept. 11 Coup-Plotters: “Zbigniew Brzezinski and Sept. 11th””, by Jeffrey Steinberg, Press Release, Jan. 2002
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 (Source Watch)
In 2002 the LaRouche campaign issued a press release titled “Israeli Moles Behind 911 and Iraq War,” claiming Israeli government policies had been “foisted on the President by a nest of Israeli agents inside the U.S. government.”3 That this “Israeli spy network inside the United States” 4 was related to the policy formulations of the group of Bush advisers known as the Neoconservatives was made clear later when the LaRouchites began issuing a series of pamphlets with the running title “Children of Satan.” (PublicEye)
AIDS:
The best example is the AIDS issue. By the fall of 1985, LaRouche recognized that it was about to become the scariest issue of the decade. He concocted the slogan “Spread Panic, not AIDS!” The entire human race, he claimed, would face extinction if stern measures weren’t taken immediately against gay people and mosquitoes. Offering himself as the only leader willing to act with the necessary ruthlessness, he picked California as his first battleground. In the summer of 1986 his followers fanned out through most of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Operating through a committee called PANIC, they collected over 700,000 signatures for a ballot initiative calling for quarantine of AIDS victims. The signatures withstood all legal challenges, and the measure was placed on the ballot as Proposition 64. It received nationwide publicity and became a major issue in California politics. Congressman William Dannemeyer (R.-Cal.) championed it and became its respectable front man. Ironically, Dannemeyer had chaired the Republican Study Committee two years earlier when it produced a report warning conservatives not to be taken in by LaRouche propaganda and pointing out that LaRouche’s intent was to “disrupt our democratic system.” Dannemeyer now said, as did some other California conservatives, that he was supporting Proposition 64 solely on its merits. Gay organizations, the health professions, labor unions, and the Democratic Party launched a counter-effort, warning the public that “political extremist Lyndon LaRouche” was behind the measure. (One of the anti-Proposition 64 groups was even called “Stop LaRouche.”) Gay organizations charged that when LaRouche said quarantine he really meant concentration camps.
LaRouche’s cadres were preprogrammed for the quarantine campaign. For years words like “faggot” and “queer” had peppered NCLC publications, along with allegations that child molesters, Satanists, and Communists control the gay rights movement, The articles also suggested that homosexuality is a characteristically Jewish condition and that rich Jews encourage it to undermine Western civilization. When the AIDS crisis erupted, LaRouche blamed the “shylocks” for being too cheap to pay for research crash programs.
His gay-equals-Jewish canard dates back to the 1970s, when New Solidarity raved against the “faggot politics” of “Zionist-supporting” gay activists. New Solidarity published a cartoon series in which prominent New York Jews were shown in Roman togas at a banquet sponsored by the “Emperor of Homohattan,” Mayor Ed Koch. In the early 1980s LaRouchian publications accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionist Gentiles of being part of an international “Homintern.” LaRouche wrote “Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry,” a crude and defamatory leaflet on his longtime Symbolic Jew. According to LaRouche, Kissinger’s alleged “heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil,” and Kissinger is “psychologically” part of a “distinct species.” In the context of LaRouche’s biological-racial theories about the Jewish “species,” the equation of Jewishness and “faggotry” was unmistakable.
LaRouche also taught that the alleged pathology of the Jewish family, especially the mother’s possessiveness, produces psychosexual aberrations in young Jews. A 1986 New Solidarity item, “Jewish Mothers in the Age of Aquarius,” joked that homosexuality is the natural result.
That the Jewish oligarchy deliberately promotes homosexuality is suggested by LaRouche’s references to “sodomic,” “pederastic,” and “lesbian” practices within oligarchy-controlled “cults” such as Freemasonry and the Quakers. In a November 1985 speech, he said AIDS was a “man-made evil” linked to these “cults out of Babylon.” He further developed this theme in “The End of the Age of Aquarius?,” a rambling discourse on AIDS that included attacks on the “Babylonians,” the “British,” “usurers,” and “cabalists.” His conclusion; “Homosexuality was organized in the United States. It wasn’t something that sprang from the weeds. . . .It was organized. . .” (an excerpt from New American fascists, chapter 16)
The Re-Writing of History
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 millions 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. The point is that Adolf Hitler was put into power largely on the initiative of the Rothschilds, Warburgs and Oppenheimers, among other Jewish and non-Jewish financial interests centered in the City of London. [….] The Jews who did die at the hands of Nazism were the victims of fascism, the victims of the Schactian form of “fiscal austerity.”
The “Holocaust” simply proves that the failure of the Nuremberg tribunal to hang Hjalmar Schacht made the whole proceeding a travesty of justice. The murderers of the million and a half or more Jews who died in the “holocaust” are any group, Jewish or non-Jewish, which supported then or now the policies advocated by Felix Rohatyn or Milton Freidman [sic]. Either you, as a Jew, join with the U.S. Labor Party to stop Rohatyn, Friedman the Mont Pelerin Society now, or you are implicitly just as guilty of the death of millions of Jews as Adolf Hitler. (New Solidarity, 8 Dec.1978, p.4) A scanned version available online
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Brainwashing Techniques:
I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS – 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.” (“Ideological Odyssey: From Old Left to Far Right,” and, “No Joke“)
“Don’t let her leave!” The group leader had thoroughly worked her over, hammering her with guilt about her previous actions, accusing her of being delusional, telling her to confess, until she was no longer recognizable as a woman, but only as a blubbering mess of tearful convulsions. The tearful woman got up to flee the room.
“Don’t let her leave! Keep her in here!” Someone got up and physically blocked her from leaving the room.
“SIT DOWN. Now M—–,” the leader said in a calm voice, “You know you’ve got to stop doing this…” She went on calmly for some time, and then everyone else left the room. I sat across the room and watched her sob hysterically with her face in her hands, and not for the first time wondered what the LaRouche organization was all about.
Throughout the summer I witnessed similar scenes over and over again in different forms; in personal meetings with the leadership, in small group meetings, Sunday “Field Meetings,” at “retreats,” and one-on-one conversations. There was a clear pattern being used in each case; the sowing of guilt (real or imagined), fear, confusion, and the use of “sore spots” (personal shames or shortcomings) to browbeat someone into an extremely worked up emotional state. Once the person has been whipped up she is then questioned until she contradicts herself on some minute point. This contradiction is then used as a stick to beat her with until there is a complete emotional breakdown, then they admit their faults (confess), after which the leadership then redefines the “mission” for them. I recognized it as manipulation. I recently took interest in a book by William Sargant, “The Battle for the Mind,” and he had another name for it: Brainwashing. (Freedom of Mind Center)
I realize I only put two conspiracy quotes, but the LaRouches pretty much believe in most of them. A short bio from an article about Lyndon LaRouche displays a quick synapsis of some hisghlites from Larouche’s political career:
- 1976: Lyndon LaRouche makes first bid for U.S. presidency under the U.S. Labor Party.
- 1982-83: LaRouche engages in exploratory talks with the Soviet Union which lead to the development of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative
- 1984: LaRouche founds the Schiller Institute, a non-profit formed to “defend the rights of all humanity to progress –material, moral and intellectual”
- 1986: LaRouche followers draft California ballot initiative calling for the isolation or quarantining of people infected with AIDS
- 1987: Roy Frankhouser,
formerKlu Klux Klan grand dragon and LaRouche advisor, convicted of obstruction of justice.
- 1988: LaRouche and six associates convicted on federal conspiracy charges. LaRouche spends five years in prison.
- 2004: LaRouche makes his fifth bid for the U.S. presidency, this time running a candidate under the Democratic Party.
This movement, and the young men and women involved in this group, is considered a cult (some say more than a cult). In fact, a site put together by former LaRouchites (LaRouche Planet) defines this topic well in their From a Political Sect to a Political Cult:
It is NOT a political democratic organization that respects individual freedom. It is a cult that uses politics to its own ends, it is a political cult which uses cult method of mind-control.
It is therefore totalitarian by definition (LaRouche would say “authoritarian”). A “cult of personality” reminiscent of the cults of personality which Stalin, Mao or Hitler once enjoyed.
The nearest representation of LaRouche’s world is the world described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel. Politically, it shares many (not all) features with the so-called “Third Position” of our contemporary political spectrum.
Similarly to the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the LaRouche cult, politics is not just “war-like”, IT IS WAR; a never ending war between “Oceania” and “Eurasia”, or between “Eastasia” and “Oceania” etc., a war against the enemies of Mankind and Civilization, i.e. the enemies of LaRouche. These enemies are “exposed” by LaRouche and his obsessive and wild “conspiracy-theories”. The world is about to be plunged at any time into the abysses of a New Dark Ages, a World War III, etc. Their clock always shows “One minute to midnight” for the last thirty-five years and LaRouche (a self-professed economist) has “predicted” a world financial crashnearly every year… for the last thirty-five years! The larouchies believe that “saving the world” is the “end-goal” of the “LaRouche organization”.
So, to use this lady (who is probably very nice) as my whipping boy, would God have anything to do with the above? Murder, hatred of Jews, brainwashing, quarantining people, multiple conspiracy theories, etc??? And their comparison of Obama’s health plan — horrible monstrosity that it is — is like Hitler’s T4 program is just plain weird.
The medias lack of care for the LaRouchites showing up at meetings with Obama/Hitler signs (as mentioned in a previous blog) is pointed out by the Weekly Standard as well:
CNN’s Larry King showed the above video of Barney Frank laying the smack down on a woman at a townhall meeting who compared Obama to Hitler. CNN left out the fact that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.
In the full video (via Allahpundit), the woman says, “This policy is already on the way out. It already has been defeated by LaRouche.” She also underscores her crazy LaRouchite beliefs by claiming that the U.S. has “30% real unemployment”. No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe — but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.
While Nancy Pelosi and liberal talk-show host Bill Press have been smearing protesters as fascists and Nazis, left-wing bloggers have been attacking protesters for comparing Obama to Hitler. It seems townhall attendees just can’t win….
I have nothing but contempt for their organization and bewilderment at people who say they love Glenn Beck and want to do what God wants them to, and then proceed to write checks to this wacky organization.
Ideological Swings:
In 1977-78, LaRouche initiated an ideological change, an evolution from “socialism” to “nationalism”, well documented by Denis King and Chip Berlet.
This “evolution” was marked by a radical re-definition of “Fascism”. To this purpose he wrote in 1977 “What Actually Is Fascism?” where he said:
“The Nazi propaganda emphasis on “Krupp steel” and other symbols of industrial development points up the fact that to rule Germany the Nazis were obliged to play upon the deep desire for industrial and technological progress within even the ranks of numerous layers of nominal Nazi supporters and party members. There was a profound discrepancy between the systematic destruction of industry and the labor force under Schacht and the nationalist impulses of important varieties of German citizens who went over to support of the Nazis largely on the basis of hatred of Versailles and a commitment to restoration of Germany’s industrial progress.” “In short, all of those features of Nazi Germany’s policy which are generally attributed to fascism are not the ideological excretion of a fascist “sociological phenomenon” but are properly termed Schachtianism in its natural course and consequences. The essence of fascism, if we mean by fascism the deprecated features of the Nazi order, is Schachtian economics.” (6)
In other words there are “good” and “bad” Nazis:
“The majority of Nazi supporters were not fascists, but nationalists.” (6)
and consequentially:
“What is to be stressed most emphatically in this connection is the fallacy of the “conservatism tends to fascism” argument.” (6)
To confirm his ideological move from “socialism” to “nationalism”, he wrote that year:
“I never had the conception of founding a “true Marxist” association. […] We have never been Marxists, except as regarding Marx as the highest preceding advancement of essential human knowledge. […] More profoundly, as we change we do not change.” (7)
contradicting himself from what he wrote a year earlier:
“Labor Committee and allied Communist forces within the capitalist sector generally are working overnight, constantly, to bring into being a new Marxist International throughout the capitalist sector.” (11)
when he wanted to establish “socialism” world-wide:
“The important point to be added to that, is that such a form of society is within reach during this century. We have before us the immediate need and possibility to establish an intermediate form of society known as workers’ government, out of which in approximately a generation’ s time, an actual socialist form of human existence can emerge.” (4)
LaRouche redefined Marxism from a “higher”, philosophical standpoint; “higher” Marxism meant “good” industrial Capitalism, Marx and Benjamin Franklin were said to share the same, common ancestry and philosophical outlook: Plato’s Republic, trying to combine “socialism” (Soviet Republics) and… the Republican party! ({“republican” in LaRouche’s code-words, meaning Plato’s “Republic”).
In his “Creating a Republican Labor Party” pamphlet, LaRouche wrote:
“The republican party is thousands of years old. It is traced in terms of formal historical knowledge available to us today to the writings of Plato and Plato’s Academy at Athens, and to Alexander the Great’s city-building policies.”
The “new” Karl Marx was redefined in “The Karl Marx Karl Marx Did Not Know” (Fall 1977).
His 1980 U.S. presidential election was based on an alliance between “labor” (socialist) forces and “republican” (nationalist) forces and geopolitically between the “East” (USSR) and the “West”.
This ideological and philosophical reshaping can be measured with help of three key-documents during that period: 1/ “The Case of Walter Lippmann” (May 1977), 2/ “Two Tactics of the Inner PCI” (April 1978) and 3/ “The Secret Known Only to the Inner Elites” (May-June 1978). This last document is still considered by the LaRouchies as the real founding document of LaRouche’s Organisation.
In this 1977 revisionist document “What Actually Is Fascism?” he explained that “Fascism” was in fact synonymous with… “financial austerity” imposed by Hjalmar Schacht, a “cannibalization” of the German economy which led to Hitler’s war!
Capitalism therefore still leads to Fascism/Imperialism…
The “real enemy” is still “Capitalism” or rather “Capitalists”, not Fascists who are victims of these “Capitalists”.
But who was Schacht? What really happened to the German economy under his influence? Why does LaRouche focuses exclusively on somebody who was a German financial expert and Minister of Economics from 1935 until 1937 only (and who began to lose power after the implementation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 by Hermann Göring which put Germany on the brink of bankruptcy)?
Because by reducing “nazism” only to one single cause: “Hjalmar Schacht”, it is more convenient to re-write History. Forget about Hitler’s and the Nazis’ open intentions to start a war against their neighbors from the onset…\\ LaRouche only needs to claim Hjalmar Schacht was a “British agent”, an “environmentalist” or a “Jewish protege” and then, LaRouche could conclude that “Nazism” was an “ecologist”, a “British” or a “Jewish” conspiracy (and vice-versa)! Consequently, any economic policy or economist or politician could be labeled as “schachtian” or “nazi”!…
Swastikas:
…The LaRouche committee has staged dozens of protests nears Trader Joe’s entrance and exit doors, of which there are usually only two, the grocer claims in Superior Count. It says LaRouche’s members display pictures of Obama with a Hitler-style moustache and of Obama Photoshopped next to Hitler.
“At the Trader Joe’s in Irvine, the LaRouche Activists wore swastikas, which brought some customers to tears,” according to the complaint.
Tension between activists and customers nearly led to a fistfight outside one store, and in screaming matches have forced police to be called to remove the activists, driving customers away, the complaint states…
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