Lyndon LaRouche
Encyclopedia
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American political activist and founder of a network of political committees, parties, and publications known collectively as the LaRouche movement
. Often described as a political extremist, he has written prolifically in his publications on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, largely promoting a conspiracist view of history and current affairs.
LaRouche was a perennial presidential candidate from 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party
and campaigning seven times for the Democratic Party
nomination, though he failed to attract appreciable electoral support. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, but continued his political activities from behind bars until his release in 1994 on parole. Ramsey Clark
, his chief appellate attorney and a former U.S. Attorney General, argued that LaRouche was denied a fair trial but the Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the appeal.
Members of the LaRouche movement see LaRouche as a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt
. Other commentators, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, have described him over the years as a conspiracy theorist, fascist, and anti-Semite, and have characterized his movement as a cult. Norman Bailey
, formerly with the National Security Council
, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation
, a conservative think tank, wrote that he leads "what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."
His parents became Quakers
after his father had converted from Roman Catholicism, and his mother from Protestantism. They forbade him from fighting with other children, even in self-defense, which he said led to "years of hell" from bullies at school. As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. He wrote that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz
, and rejecting those of Hume
, Bacon
, Hobbes
, Locke
, Berkeley
, Rousseau
, and Kant
. He graduated from Lynn's English High School
in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled his father from the group, for reportedly accusing other Quakers of misusing funds, while writing under the pen name Hezekiah Micajah Jones. LaRouche and his mother resigned in sympathy for his father.
(CO) during World War II, and joined a Civilian Public Service
camp, where, in the words of Dennis King, he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators." In 1944 he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant and served in India and Burma with medical units and ending the war as an ordnance clerk. He described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life. While in India he developed sympathy for the Indian Independence movement
. LaRouche wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces, and that prospect was "revolting to most of us."
He discussed Marxism
in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism
. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University, but left because of his perception of academic "philistinism." He returned to Lynn in 1948, and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP), adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work. He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he took a job as a management consultant. In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a psychiatrist and member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.
, a faction which was later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy
. For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth
, who later wrote that LaRouche had a "gargantuan ego," and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth."
In 1967 LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism
at New York City's Free School, and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital
, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests
, he organized his supporters under the name the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society
branch—the university's main activist group—and build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty. By 1973 the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities—including West Berlin and Stockholm—and produced what King called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity. The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government.
, founded in 1974 and known for its conspiracy theories, including that Queen Elizabeth II is the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel, and that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
was part of a British attempt to take over the United States. Others included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security. In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.
U.S. sources told the Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman
, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him offering information about the West German Green Party, and a CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed to be qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world"; he said, "They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement.
According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes, were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns. Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques."
From the 1970s through to the 2000s, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council
(Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation
, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984 he founded the Schiller Institute
in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there—the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität
—and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.
LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left
groups when Mark Rudd
's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse." Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, they assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power
activists, on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each others' throats. LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and to propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them. One FBI memo, recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC." (see image to left)
LaRouche's critics such as Dennis King and Antony Lerman
allege that in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety. According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers. Paul L. Montgomery
suggested in The New York Times that the change of political direction might have been linked to his partner, Carol Schnitzer/Larrabee, having left him in 1972 for a British activist, Chris White (see below). LaRouche apparently spent months in Germany, and returned with what Montgomery described as a "messianic vision." He spent most of his time in his bathrobe in his New York apartment, and began to suggest there was a conspiracy against him led by the Rockefeller family and the British. He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force," predicting that an epidemic of apocalyptic proportions would strike humanity in the 1980s.
LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC. The USLP is described in LaRouche's résumé as "an independent political association committed to the tradition of Benjamin Franklin
, Alexander Hamilton
, Henry C. Carey
, and President Abraham Lincoln
." LaRouche describes it in another location as "a new Whig
association," adding that an important objective of the party was to fight against "the attempted revival of the 'preventive nuclear war' organization, the revived Committee on the Present Danger
."
A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery alleged that LaRouche had turned it—at that point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America—into an extreme-right, anti-Semitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit." The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III
, an arms dealer and former member of the Office of Strategic Services
, who said he had ties to the CIA
. Journalists and publications the party regarded as unfriendly were harassed, and it published a list of potential assassins it saw as a threat. LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf. Party officials would decide who each member should live with, and if someone left the movement, his remaining partner was expected to live separately from him. LaRouche would question spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife because it was making him "politically impotent."
He recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973 LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S.; his followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." The Times wrote, "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm," then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'." LaRouche told the newspaper White had been "reduced to an eight-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality"; he said White had not been harmed and that a physician—a LaRouche movement member—had been present throughout. White ended up telling LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban frogmen.
According to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement; one activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming. In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing. One activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the claims. According to The New York Times, LaRouche sent six NCLC members to her apartment, where she was held captive for two days until she alerted a passer-by throwing a piece of paper out of her window asking for help. The members, who were charged with unlawful imprisonment, told police she had been brainwashed to help the KGB and needed deprogramming. Weitzman was reluctant to testify and the charges were dismissed.
and the Liberty Lobby
in 1974. Frank Donner
and Randall Rothenberg
wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace
's American Independent Party
, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said the contacts with the Liberty Lobby were extensive. George and Wilcox say that while the contact is often used to imply "'links' and 'ties' between LaRouche and the extreme right", it was in fact transient and marked by mutual suspicion. The Liberty Lobby pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche's views in 1981, because of what they described as his softness on "the major Zionist groups". According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed suspicion over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally.
Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onwards, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police on members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government; student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak
secret police; and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser
, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan
and the American Nazi Party
.
The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies.
LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work. Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed", an alleged CIA contact, who did not exist.
Blum wrote that, at around this time, LaRouche's Computron Technologies Corporation included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients; that his World Composition Services had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients; and that his PMR Associates produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.
Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of England, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad. LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him. He has repeatedly asserted that he is a target for assassination
. According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche later said that,
In 1975, under the name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche published Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, called his "magnum opus" by one observer and described by its only reviewer as "the most peculiar and idiosyncratic" introduction to economics he had ever seen. Mixing economics, history, anthropology, sociology and a surprisingly large helping of business administration, the work argued that most prominent Marxists had misunderstood Marx, and that bourgeois economics arose when philosophy took a wrong, reductionist
turn under British empiricists like Locke
and Hume
.
In 1976, LaRouche campaigned for the first time in a presidential election as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05 percent). It was the first of eight presidential elections he took part in between 1976 and 2004, which enabled him to attract $5.9 million in federal matching funds
; candidates seeking their party's presidential nomination qualify for matching funds if they raise $5,000 in each of at least 20 states. His platform predicted financial disaster by 1980 accompanied by famine and the virtual extinction of the human race within 15 years, and proposed a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector, and an "International Development Bank" to facilitate higher food production. When Legionnaires' disease appeared in the U.S. that year, he said it was a continuation of the swine flu outbreak
, and that senators who opposed vaccination were suppressing the link as part of a "genocidal policy."
His campaign included a paid half-hour television address, which allowed him to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns. There were protests about this, and about the involvement of the NCLC in public life generally. Writing in The Washington Post, Stephen Rosenfeld
said LaRouche's ideas belonged to the radical right, neo-Nazi fringe, and that his main interests lay in disruption and disinformation; Rosenfeld called the NCLC one of the "chief polluters" of political democracy, citing an article in Crawdaddy
that said LaRouche members had attacked the SWP in Detroit, reportedly beating a paraplegic member with clubs. Rosenfeld argued that the press should be "chary" of offering them print or air time: "A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public, unless there is reason to present it in those terms." LaRouche wrote in 1999 that this comment had "openly declared... a policy of malicious lying" against him.
, was a leading activist in the German branch of the movement. She went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of his career, standing for election in Germany in 1980 for his Europäische Arbeiterpartei (European Workers Party), and founding the Schiller Institute
in Germany in 1984. Paul Kacprzak, who worked for LaRouche in the 1970s, told The Washington Post that Zepp had a profound effect on the movement, and that it basically became a German organization. "We'd have classes in German. They'd be teaching German language. We'd be reading German poetry." He said LaRouche sent round a memo that, when he was elected president, his wedding anniversary would be a holiday and all workers would be given a week off.
. Democratic Party leaders refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat. His campaign platforms included a return to the Bretton Woods system
, including a gold-based national and world monetary system; fixed exchange rates; and ending the International Monetary Fund
. He supported the replacement of the central bank
system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System
, with a national bank
; a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering; building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; and a crash program to build particle beam weapon
s and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI). He opposed the Soviet Union and supported a military build-up to prepare for imminent war; supported the screening and quarantine of AIDS
patients; and opposed environmentalism, deregulation, outcome-based education, and abortion.
In December 1980, LaRouche and his followers started what came to be known as the "October Surprise" allegation, namely that in October 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff conspired with the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis
to delay the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, with the aim of helping Reagan win the 1980 presidential election
against Jimmy Carter
. The Iranians had agreed to this, according to the theory, in exchange for future weapons sales from the Reagan administration. The first publication of the story was in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review on December 2, 1980, followed by his New Solidarity on September 2, 1983, alleging that Henry Kissinger
, one of LaRouche's regular targets, had met Iran's Ayatollah Beheshti in Paris, according to Iranian sources in Paris. Although ultimately discredited, the story was widely discussed in conspiracy circles during the 1980s and 1990s.
, maintaining frequent contact until her assassination in October 1984. His movement engaged in intensive outreach work in Latin America, producing research papers and gaining access to top government officials, including Peruvian President Alan García. LaRouche met with Mexican president José López Portillo
. George Johnson writes that LaRouche warned Portillo about attempts by international bankers to wreck the Mexican economy, meeting him under the auspices of LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee. Both the American Embassy and the Democratic Party issued disclaimers; a Mexican official told The New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting by representing himself as a Democratic Party official. He also met Argentine's president Raúl Alfonsin
. In 1982 he authored Operation Juárez, described by Dennis King as "a brilliant call to arms against the International Monetary Fund austerity programs." The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) was the focus of widespread popular resentment throughout Latin America, and LaRouche acquired a reputation as a serious economist in Latin America, according to King. King wrote that Fidel Castro
developed "his own version of Operation Juárez."
Mexican journalist Sergio Sarmiento wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1989 that LaRouche's Labor Party in Mexico was used to attack the country's opposition; LaRouche members alleged that the National Action Party (PAN) were agents of the KGB, and later produced a pamphlet that "a vote for PAN is a vote for Nazism." When leaders of the Mexico Oil Workers' Union were jailed—corrupt leaders, according to Sarmiento—LaRouche said the union had been attacked by the Anglo-American Liberal Establishment, controlled by Scottish Rite Freemasonry. According to Jose I. Blandon, an adviser to Manuel Noriega
—the military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989—LaRouche had ties to Noriega, and according to Sarmiento, LaRouche members harassed the opposition in Lima, Peru, in support of President Alan García.
LaRouche also met Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal
in 1987; according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Özal reprimanded his aides who had mistaken LaRouche for the Democratic Presidential candidate.
, near Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia. The property was owned at the time by a company registered in Switzerland. Companies associated with LaRouche continued to buy property in the area, including part of Leesburg's industrial park, purchased by LaRouche's Lafayette/Leesburg Ltd. Partnership to develop a printing plant and office complex.
Neighbors said they saw LaRouche guards in camouflage clothes carrying semi-automatic weapons, and the Post wrote that the house had sandbag-buttressed guard posts nearby, along with metal spikes in the driveway and cement barriers on the road. One of his aides said LaRouche was safer in Loudoun County: "The terrorist organizations which have targeted Mr. LaRouche do not have bases of operations in Virginia." LaRouche said his new home meant a shorter commute to Washington. A former associate said the move also meant his members would be more isolated from friends and family than they had been in New York. According to the Post in 2004, local people who opposed him for any reason were accused in LaRouche publications of being commies, homosexual, drug pushers, and terrorists. He reportedly accused the Leesburg Garden Club of being a nest of Soviet sympathizers, and a local lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after threatening phone calls and a death threat. In leaflets supporting his application of concealed weapons permits for his bodyguards in Leesburg, Virginia
, he wrote:
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".
—the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate—a Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints. On April 19, 1986, NBC's Saturday Night Live aired a sketch satirizing the ads, portraying the Queen of England and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers. LaRouche received 78,773 votes in the 1984 presidential election.
In 1984, media reports stated that LaRouche and his aides had met Reagan administration officials, including Norman Bailey, senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr.
There were also reported contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA. The LaRouche campaign said the reporting was full of errors. In 1984 two Pentagon officials spoke at a LaRouche rally in Virginia; a Defense Department spokesman said the Pentagon viewed LaRouche's group as a "conservative group ... very supportive of the administration." White House spokesman Larry Speakes
said the Administration was "glad to talk to" any American citizen who might have information. According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off when they became public. Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC, saying he had been in conflict with Oliver North
over LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras
. According to a LaRouche publication, a court-ordered search of North's files produced a May 1986 telex from Iran–Contra defendant General Richard Secord
, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche. King states that LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review was the first to report on important details of the Iran–Contra affair, predicting that a major scandal was about to break months before mainstream media picked up on the story.
The LaRouche campaign supported Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI). Dennis King wrote that LaRouche had been speculating about space-based weaponry as early as 1975. He set up the Fusion Energy Foundation, which held conferences and tried to cultivate scientists, with some success. According to King, LaRouche's associates had for some years been in contact with members of the Reagan administration about LaRouche's space-based weapons ideas. Physicist Edward Teller
, a proponent of SDI and X-ray lasers, told reporters in 1984 that he had been courted by LaRouche, but had kept his distance. LaRouche began calling his plan the "LaRouche-Teller proposal," though they had never met. Teller said LaRouche was "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions." LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union
to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology.
. The reports said an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would lead to an indictment, and quoted Irwin Suall
, the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) fact-finding director, who called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler." After the broadcast, LaRouche members picketed NBC's office carrying signs saying "Lynch Pat Lynch," and the NBC switchboard said it received a death threat against her. Another NBC researcher said someone placed fliers around her parents' neighborhood saying she was running a call-girl ring from her parents' home. Lynch said LaRouche members began to impersonate her and her researchers in telephone calls, and called her "Fat Lynch" in their publications.
LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the ADL, arguing that the programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him. The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and LaRouche lost the case. NBC won a countersuit, the jury awarding the network $3 million in damages, later reduced to $258,459, for misuse of libel law, in what was called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant. LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty, which the judge described as "completely lacking in credibility." LaRouche said he had been unaware since 1973 who paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, and lawyers. The judge fined him for failing to answer. After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was delivered to the court to end the case. When LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
, rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.
seemed to fulfill LaRouche's 1973 prediction that an epidemic would strike humanity in the 1980s. LaRouche said it had been created by the "Soviet war machine," or by the International Monetary Fund to kill "excess eaters" in Africa. According to Christopher Toumey, his subsequent campaign followed a familiar LaRouche pattern: challenging the scientific competence of government experts, and arguing that LaRouche had special scientific insights, and his own scientific associates were more competent than government scientists. LaRouche's view of AIDS agreed with orthodox medicine in that HIV caused AIDS, but differed from it in arguing that HIV spread like the cold virus or malaria, by way of casual contact and insect bites—an idea that would make HIV-positive people extremely dangerous. He said "a person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around", and that people who lynched gays might be remembered as the "only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction." He advocated testing anyone working in schools, restaurants, or healthcare, and quarantining those who tested positive. Some of LaRouche's views on AIDS were developed by John Seale, a British venereological physician who proposed that AIDS was created in a laboratory. Seale's highly speculative writings were published in three prestigious medical journals, lending these ideas some appearance of being hard science.
LaRouche and his associates devised a "Biological Strategic Defense Initiative" that would cost $100 billion per annum, which they said would have to be directed by LaRouche. Toumey writes that those opposing the program, such as the World Health Organization
and Centers for Disease Control, were accused of "viciously lying to the world," and of following an agenda of genocide and euthanasia. In 1986 LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases. Sponsored by his "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), Proposition 64—or the "LaRouche initiative"—qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the required signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications. Seale, presented as an AIDS expert by PANIC, supported the LaRouche initiative but disagreed with several of LaRouche's views, including that HIV could be spread by insects, and described the group's political beliefs and conspiracy theories as "rather odd". According to David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, the proposal would have required that 300,000 people in the area with HIV or AIDS be reported to public health authorities; might have removed over 100,000 of them from their jobs in schools, restaurants and agriculture; and would have forced 47,000 children to stay away from school.
The proposal was opposed by leading scientists and local health officials—including the deans and faculties of four California schools of public health, scientists at Stanford University, the Red Cross, the surgeon general, labor unions and the Democratic Party of California—as based on inaccurate scientific information and, as the public health schools put it, running "counter to all public health principles." It was defeated, reintroduced two years later, and defeated again, with two million votes in favor the first time, and 1.7 million the second. AIDS became a leading plank in LaRouche's platform during his 1988 presidential campaign. He vowed to quarantine its "aberrant" victims who were "guilty of bringing this pandemic upon us."
, withdrew his nomination rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche members, and told reporters the party was "exploring every legal remedy to purge these bizarre and dangerous extremists from the Democratic ticket." A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said it would have to do a better job of communicating to the electorate that LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee was unrelated to the Democratic Party. The New York Times wrote that Democratic Party officials were trying to identify LaRouche candidates in order to alert voters, and asked the LaRouche organization to release a full list of its candidates.
A month later, LaRouche held a press conference to accuse the Soviet government, British government, drug dealers, international bankers, and journalists of being involved in a variety of conspiracies. Flanked by bodyguards, he said, "If Abe Lincoln were alive, he'd probably be standing up here with me today," and that there was no criticism of him that did not originate "with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation ..." He said he had been in danger from Soviet assassins for over 13 years, and had to live in safe houses. He refused to answer a question from an NBC reporter, saying "How can I talk with a drug pusher like you?" He called the leadership of the United States "idiotic" and "berserk," and its foreign policy "criminal or insane." He warned of the imminent collapse of the banking system and accused banks of laundering drug money. Asked about the movement's finances, he said "I don't know. ... I'm not responsible, I'm not involved in that."
In October 1986, hundreds of state and federal officers raided LaRouche offices in Virginia and Massachusetts. A federal grand jury indicted LaRouche and 12 associates on credit card fraud and obstruction of justice; the charges included that they had attempted to defraud people of millions of dollars, including several elderly people, by borrowing money they did not intend to repay. LaRouche's "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded and he at first warned law-enforcement officials not to arrest him, saying any attempt to do so would be an attempt to kill him; a spokesman would not rule out the use of violence against officials in response. While surrounded, LaRouche sent a telegraph 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." LaRouche disputed the charges, alleging that the trials were politically motivated. A number of LaRouche entities, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were taken over through an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding in 1987; the government's use of the sealed order was regarded as a rare legal maneuver.
He received 25,562 votes in the 1988 presidential election, standing under the banner of the "National Economic Recovery" party. On December 16 that year, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; 11 counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to fifteen years, but was released on January 26, 1994. The judge called his claim of a political vendetta "arrant nonsense," and said "the idea that this organization is a sufficient threat to anything that would warrant the government bringing a prosecution to silence them just defies human experience." Thirteen associates received terms ranging from one month to 77 years for mail fraud and conspiracy. Defense lawyers filed unsuccessful appeals that challenged the conduct of the grand jury, the contempt fines, the execution of the search warrants, and various trial procedures. At least ten appeals were heard by the United States Court of Appeals, and three by the U.S. Supreme Court. Former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark
joined the defense team for two appeals, writing that the case involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."
In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche says the raid on his operation was the work of Raisa Gorbachev. 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."
In 1989 LaRouche advocated that classical orchestras should return to the "Verdi pitch," a pitch that Verdi
had enshrined in Italian legislation in 1884. The initiative attracted support from more than 300 opera stars, including Joan Sutherland
, Placido Domingo
and Luciano Pavarotti
, who according to Opera Fanatic may or may not have been aware of LaRouche's politics. A spokesman for Domingo said Domingo had simply signed a questionnaire, had not been aware of its origins, and would not agree with LaRouche's politics. Renata Tebaldi
and Piero Cappuccilli
, who were running for the European Parliament on LaRouche's "Patriots for Italy" platform, attended Schiller Institute conferences as featured speakers, and the discussions led to debates in the Italian parliament about reinstating Verdi's legislation. LaRouche gave an interview to National Public Radio on the initiative from prison. The initiative was opposed by the editor of Opera Fanatic, Stefan Zucker
, who objected to the establishment of a "pitch police," and argued that LaRouche was using the issue to gain credibility.
in Rochester, Minnesota. From there he ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia
, but received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for President again in 1992 with James Bevel
as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations
. It was only the second-ever campaign for president from prison. He received 26,334 votes, standing again as the "Economic Recovery" party. For a time he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker
. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily intelligence report by mail, and at times had information about news events days before they happened. Bakker also wrote that LaRouche believed their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."
LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County. The Washington Post wrote that he would be supervised by parole and probation officers until January 2004. Also in 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam
to condemn the Anti-Defamation League for its alleged crimes against African Americans, reportedly one of several such meetings since 1992. In 1996, LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan
and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit. As soon as he began speaking, he was booed off the stage; one delegate said it was because of his actions against African Americans in the past.
In the 1996 Democratic presidential primaries
, he received enough votes in Louisiana and Virginia to get one delegate from each state, but before the primaries began, the Democratic National Committee chair, Donald Fowler
, ruled that LaRouche was not a "bona fide Democrat" because of his "expressed political beliefs ... which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic," and because of his "past activities including exploitation of and defrauding contributors and voters." Fowler instructed state parties to disregard votes for LaRouche.
LaRouche opposed attempts to impeach President Bill Clinton
, charging it was a plot by the British Intelligence to destabilize the U.S. Government. In 1996 he called for the impeachment of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge
.
In 1999 China's press agency, the Xinhua News Agency
, reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report
, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets, calling it a "scientifically illiterate hoax." On October 13, 1999, during a press conference to announce his plans to run for president, he predicted the collapse of the world's financial system, stating, "There's nothing like it in this century.... it is systematic, and therefore, inevitable." He said the U.S. and other nations had built the "biggest financial bubble in all history," which was close to bankruptcy.
LaRouche founded the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000, saying in 2004 that it had hundreds of members in the U.S. and a lesser number overseas. During the Democratic primaries in June 2000, he received 53,280 votes, or 22 percent of the total, in Arkansas.
In 2002 LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review argued that the September 11, 2001 attacks had been an "inside job"
and "attempted coup d'etat," and that Iran was the first country to question it. The article received wide coverage in Iran, and was cited by senior Iranian government officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
and Hassan Rowhani
. Mahmoud Alinejad writes that, in a subsequent telephone interview with the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, LaRouche said American and Israeli elements had organized the attacks to start a war, and that Israel was a dictatorial regime prepared to commit Nazi-style crimes against the Palestinians.
LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns; Democratic Party officials distanced themselves from him and did not allow him to participate in candidate forum debates. He did not run in 2008.
As during the preceding decade, LaRouche and his followers denied that human civilization had harmed the environment through DDT, chluorofluorocarbons, or carbon dioxide. According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming".
in 1988 and German unification. He said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan
for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries. According to Qazwini, recent years have seen a proliferation of LaRouche's ideas in China and South Asia. Qazwini referred to him as the spiritual father of the revival of the new Silk Road or Eurasian Landbridge, which aims to link the continents through a network of ground transportation. In November 2005, an eight-part interview with LaRouche was published in the People's Daily
of China, covering his economic forecasts, his battles with the American media, and his assessment of the neoconservatives. The interviewer wrote that LaRouche was "quite famous in mainland China today," and seemed to be better known overseas than in America.
Tatiana Shishova interviewed him for Russia Today
in 2008, describing him as "the greatest American economist, a prominent politician, one of the first to struggle with the financial oligarchy and its major institutions—the World Bank and IMF. He has no equal in the field of economic and financial forecasts." LaRouche gave an interview in 2009 to China Youth Daily
, which wrote that he had warned in July 2007 that unless the United States stopped monopolizing world finances, and united with China, Russia, and India to reorganize the world financial system, a new global credit crisis would be unavoidable.
as having forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2009. In December 2008, Ivo Caizzi of Corriere della Sera
referred to him as "the guru politician who, since the nineties, has announced the crash of speculative finances and the need for a New Bretton Woods
." The article said Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti
was "an attentive reader" of LaRouche's anti-Free Market and anti-Marxist writings. Italian Senator Oskar Peterlini
, in a July 2009 speech before the Senate, called LaRouche an expert in the field who had predicted the crisis.
During the discussion of U.S. health care reform in 2009, LaRouche took exception to what he described as Barack Obama
's proposal that "independent boards of doctors and health care experts [should] make the life-and-death decisions of what care to provide, and what not, based on cost-effectiveness criteria." LaRouche said the proposed boards, later compared to "death panels" by Sarah Palin
, would amount to the same thing as the Nazis' Action T4
euthanasia program, and urged Americans to "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven." His movement printed pamphlets showing Obama and Hitler
laughing together, and posters of Obama with a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to tear the posters apart, or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them. During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank
referred to the posters as "vile, contemptible nonsense."
, LaRouche believes that a super elite (the "oligarchy") is in control of world events, a group that includes the Rockefellers, the London financial center, the British royal family, the Anti-Defamation League, the KGB, and the Heritage Foundation itself. Others include Nazis, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, Trilateralists, international bankers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Socialist International—all supposedly controlled by the British—as well as Hitler, H.G. Wells, Voltaire, and the Beatles as representatives of the 1960s counterculture
. George Johnson
in Architects of Fear (1983) compares the view to the Illuminati conspiracy theory; after he wrote about LaRouche in The New York Times, LaRouche's followers denounced Johnson as part of a conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt.
LaRouche sees history as a battle between Platonists
, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians
, who rely on empirical
data. Platonists in LaRouche's view include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci
, and Leibniz. He believes that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical
, embraces moral relativism
, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, LaRouche argues, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new dark age in which the world will be ruled by the oligarchs. Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters and pro-life advocates. The conspirators may not be in touch with one another: "From their standpoint, [the conspirators] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously."
LaRouche maintained that he was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. When the ADL accused him of anti-Semitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment, and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description. LaRouche said in 1986 that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stemmed from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operation—which is sometimes the same thing," and in 2006 wrote that "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." Antony Lerman wrote in 1988 that LaRouche used "the British" as a code word for "Jews," a theory also propounded by Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). George Johnson argued that King's presentation failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish. Daniel Pipes
wrote in 1997 that LaRouche's references to the British really were to the British, though he agreed that an alleged British-Jewish alliance lay at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.
Manning Marable
of Columbia University wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled, and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute
, an organization for African-American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions-much the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis
, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality
, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not. Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf.
A 1987 article by John Mintz in The Washington Post reported that members lived hand-to-mouth in crowded apartments, their basic needs—such as a mattress and pillowcase—paid for by the movement. Their days were focused on raising money or selling newspapers for LaRouche, doing research for him, or singing in a group choir, spending almost every waking hour together.
According to Christopher Toumey, LaRouche's charismatic authority
within the movement is grounded on members' belief that he possesses a unique level of insight and expertise. He identifies an emotionally charged issue, conducts in-depth research into it, then proposes a simplistic solution, usually involving restructuring of the economy or national security apparatus. He and the membership portray anyone opposing him as immoral and part of the conspiracy. The group is known for its caustic attacks on people it opposes and former members. In the past it has justified what it refers to as "psywar techniques" as necessary to shake people up; Johnson in 1983 quoted a LaRouche associate: "We're not very nice, so we're hated. Why be nice? It's a cruel world. We're in a war and the human race is up for grabs." Charles Tate, a former long-term LaRouche associate, told The Washington Post in 1987 that members see themselves as not subject to the ordinary laws of society: "They feel that the continued existence of the human race is totally dependent on what they do in the organization, that nobody would be here without LaRouche. They feel justified in a peculiar way doing anything whatsoever."
Newspaper archives of material on LaRouche
LaRouche movement
The LaRouche movement is an international political and cultural network that promotes Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas. It has included scores of organizations and companies around the world. Their activities include campaigning, private intelligence gathering, and publishing numerous periodicals,...
. Often described as a political extremist, he has written prolifically in his publications on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, largely promoting a conspiracist view of history and current affairs.
LaRouche was a perennial presidential candidate from 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party
U.S. Labor Party
The U.S. Labor Party was a political party formed in 1973 by the National Caucus of Labor Committees . It served as a vehicle for Lyndon LaRouche to run for President of the United States in 1976, but it also sponsored many candidates for local offices and Congressional and Senate seats between...
and campaigning seven times for the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
nomination, though he failed to attract appreciable electoral support. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, but continued his political activities from behind bars until his release in 1994 on parole. Ramsey Clark
Ramsey Clark
William Ramsey Clark is an American lawyer, activist and former public official. He worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, which included service as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969, under President Lyndon B. Johnson...
, his chief appellate attorney and a former U.S. Attorney General, argued that LaRouche was denied a fair trial but the Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the appeal.
Members of the LaRouche movement see LaRouche as a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
. Other commentators, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, have described him over the years as a conspiracy theorist, fascist, and anti-Semite, and have characterized his movement as a cult. Norman Bailey
Norman Bailey (government official)
Norman A. Bailey is President of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, an international economic consultant, a professor of economic statecraft, and a former US government official.-Employment at the National Security Council:...
, formerly with the National Security Council
United States National Security Council
The White House National Security Council in the United States is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials and is part of the Executive Office of the...
, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation
Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong...
, a conservative think tank, wrote that he leads "what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."
Early life
LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the eldest of three children of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. and Jessie Lenore. His father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester before the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. LaRouche described his childhood as that of "an egregious child, I wouldn't say an ugly duckling but a nasty duckling." According to his autobiography, The Power of Reason: A Kind of an Autobiography (1979), LaRouche began to read around the age of five, and was called "Big Head" by other children at his school. He recalls that in the third grade his eyesight was poor and he was made to sit at the back of the class, where his vision remained blurred.His parents became Quakers
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
after his father had converted from Roman Catholicism, and his mother from Protestantism. They forbade him from fighting with other children, even in self-defense, which he said led to "years of hell" from bullies at school. As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. He wrote that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
, and rejecting those of Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
, Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
, Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
, Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
, Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
, and Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
. He graduated from Lynn's English High School
English High School (Lynn, Massachusetts)
Lynn English High School is a historic high school located at 50 Goodridge Street in Lynn, Massachusetts. A diverse, public high school, Lynn English is the rival of Lynn Classical High School. Enrollment is approximately 1635 students .-History:...
in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled his father from the group, for reportedly accusing other Quakers of misusing funds, while writing under the pen name Hezekiah Micajah Jones. LaRouche and his mother resigned in sympathy for his father.
University studies, the army, marriage
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate." As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objectorConscientious objector
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....
(CO) during World War II, and joined a Civilian Public Service
Civilian Public Service
The Civilian Public Service provided conscientious objectors in the United States an alternative to military service during World War II...
camp, where, in the words of Dennis King, he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators." In 1944 he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant and served in India and Burma with medical units and ending the war as an ordnance clerk. He described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life. While in India he developed sympathy for the Indian Independence movement
Indian independence movement
The term Indian independence movement encompasses a wide area of political organisations, philosophies, and movements which had the common aim of ending first British East India Company rule, and then British imperial authority, in parts of South Asia...
. LaRouche wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces, and that prospect was "revolting to most of us."
He discussed Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University, but left because of his perception of academic "philistinism." He returned to Lynn in 1948, and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party
Socialist Workers Party (United States)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far-left political organization in the United States. The group places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba...
(SWP), adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work. He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he took a job as a management consultant. In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a psychiatrist and member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.
Teaching and the National Caucus of Labor Committees
By 1961 the LaRouches were living in Central Park West, Manhattan, and LaRouche's activity were mostly focused on his career and not on the SWP. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with another SWP member, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee. In 1964 he began an association with an SWP faction called the Revolutionary TendencyRevolutionary Tendency (SWP)
The Revolutionary Tendency within the US Socialist Workers Party was an internal faction that disagreed with the direction the leadership was taking the party on several important issues...
, a faction which was later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy
Gerry Healy
Thomas Gerard Healy, known as Gerry Healy , was a political activist, a co-founder of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and, according to former prominent U.S. supporter David North, the leader of the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain between 1950 – 1985...
. For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth
Tim Wohlforth
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth , is a United States former Trotskyist leader. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction....
, who later wrote that LaRouche had a "gargantuan ego," and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth."
In 1967 LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
at New York City's Free School, and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests
Columbia University protests of 1968
The Columbia University protests of 1968 were among the many student demonstrations that occurred around the world in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United...
, he organized his supporters under the name the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
branch—the university's main activist group—and build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty. By 1973 the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities—including West Berlin and Stockholm—and produced what King called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity. The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government.
1971: "Intelligence network"
Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world would send information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute it via briefings and other publications.LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which commentators say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover. They included Executive Intelligence ReviewExecutive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review is a weekly newsmagazine founded in 1974 by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. Based in Leesburg, Virginia, it maintains offices in a number of countries, according to its masthead, including Wiesbaden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Melbourne, and Mexico City...
, founded in 1974 and known for its conspiracy theories, including that Queen Elizabeth II is the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel, and that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
Oklahoma City bombing
The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19...
was part of a British attempt to take over the United States. Others included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security. In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.
U.S. sources told the Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman
Bobby Ray Inman
Bobby Ray Inman is a retired United States admiral who held several influential positions in the U.S. Intelligence community.-Career:...
, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him offering information about the West German Green Party, and a CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed to be qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world"; he said, "They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement.
According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes, were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns. Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques."
From the 1970s through to the 2000s, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council
Citizens Electoral Council
The Citizens Electoral Council of Australia is a minor nationalist political party in Australia affiliated with the international LaRouche Movement, led by American political activist and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. It reported having 549 members in 2007...
(Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation
Fusion Energy Foundation
Fusion Energy Foundation was a non-profit think tank cofounded by Lyndon LaRouche in 1974 in New York. It promoted the construction of nuclear power plants, research into fusion power and beam weapons and other causes. The FEF was called fusion's greatest private supporter...
, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984 he founded the Schiller Institute
Schiller Institute
The Schiller Institute is an international political and economic thinktank, one of the primary organizations of the LaRouche movement, with headquarters in Germany and the United States, and supporters in Australia, Canada, Russia, and South America, among others, according to its website.The...
in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there—the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität
Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität
Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität , or the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity, is a German political party founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of U.S. political activist Lyndon LaRouche....
—and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
The Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement and the LaRouche Political Action Committee are part of the political organization of controversial American political figure Lyndon LaRouche...
. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.
1973: Political shift; "Operation Mop-Up"
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
groups when Mark Rudd
Mark Rudd
Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...
's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse." Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, they assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power
Black Power
Black Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among people of Black African descent throughout the world, though primarily by African Americans in the United States...
activists, on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each others' throats. LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and to propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them. One FBI memo, recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC." (see image to left)
LaRouche's critics such as Dennis King and Antony Lerman
Antony Lerman
Antony Lerman is a British writer who specializes in the study of antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, multiculturalism, and the place of religion in society. From 2006 to early 2009, he was Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a think tank on issues affecting Jewish...
allege that in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety. According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers. Paul L. Montgomery
Paul L. Montgomery
Paul Lauren Montgomery was a longtime reporter for The New York Times who wrote about local and international affairs for the newspaper.-Biography:...
suggested in The New York Times that the change of political direction might have been linked to his partner, Carol Schnitzer/Larrabee, having left him in 1972 for a British activist, Chris White (see below). LaRouche apparently spent months in Germany, and returned with what Montgomery described as a "messianic vision." He spent most of his time in his bathrobe in his New York apartment, and began to suggest there was a conspiracy against him led by the Rockefeller family and the British. He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force," predicting that an epidemic of apocalyptic proportions would strike humanity in the 1980s.
1973: U.S. Labor Party
Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
, Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...
, Henry C. Carey
Henry Charles Carey
Henry Charles Carey , a leading 19th century economist of the American School of capitalism. He is now best known for the book The Harmony of Interests, to compare and contrast what he called the "British System" of laissez faire free trade capitalism with the "American System" of developmental...
, and President Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
." LaRouche describes it in another location as "a new Whig
Whig Party (United States)
The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s, the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic...
association," adding that an important objective of the party was to fight against "the attempted revival of the 'preventive nuclear war' organization, the revived Committee on the Present Danger
Committee on the Present Danger
The Committee on the Present Danger is an American foreign policy interest group. Its current stated single goal is "to stiffen American resolve to confront the challenge presented by terrorism and the ideologies that drive it" through "education and advocacy"...
."
A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery alleged that LaRouche had turned it—at that point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America—into an extreme-right, anti-Semitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit." The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III
Mitchell Werbell III
Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, , was an OSS operative, Soldier of Fortune, Paramilitary trainer, firearms engineer, and arms dealer.- Early life and OSS service :...
, an arms dealer and former member of the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
, who said he had ties to the CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
. Journalists and publications the party regarded as unfriendly were harassed, and it published a list of potential assassins it saw as a threat. LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf. Party officials would decide who each member should live with, and if someone left the movement, his remaining partner was expected to live separately from him. LaRouche would question spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife because it was making him "politically impotent."
1973: "Ego-stripping" and "brainwashing" allegations
LaRouche began writing in 1973 about the use of certain psychological techniques on recruits. In an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis", he wrote that a worker's persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called "little me," from which it would be possible to "rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity," according to The Washington Post. The New York Times wrote that the first such session—which LaRouche called "ego-stripping"—involved a German member, Konstantin George, in the summer of 1973; LaRouche said he discovered during it that a plot to assassinate him had been implanted in George's mind.He recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973 LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S.; his followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." The Times wrote, "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm," then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'." LaRouche told the newspaper White had been "reduced to an eight-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality"; he said White had not been harmed and that a physician—a LaRouche movement member—had been present throughout. White ended up telling LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban frogmen.
According to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement; one activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming. In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing. One activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the claims. According to The New York Times, LaRouche sent six NCLC members to her apartment, where she was held captive for two days until she alerted a passer-by throwing a piece of paper out of her window asking for help. The members, who were charged with unlawful imprisonment, told police she had been brainwashed to help the KGB and needed deprogramming. Weitzman was reluctant to testify and the charges were dismissed.
1974: Liberty Lobby, Ku Klux Klan, intelligence reports
According to The Los Angeles Times, LaRouche established ties with the Ku Klux KlanKu Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
and the Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto. In their own words,-Antisemitic world-view:...
in 1974. Frank Donner
Frank Donner
Frank Donner was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Project on Political Surveillance...
and Randall Rothenberg
Randall Rothenberg
Randall Rothenberg is the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for interactive marketing in the U.S.He received an undergraduate degree in classics from Princeton University....
wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace
George Wallace
George Corley Wallace, Jr. was the 45th Governor of Alabama, serving four terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. "The most influential loser" in 20th-century U.S. politics, according to biographers Dan T. Carter and Stephan Lesher, he ran for U.S...
's American Independent Party
American Independent Party
The American Independent Party is a right-wing political party of the United States that was established in 1967 by Bill and Eileen Shearer. In 1968, the American Independent Party nominated George C. Wallace as its presidential candidate and retired Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay as the vice...
, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said the contacts with the Liberty Lobby were extensive. George and Wilcox say that while the contact is often used to imply "'links' and 'ties' between LaRouche and the extreme right", it was in fact transient and marked by mutual suspicion. The Liberty Lobby pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche's views in 1981, because of what they described as his softness on "the major Zionist groups". According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed suspicion over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally.
Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onwards, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police on members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government; student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak
SAVAK
SAVAK was the secret police, domestic security and intelligence service established by Iran's Mohammad Reza Shah on the recommendation of the British Government and with the help of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency SAVAK (Persian: ساواک, short for سازمان اطلاعات و امنیت کشور...
secret police; and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser
Roy Frankhouser
Roy Everett Frankhouser, Jr. , was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a member of the American Nazi Party, a government informant, and a security consultant to Lyndon LaRouche. Frankhouser was reported by federal officials to have been arrested at least 142 times...
, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
and the American Nazi Party
American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party was an American political party founded by discharged U.S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists , but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in...
.
The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies.
LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work. Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed", an alleged CIA contact, who did not exist.
Blum wrote that, at around this time, LaRouche's Computron Technologies Corporation included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients; that his World Composition Services had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients; and that his PMR Associates produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.
Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of England, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad. LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him. He has repeatedly asserted that he is a target for assassination
Assassination
To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...
. According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche later said 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."
1975–1976: Presidential campaign, alleged harassment of public figures
In March 1975 Clarence Kelley, director of the FBI, testified before the House Appropriations Committee that LaRouche's NCLC was "a violence-oriented organization of 'revolutionary socialists' with a membership of nearly 1,000 in chapters in some 50 cities." He said that during the previous two years its members had been "involved in fights, beatings, using drugs, kidnappings, brainwashings, and at least one shooting. They are reported to be armed, to have received defensive training such as karate, and to attend cadre schools and training schools to learn military tactics."In 1975, under the name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche published Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, called his "magnum opus" by one observer and described by its only reviewer as "the most peculiar and idiosyncratic" introduction to economics he had ever seen. Mixing economics, history, anthropology, sociology and a surprisingly large helping of business administration, the work argued that most prominent Marxists had misunderstood Marx, and that bourgeois economics arose when philosophy took a wrong, reductionist
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
turn under British empiricists like Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
and Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
.
In 1976, LaRouche campaigned for the first time in a presidential election as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05 percent). It was the first of eight presidential elections he took part in between 1976 and 2004, which enabled him to attract $5.9 million in federal matching funds
Matching funds
Matching funds, a term used to describe the requirement or condition that a generally minimal amount of money or services-in-kind originate from the beneficiaries of financial amounts, usually for a purpose of charitable or public good.-Charitable causes:...
; candidates seeking their party's presidential nomination qualify for matching funds if they raise $5,000 in each of at least 20 states. His platform predicted financial disaster by 1980 accompanied by famine and the virtual extinction of the human race within 15 years, and proposed a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector, and an "International Development Bank" to facilitate higher food production. When Legionnaires' disease appeared in the U.S. that year, he said it was a continuation of the swine flu outbreak
1976 swine flu outbreak
The 1976 swine flu outbreak, also known as the swine flu fiasco, or the swine flu debacle, was a strain of H1N1 influenza virus that appeared in 1976. Infections were only detected from January 19 to February 9, and were not found outside Fort Dix. The outbreak is most remembered for the mass...
, and that senators who opposed vaccination were suppressing the link as part of a "genocidal policy."
His campaign included a paid half-hour television address, which allowed him to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns. There were protests about this, and about the involvement of the NCLC in public life generally. Writing in The Washington Post, Stephen Rosenfeld
Stephen Rosenfeld
Stephen Samuel Rosenfeld was an American journalist who worked as an editor and columnist for The Washington Post for 40 years...
said LaRouche's ideas belonged to the radical right, neo-Nazi fringe, and that his main interests lay in disruption and disinformation; Rosenfeld called the NCLC one of the "chief polluters" of political democracy, citing an article in Crawdaddy
Crawdaddy!
Crawdaddy! was the first U.S. magazine of rock and roll music criticism. Created in 1966 by college student Paul Williams in response to the increasing sophistication and cultural influence of popular music, Crawdaddy! was self-described as "the first magazine to take rock and roll...
that said LaRouche members had attacked the SWP in Detroit, reportedly beating a paraplegic member with clubs. Rosenfeld argued that the press should be "chary" of offering them print or air time: "A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public, unless there is reason to present it in those terms." LaRouche wrote in 1999 that this comment had "openly declared... a policy of malicious lying" against him.
1977: Second marriage
LaRouche married again in 1977. His new wife, Helga ZeppHelga Zepp-LaRouche
Helga Zepp-LaRouche is a German political activist, wife of American political activist Lyndon LaRouche, and founder of the LaRouche movement's Schiller Institute and the German Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität party .She has run for political office several times in Germany, representing small...
, was a leading activist in the German branch of the movement. She went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of his career, standing for election in Germany in 1980 for his Europäische Arbeiterpartei (European Workers Party), and founding the Schiller Institute
Schiller Institute
The Schiller Institute is an international political and economic thinktank, one of the primary organizations of the LaRouche movement, with headquarters in Germany and the United States, and supporters in Australia, Canada, Russia, and South America, among others, according to its website.The...
in Germany in 1984. Paul Kacprzak, who worked for LaRouche in the 1970s, told The Washington Post that Zepp had a profound effect on the movement, and that it basically became a German organization. "We'd have classes in German. They'd be teaching German language. We'd be reading German poetry." He said LaRouche sent round a memo that, when he was elected president, his wedding anniversary would be a holiday and all workers would be given a week off.
National Democratic Policy Committee, "October Surprise" theory
From the autumn of 1979, the LaRouche movement conducted most of its U.S. electoral activities as the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a political action committee. The name drew complaints from the Democratic Party's Democratic National CommitteeDemocratic National Committee
The Democratic National Committee is the principal organization governing the United States Democratic Party on a day to day basis. While it is responsible for overseeing the process of writing a platform every four years, the DNC's central focus is on campaign and political activity in support...
. Democratic Party leaders refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat. His campaign platforms included a return to the Bretton Woods system
Bretton Woods system
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century...
, including a gold-based national and world monetary system; fixed exchange rates; and ending the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
. He supported the replacement of the central bank
Central bank
A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is a public institution that usually issues the currency, regulates the money supply, and controls the interest rates in a country. Central banks often also oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries...
system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System
Federal Reserve System
The Federal Reserve System is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907...
, with a national bank
National bank
In banking, the term national bank carries several meanings:* especially in developing countries, a bank owned by the state* an ordinary private bank which operates nationally...
; a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering; building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; and a crash program to build particle beam weapon
Particle beam weapon
A particle beam weapon uses an ultra-high-energy beam of atoms or electrons to damage a material target by hitting it, and thus disrupting its atomic and molecular structure. A particle beam weapon is a type of directed-energy weapon, which directs energy in a particular direction by a means of...
s and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic...
(SDI). He opposed the Soviet Union and supported a military build-up to prepare for imminent war; supported the screening and quarantine of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
patients; and opposed environmentalism, deregulation, outcome-based education, and abortion.
In December 1980, LaRouche and his followers started what came to be known as the "October Surprise" allegation, namely that in October 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff conspired with the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis
Iran hostage crisis
The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran in support of the Iranian...
to delay the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, with the aim of helping Reagan win the 1980 presidential election
United States presidential election, 1980
The United States presidential election of 1980 featured a contest between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, as well as Republican Congressman John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent...
against Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
. The Iranians had agreed to this, according to the theory, in exchange for future weapons sales from the Reagan administration. The first publication of the story was in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review on December 2, 1980, followed by his New Solidarity on September 2, 1983, alleging that Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
, one of LaRouche's regular targets, had met Iran's Ayatollah Beheshti in Paris, according to Iranian sources in Paris. Although ultimately discredited, the story was widely discussed in conspiracy circles during the 1980s and 1990s.
Meetings with world leaders, involvement in Latin America
In 1982, LaRouche had private meetings with Indian Prime Minister Indira GandhiIndira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhara was an Indian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms and a fourth term . She was assassinated by Sikh extremists...
, maintaining frequent contact until her assassination in October 1984. His movement engaged in intensive outreach work in Latin America, producing research papers and gaining access to top government officials, including Peruvian President Alan García. LaRouche met with Mexican president José López Portillo
José López Portillo
José López Portillo y Pacheco was the President of Mexico from 1976 to 1982.Born in Mexico City, López Portillo studied Law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before beginning his political career with the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1959.He held several positions in the...
. George Johnson writes that LaRouche warned Portillo about attempts by international bankers to wreck the Mexican economy, meeting him under the auspices of LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee. Both the American Embassy and the Democratic Party issued disclaimers; a Mexican official told The New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting by representing himself as a Democratic Party official. He also met Argentine's president Raúl Alfonsin
Raúl Alfonsín
Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín was an Argentine lawyer, politician and statesman, who served as the President of Argentina from December 10, 1983, to July 8, 1989. Alfonsín was the first democratically-elected president of Argentina following the military government known as the National Reorganization...
. In 1982 he authored Operation Juárez, described by Dennis King as "a brilliant call to arms against the International Monetary Fund austerity programs." The International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
(IMF) was the focus of widespread popular resentment throughout Latin America, and LaRouche acquired a reputation as a serious economist in Latin America, according to King. King wrote that Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
developed "his own version of Operation Juárez."
Mexican journalist Sergio Sarmiento wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1989 that LaRouche's Labor Party in Mexico was used to attack the country's opposition; LaRouche members alleged that the National Action Party (PAN) were agents of the KGB, and later produced a pamphlet that "a vote for PAN is a vote for Nazism." When leaders of the Mexico Oil Workers' Union were jailed—corrupt leaders, according to Sarmiento—LaRouche said the union had been attacked by the Anglo-American Liberal Establishment, controlled by Scottish Rite Freemasonry. According to Jose I. Blandon, an adviser to Manuel Noriega
Manuel Noriega
Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno is a Panamanian politician and soldier. He was military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989.The 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States removed him from power; he was captured, detained as a prisoner of war, and flown to the United States. Noriega was tried on...
—the military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989—LaRouche had ties to Noriega, and according to Sarmiento, LaRouche members harassed the opposition in Lima, Peru, in support of President Alan García.
LaRouche also met Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal
Turgut Özal
Halil Turgut Özal was Prime Minister of Turkey and President of Turkey . As Prime Minister, he transformed the economy of Turkey by paving the way for the privatization of many state enterprises.-Early life and career:...
in 1987; according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Özal reprimanded his aides who had mistaken LaRouche for the Democratic Presidential candidate.
1983: Move from New York to Loudoun County
The Washington Post wrote that LaRouche and his wife moved in August 1983 from New York to a 13-room Georgian mansion on a 250-acre section of the Woodburn EstateWoodburn, Virginia
Woodburn is an unincorporated community in Loudoun County, Virginia. The village is located on Hogback Mountain southwest of Leesburg. Woodburn Road, which runs between Dry Mill and Harmony Church Roads, is all that is left to mark the existence and location of the community...
, near Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia. The property was owned at the time by a company registered in Switzerland. Companies associated with LaRouche continued to buy property in the area, including part of Leesburg's industrial park, purchased by LaRouche's Lafayette/Leesburg Ltd. Partnership to develop a printing plant and office complex.
Neighbors said they saw LaRouche guards in camouflage clothes carrying semi-automatic weapons, and the Post wrote that the house had sandbag-buttressed guard posts nearby, along with metal spikes in the driveway and cement barriers on the road. One of his aides said LaRouche was safer in Loudoun County: "The terrorist organizations which have targeted Mr. LaRouche do not have bases of operations in Virginia." LaRouche said his new home meant a shorter commute to Washington. A former associate said the move also meant his members would be more isolated from friends and family than they had been in New York. According to the Post in 2004, local people who opposed him for any reason were accused in LaRouche publications of being commies, homosexual, drug pushers, and terrorists. He reportedly accused the Leesburg Garden Club of being a nest of Soviet sympathizers, and a local lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after threatening phone calls and a death threat. In leaflets supporting his application of concealed weapons permits for his bodyguards in Leesburg, Virginia
Leesburg, Virginia
Leesburg is a historic town in, and county seat of, Loudoun County, Virginia, United States of America. Leesburg is located west-northwest of Washington, D.C. along the base of the Catoctin Mountain and adjacent to the Potomac River. Its population according the 2010 Census is 42,616...
, 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."
Regarding LaRouche's paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
security force, armed with semi-automatic weapons, a spokesperson said that they were necessary because LaRouche was the subject of "assassination conspiracies".
1984: Schiller Institute, television spots, contact with Reagan administration
Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984. In the same year, LaRouche was able to raise enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at a cost of $330,000 each, in which he called Walter MondaleWalter Mondale
Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale is an American Democratic Party politician, who served as the 42nd Vice President of the United States , under President Jimmy Carter, and as a United States Senator for Minnesota...
—the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate—a Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints. On April 19, 1986, NBC's Saturday Night Live aired a sketch satirizing the ads, portraying the Queen of England and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers. LaRouche received 78,773 votes in the 1984 presidential election.
In 1984, media reports stated that LaRouche and his aides had met Reagan administration officials, including Norman Bailey, senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr.
William P. Clark, Jr.
William Patrick Clark, Jr. , American politician, served under President Ronald Reagan as the Deputy Secretary of State from 1981 to 1982, United States National Security Advisor from 1982 to 1983, and the Secretary of the Interior from 1983 until 1985.- Life and career :A devout Catholic, former...
There were also reported contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA. The LaRouche campaign said the reporting was full of errors. In 1984 two Pentagon officials spoke at a LaRouche rally in Virginia; a Defense Department spokesman said the Pentagon viewed LaRouche's group as a "conservative group ... very supportive of the administration." White House spokesman Larry Speakes
Larry Speakes
Larry M. Speakes is a former acting spokesman for the White House under President Ronald Reagan, having held the position from 1981 to 1987.Speakes was born in Cleveland, Mississippi...
said the Administration was "glad to talk to" any American citizen who might have information. According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off when they became public. Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC, saying he had been in conflict with Oliver North
Oliver North
Oliver Laurence North is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer, political commentator, host of War Stories with Oliver North on Fox News Channel, a military historian, and a New York Times best-selling author....
over LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras
Contras
The contras is a label given to the various rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's FSLN Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government following the July 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's dictatorship...
. According to a LaRouche publication, a court-ordered search of North's files produced a May 1986 telex from Iran–Contra defendant General Richard Secord
Richard Secord
Major General Richard V. Secord, Retired , is a United States Air Force officer convicted for his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal only to be exonerated after a 1990 Supreme Court case found the statute used to be illegal....
, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche. King states that LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review was the first to report on important details of the Iran–Contra affair, predicting that a major scandal was about to break months before mainstream media picked up on the story.
Strategic Defense Initiative
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic...
(SDI). Dennis King wrote that LaRouche had been speculating about space-based weaponry as early as 1975. He set up the Fusion Energy Foundation, which held conferences and tried to cultivate scientists, with some success. According to King, LaRouche's associates had for some years been in contact with members of the Reagan administration about LaRouche's space-based weapons ideas. Physicist Edward Teller
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
, a proponent of SDI and X-ray lasers, told reporters in 1984 that he had been courted by LaRouche, but had kept his distance. LaRouche began calling his plan the "LaRouche-Teller proposal," though they had never met. Teller said LaRouche was "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions." LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology.
1984: NBC lawsuit
In January 1984 NBC aired a news segment about LaRouche, and in March a "First Camera" report produced by Pat Lynch. In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review in 1985, Lynch wrote that the reports included the allegation that LaRouche was "the leader of a violence-prone, anti-Semitic cult that smeared its opponents and sued its critics." In interviews, former members of the movement gave details about their fundraising practices, and alleged that LaRouche had spoken about assassinating U.S. President Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
. The reports said an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would lead to an indictment, and quoted Irwin Suall
Irwin Suall
Irwin Suall was an American socialist and researcher. He was national director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League from 1967 to 1997 in which capacity he directed that organizations undercover intelligence gathering on extremist groups....
, the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) fact-finding director, who called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler." After the broadcast, LaRouche members picketed NBC's office carrying signs saying "Lynch Pat Lynch," and the NBC switchboard said it received a death threat against her. Another NBC researcher said someone placed fliers around her parents' neighborhood saying she was running a call-girl ring from her parents' home. Lynch said LaRouche members began to impersonate her and her researchers in telephone calls, and called her "Fat Lynch" in their publications.
LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the ADL, arguing that the programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him. The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and LaRouche lost the case. NBC won a countersuit, the jury awarding the network $3 million in damages, later reduced to $258,459, for misuse of libel law, in what was called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant. LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty, which the judge described as "completely lacking in credibility." LaRouche said he had been unaware since 1973 who paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, and lawyers. The judge fined him for failing to answer. After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was delivered to the court to end the case. When LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is a federal court located in Richmond, Virginia, with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:*District of Maryland*Eastern District of North Carolina...
, rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.
1985–1986: PANIC, LaRouche's AIDS initiative
The advent of AIDSAIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
seemed to fulfill LaRouche's 1973 prediction that an epidemic would strike humanity in the 1980s. LaRouche said it had been created by the "Soviet war machine," or by the International Monetary Fund to kill "excess eaters" in Africa. According to Christopher Toumey, his subsequent campaign followed a familiar LaRouche pattern: challenging the scientific competence of government experts, and arguing that LaRouche had special scientific insights, and his own scientific associates were more competent than government scientists. LaRouche's view of AIDS agreed with orthodox medicine in that HIV caused AIDS, but differed from it in arguing that HIV spread like the cold virus or malaria, by way of casual contact and insect bites—an idea that would make HIV-positive people extremely dangerous. He said "a person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around", and that people who lynched gays might be remembered as the "only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction." He advocated testing anyone working in schools, restaurants, or healthcare, and quarantining those who tested positive. Some of LaRouche's views on AIDS were developed by John Seale, a British venereological physician who proposed that AIDS was created in a laboratory. Seale's highly speculative writings were published in three prestigious medical journals, lending these ideas some appearance of being hard science.
LaRouche and his associates devised a "Biological Strategic Defense Initiative" that would cost $100 billion per annum, which they said would have to be directed by LaRouche. Toumey writes that those opposing the program, such as the World Health Organization
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...
and Centers for Disease Control, were accused of "viciously lying to the world," and of following an agenda of genocide and euthanasia. In 1986 LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases. Sponsored by his "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), Proposition 64—or the "LaRouche initiative"—qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the required signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications. Seale, presented as an AIDS expert by PANIC, supported the LaRouche initiative but disagreed with several of LaRouche's views, including that HIV could be spread by insects, and described the group's political beliefs and conspiracy theories as "rather odd". According to David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, the proposal would have required that 300,000 people in the area with HIV or AIDS be reported to public health authorities; might have removed over 100,000 of them from their jobs in schools, restaurants and agriculture; and would have forced 47,000 children to stay away from school.
The proposal was opposed by leading scientists and local health officials—including the deans and faculties of four California schools of public health, scientists at Stanford University, the Red Cross, the surgeon general, labor unions and the Democratic Party of California—as based on inaccurate scientific information and, as the public health schools put it, running "counter to all public health principles." It was defeated, reintroduced two years later, and defeated again, with two million votes in favor the first time, and 1.7 million the second. AIDS became a leading plank in LaRouche's platform during his 1988 presidential campaign. He vowed to quarantine its "aberrant" victims who were "guilty of bringing this pandemic upon us."
1986: Electoral success in Illinois; press conference allegations
In March 1986, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart—LaRouche National Democratic Policy Committee candidates—won the Democratic primary for state-wide offices in Illinois, bringing LaRouche national attention. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson IIIAdlai Stevenson III
Adlai Ewing Stevenson III is an American politician of the Democratic Party. He represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 1970 until 1981.-Education, military service, and early career:...
, withdrew his nomination rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche members, and told reporters the party was "exploring every legal remedy to purge these bizarre and dangerous extremists from the Democratic ticket." A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said it would have to do a better job of communicating to the electorate that LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee was unrelated to the Democratic Party. The New York Times wrote that Democratic Party officials were trying to identify LaRouche candidates in order to alert voters, and asked the LaRouche organization to release a full list of its candidates.
A month later, LaRouche held a press conference to accuse the Soviet government, British government, drug dealers, international bankers, and journalists of being involved in a variety of conspiracies. Flanked by bodyguards, he said, "If Abe Lincoln were alive, he'd probably be standing up here with me today," and that there was no criticism of him that did not originate "with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation ..." He said he had been in danger from Soviet assassins for over 13 years, and had to live in safe houses. He refused to answer a question from an NBC reporter, saying "How can I talk with a drug pusher like you?" He called the leadership of the United States "idiotic" and "berserk," and its foreign policy "criminal or insane." He warned of the imminent collapse of the banking system and accused banks of laundering drug money. Asked about the movement's finances, he said "I don't know. ... I'm not responsible, I'm not involved in that."
1986–1988: Raids, criminal conviction
He received 25,562 votes in the 1988 presidential election, standing under the banner of the "National Economic Recovery" party. On December 16 that year, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; 11 counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to fifteen years, but was released on January 26, 1994. The judge called his claim of a political vendetta "arrant nonsense," and said "the idea that this organization is a sufficient threat to anything that would warrant the government bringing a prosecution to silence them just defies human experience." Thirteen associates received terms ranging from one month to 77 years for mail fraud and conspiracy. Defense lawyers filed unsuccessful appeals that challenged the conduct of the grand jury, the contempt fines, the execution of the search warrants, and various trial procedures. At least ten appeals were heard by the United States Court of Appeals, and three by the U.S. Supreme Court. Former Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...
Ramsey Clark
Ramsey Clark
William Ramsey Clark is an American lawyer, activist and former public official. He worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, which included service as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969, under President Lyndon B. Johnson...
joined the defense team for two appeals, writing that the case involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."
In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche says the raid on his operation was the work of Raisa Gorbachev. In an interview the same year, he said that the Soviet Union opposed him because he invented the Strategic Defense Initiative
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic...
. "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."
1989: Musical interests and Verdi tuning initiative
LaRouche and his wife have an interest in classical music up to the period of Brahms. A motto of LaRouche's European Workers' Party, is "Think like Beethoven"; movement offices typically include a piano and posters of German composers, and members are known for their choral singing at protest events and for using satirical lyrics tailored to their targets. LaRouche abhors contemporary music; he said in 1980, "Rock was not an accidental thing. This was done by people who set out in a deliberate way to subvert the United States. It was done by British intelligence," and wrote that the Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." LaRouche movement members have protested at performances of Richard Wagner's operas, denouncing Wagner as an anti-Semite who found favor with the Nazis, and called a conductor "satanic" because he played contemporary music.In 1989 LaRouche advocated that classical orchestras should return to the "Verdi pitch," a pitch that Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
had enshrined in Italian legislation in 1884. The initiative attracted support from more than 300 opera stars, including Joan Sutherland
Joan Sutherland
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s....
, Placido Domingo
Plácido Domingo
Plácido Domingo KBE , born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range...
and Luciano Pavarotti
Luciano Pavarotti
right|thumb|Luciano Pavarotti performing at the opening of the Constantine Palace in [[Strelna]], 31 May 2003. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of [[St...
, who according to Opera Fanatic may or may not have been aware of LaRouche's politics. A spokesman for Domingo said Domingo had simply signed a questionnaire, had not been aware of its origins, and would not agree with LaRouche's politics. Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi was an Italian lirico-spinto soprano popular in the post-war period...
and Piero Cappuccilli
Piero Cappuccilli
Piero Cappuccilli was an Italian operatic baritone, particularly associated with Verdi roles, especiallyMacbeth and Simon Boccanegra; he was renowned for his extraordinary breath control and smooth legato, and is widely regarded as one of the finest Italian baritones of the second half of the 20th...
, who were running for the European Parliament on LaRouche's "Patriots for Italy" platform, attended Schiller Institute conferences as featured speakers, and the discussions led to debates in the Italian parliament about reinstating Verdi's legislation. LaRouche gave an interview to National Public Radio on the initiative from prison. The initiative was opposed by the editor of Opera Fanatic, Stefan Zucker
Stefan Zucker
Stefan Zucker is an American singer, expert on Italian opera and self-described "opera fanatic." He was listed in the 1980 Guinness Book of Records as the "world's highest tenor" for having hit and sustained an A above high C for 3.8 seconds at The Town Hall in New York City on September 12,...
, who objected to the establishment of a "pitch police," and argued that LaRouche was using the issue to gain credibility.
Imprisonment and release on parole
LaRouche began his jail sentence in 1989, serving it at the Federal Medical CenterFederal Medical Center, Rochester
Federal Medical Center, Rochester is a United States Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in southeast Minnesota which provides specialized and long-term physical and mental health medical care to male offenders...
in Rochester, Minnesota. From there he ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia
Virginia's 10th congressional district
Virginia's Tenth Congressional District is a U.S. congressional district in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The residents of the 10th District are currently represented by Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, first elected to the 10th's seat in the U.S...
, but received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for President again in 1992 with James Bevel
James Bevel
James L. Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement who, as the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era:...
as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations
Franklin child prostitution ring allegations
The Franklin child prostitution ring allegations were a series of high-profile accusations and legal actions between 1988 and 1991 surrounding an alleged child sex ring serving prominent citizens of Omaha, Nebraska, as well as high-level U.S. politicians. The allegations centered around the actions...
. It was only the second-ever campaign for president from prison. He received 26,334 votes, standing again as the "Economic Recovery" party. For a time he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker
Jim Bakker
James Orsen "Jim" Bakker is an American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program.A sex scandal led to his resignation from the ministry...
. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily intelligence report by mail, and at times had information about news events days before they happened. Bakker also wrote that LaRouche believed their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."
LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County. The Washington Post wrote that he would be supervised by parole and probation officers until January 2004. Also in 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam
Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
to condemn the Anti-Defamation League for its alleged crimes against African Americans, reportedly one of several such meetings since 1992. In 1996, LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan Muhammad, Sr. is the leader of the African-American religious movement the Nation of Islam . He served as the minister of major mosques in Boston and Harlem, and was appointed by the longtime NOI leader, Elijah Muhammad, before his death in 1975, as the National Representative of...
and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit. As soon as he began speaking, he was booed off the stage; one delegate said it was because of his actions against African Americans in the past.
In the 1996 Democratic presidential primaries
Democratic Party (United States) presidential primaries, 1996
The 1996 Democratic presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the Democratic Party chose its nominee for President of the United States in the 1996 U.S. presidential election...
, he received enough votes in Louisiana and Virginia to get one delegate from each state, but before the primaries began, the Democratic National Committee chair, Donald Fowler
Donald Fowler
Donald L. Fowler served as National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997. Fowler is a political science professor and businessman from South Carolina who has spent most of his adult life in various Democratic Party roles, including state party executive director, state...
, ruled that LaRouche was not a "bona fide Democrat" because of his "expressed political beliefs ... which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic," and because of his "past activities including exploitation of and defrauding contributors and voters." Fowler instructed state parties to disregard votes for LaRouche.
LaRouche opposed attempts to impeach President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
, charging it was a plot by the British Intelligence to destabilize the U.S. Government. In 1996 he called for the impeachment of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge
Tom Ridge
Thomas Joseph "Tom" Ridge is an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives , the 43rd Governor of Pennsylvania , Assistant to the President for Homeland Security , and the first United States Secretary of Homeland Security...
.
In 1999 China's press agency, the Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency
The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in the PRC. It is the largest news agency in the PRC, ahead of the China News Service...
, reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report
Cox Report
The Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, commonly known as the Cox Report after Representative Christopher Cox, is a classified U.S...
, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets, calling it a "scientifically illiterate hoax." On October 13, 1999, during a press conference to announce his plans to run for president, he predicted the collapse of the world's financial system, stating, "There's nothing like it in this century.... it is systematic, and therefore, inevitable." He said the U.S. and other nations had built the "biggest financial bubble in all history," which was close to bankruptcy.
2000–2003: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement, September 11 Attacks, Presidential run
In 2002 LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review argued that the September 11, 2001 attacks had been an "inside job"
9/11 conspiracy theories
9/11 conspiracy theories are theories that disagree with the widely accepted account that the September 11 attacks were perpetrated solely by al-Qaeda. These theories arose because of what proponents of the conspiracy theories believe to be inconsistencies in the official conclusions or some...
and "attempted coup d'etat," and that Iran was the first country to question it. The article received wide coverage in Iran, and was cited by senior Iranian government officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is an influential Iranian politician and writer, who was the fourth President of Iran. He was a member of the Assembly of Experts until his resignation in 2011...
and Hassan Rowhani
Hassan Rowhani
Hassan Rowhani is an Iranian politician and cleric, and as of March 2007, a member of the Supreme National Security Council. Rowhani's membership in the council is as one of the two representatives of the Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran...
. Mahmoud Alinejad writes that, in a subsequent telephone interview with the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, LaRouche said American and Israeli elements had organized the attacks to start a war, and that Israel was a dictatorial regime prepared to commit Nazi-style crimes against the Palestinians.
LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns; Democratic Party officials distanced themselves from him and did not allow him to participate in candidate forum debates. He did not run in 2008.
As during the preceding decade, LaRouche and his followers denied that human civilization had harmed the environment through DDT, chluorofluorocarbons, or carbon dioxide. According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming".
2003–2009: Articles in the Arab, Chinese, and Russian press
Iqbal Qazwini wrote in the Arabic-language daily Asharq Al-Awsat in 2003 that LaRouche was one of the first to predict the fall of the Berlin WallBerlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
in 1988 and German unification. He said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was the large-scale American program to aid Europe where the United States gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to combat the spread of Soviet communism. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948...
for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries. According to Qazwini, recent years have seen a proliferation of LaRouche's ideas in China and South Asia. Qazwini referred to him as the spiritual father of the revival of the new Silk Road or Eurasian Landbridge, which aims to link the continents through a network of ground transportation. In November 2005, an eight-part interview with LaRouche was published in the People's Daily
People's Daily
The People's Daily is a daily newspaper in the People's Republic of China. The paper is an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China , published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million. In addition to its main Chinese-language edition, it has editions in English,...
of China, covering his economic forecasts, his battles with the American media, and his assessment of the neoconservatives. The interviewer wrote that LaRouche was "quite famous in mainland China today," and seemed to be better known overseas than in America.
Tatiana Shishova interviewed him for Russia Today
RT (TV network)
RT, previously known as Russia Today, is a global multilingual television news network based in the Russian Federation run by the state-owned state-run RIA Novosti....
in 2008, describing him as "the greatest American economist, a prominent politician, one of the first to struggle with the financial oligarchy and its major institutions—the World Bank and IMF. He has no equal in the field of economic and financial forecasts." LaRouche gave an interview in 2009 to China Youth Daily
China Youth Daily
The China Youth Daily is the official newspaper of Communist Youth League of China , and is a popular official daily newspaper and the first independently operated central government news media portal in the People's Republic of China.In 1980s it was regarded as the best newspaper in mainland...
, which wrote that he had warned in July 2007 that unless the United States stopped monopolizing world finances, and united with China, Russia, and India to reorganize the world financial system, a new global credit crisis would be unavoidable.
2007–2009: Financial crisis, U.S. healthcare reform
In 2008, he was credited by press in ItalyItaly
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
as having forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2009. In December 2008, Ivo Caizzi of Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...
referred to him as "the guru politician who, since the nineties, has announced the crash of speculative finances and the need for a New Bretton Woods
Bretton Woods system
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century...
." The article said Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti
Giulio Tremonti
Giulio Tremonti is an Italian politician. He served in the government of Italy as Minister of Economy and Finance under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2004, from 2005 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2011....
was "an attentive reader" of LaRouche's anti-Free Market and anti-Marxist writings. Italian Senator Oskar Peterlini
Oskar Peterlini
Oskar Peterlini is a Representative of the German-speaking South Tyrolean Minority in South Tyrol, Italy. He is a member of the Italian Senate in the Italian Parliament and used to be President of the district of the South Tyrolean Unterland of the South Tyrolean People's Party 2001-2010.- Life...
, in a July 2009 speech before the Senate, called LaRouche an expert in the field who had predicted the crisis.
During the discussion of U.S. health care reform in 2009, LaRouche took exception to what he described as Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
's proposal that "independent boards of doctors and health care experts [should] make the life-and-death decisions of what care to provide, and what not, based on cost-effectiveness criteria." LaRouche said the proposed boards, later compared to "death panels" by Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
, would amount to the same thing as the Nazis' Action T4
Action T4
Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...
euthanasia program, and urged Americans to "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven." His movement printed pamphlets showing Obama and Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
laughing together, and posters of Obama with a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to tear the posters apart, or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them. During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank
Barney Frank
Barney Frank is the U.S. Representative for . A member of the Democratic Party, he is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and is considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States.Born and raised in New Jersey, Frank graduated from Harvard College and...
referred to the posters as "vile, contemptible nonsense."
History as a struggle between Platonism and Aristotelianism
According to the Heritage FoundationHeritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong...
, LaRouche believes that a super elite (the "oligarchy") is in control of world events, a group that includes the Rockefellers, the London financial center, the British royal family, the Anti-Defamation League, the KGB, and the Heritage Foundation itself. Others include Nazis, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, Trilateralists, international bankers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Socialist International—all supposedly controlled by the British—as well as Hitler, H.G. Wells, Voltaire, and the Beatles as representatives of the 1960s counterculture
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
. George Johnson
George Johnson (writer)
George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics , and writes for a number of publications, including The New York...
in Architects of Fear (1983) compares the view to the Illuminati conspiracy theory; after he wrote about LaRouche in The New York Times, LaRouche's followers denounced Johnson as part of a conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt.
LaRouche sees history as a battle between Platonists
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...
, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
, who rely on empirical
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
data. Platonists in LaRouche's view include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
, and Leibniz. He believes that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, embraces moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, LaRouche argues, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new dark age in which the world will be ruled by the oligarchs. Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters and pro-life advocates. The conspirators may not be in touch with one another: "From their standpoint, [the conspirators] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously."
Allegations of fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism
From the mid-1970s onwards, the mainstream press and other commentators alleged that LaRouche had fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies. Paul Montgomery wrote in The New York Times that the charges dated to around 1976, when LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party began to include Zionist and Jewish groups in its stories about conspiracies. It started a campaign against the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai Brith (ADL), which included setting up a group called "The Provisional Committee to Clean Up B'Nai Brith." Montgomery wrote that material sold by LaRouche organizers in airports and shopping centers included a book that said Jews dominated the drug trade with the help of Jewish bankers. This, despite the fact that the LaRouche movement had Jewish members who had been recruited from the 1960s student movement.LaRouche maintained that he was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. When the ADL accused him of anti-Semitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment, and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description. LaRouche said in 1986 that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stemmed from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operation—which is sometimes the same thing," and in 2006 wrote that "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." Antony Lerman wrote in 1988 that LaRouche used "the British" as a code word for "Jews," a theory also propounded by Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). George Johnson argued that King's presentation failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish. Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...
wrote in 1997 that LaRouche's references to the British really were to the British, though he agreed that an alleged British-Jewish alliance lay at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.
Manning Marable
Manning Marable
William Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. Marable authored several texts and was active in progressive political causes...
of Columbia University wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled, and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute
A. Philip Randolph Institute
The A. Philip Randolph Institute is an organization for African American trade unionists.-History:Following passage of the Voting Rights Act, APRI was co-founded in 1965 by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin...
, an organization for African-American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions-much the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis
Roy Innis
Roy Emile Alfredo Innis is an African American civil rights activist. He has been National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality since his election to the position in 1968....
, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality
Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...
, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not. Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf.
Movement
Estimates of the size of LaRouche's movement have varied over the years; most say there is a core membership of 500–2000. The estimated 600 members in 1978 paid monthly dues of $24. Johnson wrote in 1983 that the Fusion Energy Foundation and National Democratic Policy Committee had attracted some 20,000 members, as well as 300,000 magazine subscribers.A 1987 article by John Mintz in The Washington Post reported that members lived hand-to-mouth in crowded apartments, their basic needs—such as a mattress and pillowcase—paid for by the movement. Their days were focused on raising money or selling newspapers for LaRouche, doing research for him, or singing in a group choir, spending almost every waking hour together.
According to Christopher Toumey, LaRouche's charismatic authority
Charismatic authority
The sociologist Max Weber defined charismatic authority as "resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him." Charismatic authority is one of three forms of authority laid out...
within the movement is grounded on members' belief that he possesses a unique level of insight and expertise. He identifies an emotionally charged issue, conducts in-depth research into it, then proposes a simplistic solution, usually involving restructuring of the economy or national security apparatus. He and the membership portray anyone opposing him as immoral and part of the conspiracy. The group is known for its caustic attacks on people it opposes and former members. In the past it has justified what it refers to as "psywar techniques" as necessary to shake people up; Johnson in 1983 quoted a LaRouche associate: "We're not very nice, so we're hated. Why be nice? It's a cruel world. We're in a war and the human race is up for grabs." Charles Tate, a former long-term LaRouche associate, told The Washington Post in 1987 that members see themselves as not subject to the ordinary laws of society: "They feel that the continued existence of the human race is totally dependent on what they do in the organization, that nobody would be here without LaRouche. They feel justified in a peculiar way doing anything whatsoever."
Selected works
- Marcus, Lynn. The third stage of imperialism. New York: West Village Committee for Independent Political Action, 1967.
- with Tony Papert. Mass action. SDS Regional Labor Committee,1968.
- The philosophy of Socialist education. New York: National Caucus of Labor Committees, 1969.
- with Uwe Henke von Papert. Centrism as a social phenomenon: how not to build a revolutionary party. New York: National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees 1970
- Education, science and politics. New York: National Caucus of Labor Committees, 1972.
- The question of Stalinism today. New York: Campaigner Publications, 1975.
- How the International Development Bank will work. New York: Campaigner Publications, 1975.
- A presidential campaign white paper on agricultural production. New York: New Solidarity International Press Service, 1975.
- The Rothschilds, from Pitt to Rockefeller. 1976
- Dialectical Economics An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy. New York: Heath, 1975. ISBN 0-669-85308-9
- The Case of Walter Lippmann A Presidential Strategy. New York: Campaigner Publications, 1977. ISBN 0-918388-06-6
- How to Defeat Liberalism and William F. Buckley 1980 Campaign Policy. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co, 1979. ISBN 0-933488-03-3
- The Power of Reason: A Kind of Autobiography. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. House, 1979. ISBN 0-933488-01-7
- Will the Soviets Rule During the 1980s?. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co, 1979. ISBN 0-933488-02-5
- Basic Economics for Conservative Democrats. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co, 1980. ISBN 0-933488-04-1
- What Every Conservative Should Know About Communism. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co, 1980. ISBN 0-933488-06-8
- Why Revival of "SALT" Won't Stop War. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co, 1980. ISBN 0-933488-08-4
- with David P. Goldman. The Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980. ISBN 0-933488-09-2
- Operation Juárez: Mexico/Ibero-America policy study. Executive Intelligence Review, 1982.
- There Are No Limits to Growth. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1983. ISBN 0-933488-31-9
- So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? A Text on Elementary Mathematical Economics. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984. ISBN 0-943235-13-8
- Imperialism The Final Stage of Bolshevism. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984. ISBN 0-933488-33-5
- The Power of Reason, 1988: An Autobiography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1987. ISBN 0-943235-00-6
- In Defense of Common Sense. Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1989. ISBN 0-9621095-3-3
- The Science of Christian Economy. Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991. ISBN 0-9621095-6-8
- with Paul Gallager. Cold Fusion: A Challenge to U.S. Science Policy. Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1992. ISBN 0-9621095-7-6
- Now, Are You Ready to Learn About Economics? Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 2000. ISBN 0-943235-18-9
- The Economics of the Nöosphere Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 2001. ISBN 0-943235-20-0
Further reading
- LaRouche Political Action Committee, retrieved February 13, 2011.
- Executive Intelligence Review, retrieved February 13, 2011.
- World Larouche Youth Movement, retrieved February 13, 2011.
- Schiller Institute, retrieved February 13, 2011.
- Atkins, Stephen E. "LaRouche, Lyndon Hermyle," Encyclopedia of Modern American Extremists and Extremist Groups. Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 0313315027
- Beyes-Corleis, Aglaja (1994). Verirrt: Mein Leben in einer radikalen Politorganisation. Herder. ISBN 3-451-04278-9
- Berlet, Chip (1981). "War on Drugs. The Strange Story of Lyndon LaRouche," High Times, May 1981..
- Kalimtgis, Konstandinos and Goldman, David (1978). Dope, Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against The U.S.. New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co (LaRouche).
- King, Dennis and Radosh, Ronald (1984). "The LaRouche Connection," The New Republic, November 19, 1984, p. 15.
- King, Dennis (1982). "LaRouche: A Dictatorial Mind at Work", New America, April–May 1982.
- LaRouche, Lyndon (1976–2008). Footage of LaRouche on the financial collapse, YouTube, accessed September 7, 2009.
- Political Research Associates. Articles about LaRouche, retrieved February 13, 2011.
- Riggs, Carol (1996). Lyndon LaRouche: A Study in Political Extremism. George Mason University.
- Roberts, Paul (1995). An American Fuhrer: Lyndon Larouche and the Politics of Paranoia. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312021615\
- Rowell, Andrew (1996). Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environment Movement. Routledge. ISBN 0415128285
- Schiller Institute. "Meet Lyndon LaRouche", accessed February 10, 2011.
- The Nizkor Project. "Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam", accessed February 10, 2011.
- Zuckert, Catherine H. and Zuckert, Michael (2006). The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. University Of Chicago Press, p. 11ff. ISBN 0226993329
Newspaper archives of material on LaRouche
- The New York Times, before 1981.
- The New York Times, 1981–present.
- The Washington Post, before 1987.
- The Washington Post, 1987–present.
- Mintz, John. "The Cult Controversy", The Washington Post, includes a series on LaRouche by Mintz and links to other Post articles on LaRouche.
- Los Angeles Times, before 1985.
- Los Angeles Times, 1985–present.