Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement

This article is about the views of Lyndon LaRouche. For an overview of his organization, see LaRouche movement, and for the man himself, see Lyndon LaRouche.

The views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement cover a wide variety of topics including history, economics, politics and cultural issues. They are the source of much controversy; there are disputes over how to categorize them, complicated by the fact that they have changed over the years. LaRouche abandoned his Marxist orientation in the 1970s, and some critics said that he moved to the right, while others said that he remained a leftist or was a supporter of the Soviet Union. LaRouche's supporters regard his views as those of a brilliant and original thinker. His critics regard them as being conspiratorial or anti-semitic.

Overview

In the 1980s, LaRouche candidates ran on political platforms that included support for the Strategic Defense Initiative, opposition to the Soviet Union, a plan to return the U.S. to a gold-backed currency, support for nuclear energy and research into fusion energy, the replacement of the International Monetary Fund with an International Development Bank, expansion of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, infrastruture projects funded with low-interest loans, a moratorium on debts owed by U.S. farmers and Third World nations, and mass screening for HIV with quarantining of those with AIDS.

Citizens Electoral Council, the Australian arm of the LaRouche movement, was reported in 2006 to reject the "economic rationalist model" and its related policies, including radical free trade, deregulation, and globalization. In their place, it favors averting economic depression by building infrastructure projects funded by low interest loans from national banks. It also opposes multiculturalism, gay rights, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, "anti-economic development Greens", and the alleged involvement of banks in the drug trade.

Other views:

• They have called for a moratorium on Third World debt.
• They have opposed the so-called counterculture, and the legalization of recreational drugs, arguing that these create a "bread and circuses" culture of self-centered hedonism, and a highly manipulable population. LaRouche calls for a revival of classical culture, particularly in the domain of public education. This is a view that the NCLC and descendent LaRouche organizations have held consistently since their beginnings in the late 1960s.
• They have supported nuclear energy and other complex technologies often opposed by the environmentalist movement, arguing that human survival depends on a progression of technologies. (see LaRouche on Economics.)
• They believe that the idea of man-made global warming is a "fraud", and have referred to the Oscar-winning documentary film An Inconvenient Truth as "the Great Luddite Hoax." LaRouche proposes that cosmic ray radiation, including that from the Crab Nebula, "determines much of the climate on Earth". LaRouche also states that "we are entering a solar-determined global cooling, as typified by the recapping of the icecap on the Arctic." He has endorsed the British TV documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
• They defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment scandal, claiming that those who called for Clinton's resignation or impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky scandal were hiding their true motives.
• They opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supported Argentina in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war.
• They oppose deregulation. According to EIR, "LaRouche has consistently called for reregulation of utilities, transportation, health care (under the "Hill-Burton" standard), the financial (especially the speculative markets) and other sectors, and a return to traditional American-System practices, set aside over the past 40 years."
• They oppose the United Nations and other international organizations, particularly the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in cases where LaRouche says they interfere with the concept of the Westphalian state and the Platonic ideal of a "perfectly sovereign nation-state republic". This holds especially true for their conduct toward the nations of the Third World, and LaRouche further argues that this conduct represents neo-colonialism.
• LaRouche proposed the "Homeowners and Banks Protection Act of 2007," which would freeze mortgage rates, ban foreclosures and put the banking system through a bankruptcy reorganization.

Economics

According to KM.RU News in Russia, LaRouche promotes a policy of protectionism excercised by sovereign nation-states, based on the ideas of "physical economics." He is said to be perhaps the first to draw attention to the "hegemonic aspirations" of a global oligarchy of financial speculators, which have created a world-wide financial pyramid and a growing gap between total financial obligations and the state of productive forces.

He regards economics as the "mother of the sciences", and often combines discussion of economics with a discussion of science, philosophy and culture. According to a 2009 interview in China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche is a famous economist who used to follow Marxism but now supports American-style capitalism. He says that America can return to a spirit of innovation if there is public control of financial capital and low-interest loans.

Although LaRouche espoused Marxism in the 1960s, he abandoned it in favor of what he calls the "American System" in the 1970s. The term "American System" was originally associated with Henry Clay. LaRouche also says that this school of thought is based on the economic policies of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's advisor Henry Carey, as well as those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In practice this means massive state investment in infrastructure projects and protectionist measures such as protective tariffs.

LaRouche believes that capitalism is not, as Marxists argue, the principal enemy of progress. He argues that an oligarchical faction within the financial community is in fact the principal enemy of progress. This elite conspiracy, he says, predates and transcends both capitalism and socialism.

He has argued that a fundamental question of economics is the problem of diminishing resources. He believes that this can be overcome through the creative power of the human mind, which makes it possible to harness elements of nature that were once considered useless, such as oil, and then find new resources before the old ones have been depleted. Thus, in LaRouche's view, the principal subject of economics is the ability of the cognitive powers of the individual human mind to make new "discoveries of universal principles." These discoveries, LaRouche says, lead to revolutions in technology, which re-define man's relationship to nature in a non-linear way (LaRouche's most recent book on economics, entitled The Economics of the Noösphere, praises the ideas of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky). Such revolutions, he says, are contingent on the viability of the culture, on its capacity to absorb and transmit new ideas. He believes that the most historically successful culture is what he calls the classical culture of Ancient Greece during the time of Plato, or the culture of Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance.

LaRouche supports extensive government intervention, both in terms of regulating sectors of the economy that are essential to the well-being of the nation (infrastructure), and in terms of providing credits for investment in infrastructure projects and science projects such as NASA that are too large and long-term for any private firm to pursue. LaRouche points to policies such as Abraham Lincoln's transcontinental railroad and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority as examples of successful economic policy. LaRouche also supports the selective use of government's power both to tax and to issue credits (see national bank) as a means of encouraging productive investment, while discouraging speculation. He calls for greater federal investment in science and technology, particularly the space program and nuclear energy, with an emphasis on nuclear fusion.

He believes that if governments do not play a strong role in directing national economies, the gap will be filled by several kinds of monopolies and cartels. It is because of this that LaRouche opposes Free Trade and globalism and supports protectionism.

LaRouche maintains that supranational financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund are committed to a policy of looting the living standards of the world's populations through austerity and speculation, while contracting the actual productive base of these economies– a policy that he claims is a revival of the economic approach of the German central banker Hjalmar Schacht, who held office both before and during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. To remedy this, LaRouche proposes a new international conference, modeled on the Bretton Woods conference, for the purpose of reorganizing a bankrupt monetary system, and eliminating most of the presently unpayable debt. For example, he advocates the retroactive cancellation of all financial derivatives contracts. He proposes that new credits be created for very large infrastructure projects all over the world; LaRouche has published specific proposals for such projects in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, North and South America, and Australia. LaRouche considers it to be the unfinished mission of the United States of America to end any form of colonialism, which he associates in particular with the austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund in the post-1972 period.

Economic forecasting

According to a 2009 interview with China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche has made nine forecasts since the 1950s, and every one has been correct.

According to the LaRouche movement, LaRouche has developed the LaRouche-Riemann Method, built on the application of LaRouche's concepts to the theories of Bernhard Riemann.

Russian Professor GG Pirogov, in presentation on LaRouche's ideas made at the Lebedev Physical Institute, reports that LaRouche's approach stresses the idea that the mind can discover new physical priniciples and expand human capabilities, thereby increasing mankind's domination of nature and allowing for the continued growth of the human race. In search of a measurable standard for the role of human cognition as an economic force, LaRouche adopted the standpoint of Riemann's 1852 habilitation dissertation to form the LaRouche-Riemann Method. LaRouche is said to have applied these ideas to develop an approach to "physical economics."

With the formulation of this method, LaRouche claims success as a long-range forecaster. LaRouche says that he predicted that if the policies of the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower presidencies persisted, the second half of the 1960s would experience a series of international financial-monetary crises, leading toward a breakdown in the existing Bretton Woods system. The LaRouche-Riemann Method predictions for the future included a systemic crisis, and a general breakdown crisis of the global system if monetarist forms of austerity measures were continued. On July 25, 2007, LaRouche stated in a webcast that "There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none! It's finished, now!."

The "Triple Curve", or "typical collapse function", is an economic model developed by LaRouche which purports to illustrate the growth of financial aggregates at the expense of the physical economy and how this leads to an inevitably collapsing bubble economy. According to an interview with China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche's main point is that when the real economy (production) drops while the nominal economy (money and financial instruments) goes up there will be an unavoidable economic crisis.(graphic)

According to this model, speculative gains in financial markets are sustained by diverting monetary flows out of the real economy, into financial markets. LaRouche writes:

Speculative gains in financial markets are sustained by diverting monetary flows out of the real economy, into financial markets. This is sustained, increasingly, by looting the economic basis through large-scale attrition in basic economic infrastructure, and by driving down the net after-inflation prices paid for wages and production of operatives. Thus, we have a "hyperbolic" curve, upward, of financial aggregates; a slower, but also hyperbolic curve, upward, of monetary aggregate needed to sustain the financial bubble; and, an accelerating, downward, curve in net per-capita real output.

Physical science

LaRouche associates himself with what he characterizes as the Platonic current in physical science. He writes of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's work, De Docta Ignorantia, that it "became the keystone of a series of scientific papers on which the principal line of progress of modern, and also viable European science depended: that best typified by the work of Cusa himself, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Pierre de Fermat, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl F. Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann." Pirogov indicates that in addition to Plato and Riemann, LaRouche also draws upon the work of Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel. According to an official biographical sketch, LaRouche "rejects the empiricist, cartesian, and positivist notions of both 'objective science,' and the separation of science from art."

He has made attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, alleging that he and his associates plagiarized Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation and arrived at an inferior version, as is illustrated by the Three Body Problem, although neither version gives a general solution. He also asserts that Newton's version of the Calculus is inferior to that of Leibniz. (see also Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy.) LaRouche has called Newton a "half-witted hoaxster and specialist in witchcraft." (see Isaac Newton's occult studies.)

Political proposals

"Operación Juárez"

LaRouche prepared a proposal in 1982, named for Mexican President Benito Juárez, for an alliance among Ibero-American nations to create a continental currency and to defend themselves against the threats from private banks, the IMF, and the World Bank. According to a 2006 article in Executive Intellignece Review, the plan also called for "reorganizing the pooled debts of South and Central America as a source of long-term, low-interest credit, for great infrastructure and other high-technology projects."

New Bretton Woods

Beginning in the late 1990s, LaRouche began to call for a "New Bretton Woods" conference, which would be a treaty conference, modeled on the original Bretton Woods Conference, "to replace the present bankrupt monetary system with a new one. A global debt reorganization, the establishment of fixed-parity exchange rates and a new set of trade and tariff agreements, are the absolute precondition for stability in world economic and financial relations, which is required for a return to economic growth." A letter endorsing the proposal was circulated in 1997 by LaRouche's wife, Helga Zepp LaRouche, and by Ukrainian parliamentarian Nataliya Vitrenko.

According to Stanislav Menshikov, this would significantly limit the scope of the grounds for speculation - one of the root causes of the current instability and financial crisis. Measures should be coordinated at the level of all major countries. First of all, it would require a strong improvement of the banking system until the bankruptcy of its component parts could be arranged. It would be necessary to take under state control or even ban the activities of hedge funds and all other agencies which trade financial derivatives. Without surgical removal of the cancerous speculation to end the financial crisis, a solution is impossible. Also required would be an agreement between the same powers to develop a coherent program of long-term capital investment in energy and transport infrastructure in the world for 20-50 years ahead. Such a program would create a solid foundation for sustainable development of world economy with an emphasis on material production and the maximum reduction in resources unproductively spent on speculative activities.

In August 2001, a very different proposal, with the same name, was issued by investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who LaRouche considers to be one of his major opponents. LaRouche issued a press release challenging Rohatyn to defend his proposal.

In October 2008, an article appeared in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera which was entitled "Bretton Woods #2 of LaRouche and Tremonti." Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti, who has defined financial speculation as the "plague of the century," said that he had encountered "U.S. political guru Lyndon LaRouche, the historic enemy of financial speculation and deregulation" at a debate held in 2007 in Rome, and that he appreciates LaRouche's writings. According to the article, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini have asked the Berlesconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007. In this approach, public money should save only the commercial infrastructure required for the financing of productive enterprises.

Eurasian Landbridge

Also in the late 1990s, LaRouche proposed a global infrastructure plan called the Eurasian Landbridge. It would be a network of "infrastructure corridors", comprising high-speed rail (preferably Maglev trains), combined with other infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines and fiber-optic cables. Initially the priority would be to link Europe with the Pacific coast of Asia, but the proposal envisions a network that would eventually extend through the Middle East into Africa, and would also link up to North and South America through a tunnel under the Bering Straits.

The plan has been called a "new Silk Road." The transport lines would act as an artery feeding the regions through which it will pass, and would be accompanied by water projects and the establishment of agricultural and industrial facilities along the network. It would also facilitate the transfer of technology to regions which are presently only raw materials exporters, and overcome the dilemma of the isolation of the former colonial nations, who were prevented from engaging in regional cooperation both during and after the colonial era.

Marxist roots

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

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

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

Wohlforth writes:

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

Fascism

LaRouche's view of fascism

According to LaRouche, the first fascist state was France under Napoleon Bonaparte. European oligarchical forces, he says, intervened in the French Revolution to prevent it from becoming a republican, American-style revolution, and steered it instead toward becoming a bloodbath followed by a dictatorship. LaRouche calls this the beginning of modern synarchism, a revival of feudal-Venetian methods.

Members of the LaRouche movement in Sweden, the European Workers Party, protesting the Lisbon Treaty. The text on the left reads: "Sweden's future depends on a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon" and the text on the right reads: "THE TREATY OF LISBON MEANS DICTATORSHIP! Proof: You don't know the slightest about it, do you?!? Do you want to elect your own leaders? -DEMAND A REFERENDUM!"

LaRouche points to a specific economic policy as the foundation of fascism: it is a situation where the financial system has become insolvent, and rather than put it through a bankruptcy reorganization, the ruling powers attempt to prop it up by cannibalizing the workforce through radical austerity and forced-labor policies. LaRouche identifies these policies particularly with German finance minister Hjalmar Schacht, whom LaRouche considers to be instrumental in bringing Adolf Hitler to power. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1972, LaRouche warned that key financial institutions of the world were committed to a revival of Schacht's policies, first in the form of intensified exploitation of the Third World, and increasingly with respect to the economic policies of the more wealthy nations toward their own populations. He also accuses the Neo-conservatives of being modern-day fascists:

Today, the systemic principle of modern fascism, as traced from Tomas de Torquemada and Napoleon Bonaparte's Martinist political tailor, Count Joseph de Maistre, is also costumed in such cloaks as those worn by the neo-conservatives of the Mont Pelerin Society and American Enterprise Institute.

View of LaRouche as a fascist

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

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

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

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

Using these and related theories, writers such as Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons have described LaRouche as a neofascist. According to Berlet and Lyons:

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

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

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

Conspiracy theories

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

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

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

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

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

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

British journalist Roger Boyes writes, "Anti-Semitism is at the core of LaRouche's conspiracy theories, which he adapts to modern events -most recently the war in Iraq."

In 2008, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in referring to made up history, coined the term: "LaRouche Version of History."

The "British" conspiracy

LaRouche's thesis is that the dominant imperialist strategic force acting on the planet today is not the United States, but the "Anglo-Dutch liberal system" of the British Empire, which he assers is an oligarchic financial consortium like that of medieval Venice, more like a "financial slime-mold" than a nation. According to this theory, London financial circles protect themselves from competition by using techniques of "controlled conflict" first developed in Venice, and LaRouche attributes many wars in recent memory to this alleged activity by the British.

LaRouche has asserted that the Queen of England is not merely a figurehead, but it is the absolute, authoritative, functional head of state for the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, meaning that in effect she personally runs the military and intelligence services of those countries. He said in an interview to the Peruvian magazine Gente that she seeks to "liquidate the sovereignty" of every nation state in the Americas.

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

These views are reflected in three books authored by members of his organization:

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

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

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

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

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

In 1999, an article in the LaRouche-controlled Executive Intelligence Review accused senior advisers to the Royal family and MI6 of threatening to assassinate him, after a British women's magazine called Take a Break published an article about him entitled "Shut This Man's Mouth." On August 2, 1999, Debra Hanania-Freeman, national spokeswoman for LaRouche, issued the following statement about the alleged threat:

After consulting with security experts familiar with the modus operandi of British intelligence networks, we are treating the piece as a cover for an MI6 order, probably with direct backing from someone in the royal household, to assassinate Lyndon LaRouche.... The inflammatory article ... reflects a growing hysteria around Buckingham Palace, over the growing global influence of LaRouche's ideas and his continuing exposé of the British oligarchy... We are also passing the information on to the White House so they can assess whether the article also constitutes a threat to the security of President Clinton.

Leo Strauss

Beginning in 2003, LaRouche's presidential campaign committee distributed a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan", which were later consolidated into a book by the same name. In the pamphlets LaRouche charges that there was a conspiracy dominated by what are called Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss) within the Bush administration, and that the dominant personality in this conspiracy was Dick Cheney (whose photo appears on the cover of the book.) LaRouche claimed that these conspirators deliberately misled the American public and the US Congress in order to initiate the US invasion of Iraq. He writes that the Straussians created the Office of Special Plans in order to fabricate intelligence and bypass traditional intelligence channels. Accroding to LaRouche movement member Tony Papert, an important part of this theory is the LaRouchian analysis of the ideas of Leo Strauss which borrows heavily from the writings of Shadia Drury.

Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal has condemned LaRouche's views on this subject, and says that it may have influenced other commentators who subsequently published a similar analysis, such as Seymour Hersch and James Atlas of the New York Times. Bartley quotes the assertion by LaRouche movement member Jeffrey Steinberg that a "cabal of [Leo] Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" have plotted a "not-so-silent coup" using the September 11 attacks as a justification, similar to the Reichstag fire of 1933. Bartley complains that Strauss's "words are twisted from their meaning" in order to justify the theory. Canadian journalist Jeet Heer writes that LaRouche's followers "argue that Strauss is the evil genius behind the Republican Party".

Social engineering

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

LaRouche vs. the media

There are a number of characterizations of LaRouche's views that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, routinely appeared in many American and British news media, and are regarded by LaRouche and his organization as malicious distortions, or black propaganda.

LaRouche has charged that much negative press coverage during the 1980s, as well as aspects of his trial, was orchestrated by powerful persons from outside the journalistic community. LaRouche follower Jeffrey Steinberg says there is a conspiracy by the "Establishment" and the press it allegedly controls to deny LaRouche coverage and prevent his views becoming known.

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

Conspiracies directed at himself

File:Ibykus Farm combined.jpg

"Ibykus Farm", LaRouche's home in the mid-1980s

LaRouche personalizes his conspiracy theories, according to Daniel Pipes, who writes that LaRouche associates "all of his adversaries with the forces of darkness." LaRouche has repeatedly asserted that he is a target for assassination. He sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him. In leaflets supporting his application of concealed weapons permits for his bodyguards in Leesburg, Virginia, he wrote:

I have a major personal security problem...[Without the permits] the assassination teams of professional mercenaries now being trained in Canada and along the Mexico border may be expected to start arriving on the streets of Leesburg...If they come, there will be many people dead or mutilated within as short an interval as 60 seconds of fire."

According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche says he has been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche made a speech in 1983, stating that,

Since late 1973, I have been repeatedly the target of serious assassination threats and my wife has been three times the target of attempted assassination...My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet President Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Gadaffi, Ayatollah Khomaini and the Malthusian lobby."

Regarding LaRouche's paramilitary security force, armed with semi-automatic weapons, a spokesperson said that they were necessary because LaRouche was the subject of "assassination conspiracies". LaRouche testified 1986 that "I have been 'safe-housed' by friends and associates in many different places because of threats to my physical security". Later that same year his "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded by law enforcement officers during a search of his offices. While surrounded, LaRouche sent a 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." During the subsequent federal trial he was driven to court in an armored limousine, and a bodyguard accompanied him into the courtroom, while another guard stood outside the door. When convicted he predicted that he would be assassinated in prison. A cellmate, televangelist Jim Bakker, later wrote, "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."

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

Health care policy

LaRouche and his organization have called for the banning of HMOs, and LaRouche has formally endorsed H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act of 2005 or National Health Insurance Act for Single-payer health care.

LaRouchePAC poster, Alhambra, California, 2009

LaRouche's organization opposed the Obama administration's health care reform proposals, and its comparisons of U.S. President Barack Obama to German dictator Adolf Hitler in 2009 generated controversy. LaRouche called Obama's actions "impeachable," without actually calling for impeachment, due to his support of health insurance reform that LaRouche says is comparable to Hitler's Action T4 euthanasia program. The LaRouche movement has printed pamphlets with a picture on the front showing Obama and Hitler laughing together, and have made posters of Obama wearing a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police have been called twice in response to people who were offended by the posters threatening to tear them apart or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them.

As town hall meetings on this issue during the summer of 2009 began to attract very large and angry crowds, the comparison of Obama to Hitler began to show up on many signs and banners. The Atlantic wrote that LaRouche supporters "patented the Obama-is-Nazi theme." The Anti-Defamation League issued a report titled, "Lyndon LaRouche, Holocaust Imagery & the Health Care Debate".

Nancy Spannaus, a LaRouche spokeswoman, told the Washington Times that the Obama policy was "a direct copy of the policy Hitler declared in October 1939, when Hitler issued the order for euthanasia against those determined, by a board of medical experts, to have 'lives unworthy to be lived.'" She said that the LaRouche alternative was to "cancel the bailout and HMOs, implement bankruptcy reorganization of the financial system, and return to the Hill-Burton system that made our health care the best in the world."

AIDS

In 1973, LaRouche formed the Biological Holocaust Task Force to analyze the effects of International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Bank for International Settlements austerity and triage policies in Africa. The task force published a report in 1974, warning that these policies would cause a collapse of nutrition and sanitation, and could create an environment where pandemics of old or new diseases could begin. The report compared the situation to the collapse of public health conditions which lead to the Black Plague which killed 1/3 to 2/3 of the population of 14th Century Europe. When AIDS was first recognized as a medical phenomenon in the early 1980s, LaRouche activists were convinced that this was the pandemic about which the task force had warned. LaRouche and his followers stated that HIV, the AIDS virus, could be transmitted by casual contact, citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida. LaRouche said that the transmission by insect bite was "thoroughly established". John Grauerholz, medical director of the BHTF, told reporters that the Soviet Union may have started the epidemic and that U.S. health officials aided the Soviets by not doing more to stop AIDS.

AIDS became a key plank in LaRouche's platform. His slogan was "Spread Panic, not AIDS!" LaRouche's followers created "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), which sponsored California Proposition 64, the "LaRouche Initiative", in 1986. Proponents argued that the measures would merely return AIDS to the list of communicable diseases under the public health laws. Opponents characterized it as an anti-gay measure that would force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine, or create "concentration camps for AIDS patients." Mel Klenetsky, co-director of political operations for the Larouche-affiliated National Democratic Policy Committee and LaRouche's campaign director, said that there must be universal testing and mandatory quarantining of HIV carriers. "Twenty to 30 million out of 100 million people in central Africa have AIDS," Klenetsky said. "It is spreading because of impoverished economic conditions, and that is a direct result of IMF policies that have destroyed people's means of resisting the disease." Klenetsky said that LaRouche believes that not only drug users and homosexuals are vulnerable to the disease. According to newspaper reports, the LaRouche newspaper New Solidarity said the initiative was opposed by Communist gangs composed of the "lower sexual classes" and he warned of the recruitment of millions of Americans into the ranks of "AIDS-riddled homosexuality". The measure was met with strong opposition and was defeated. A second AIDS initiative qualified for the ballot in 1988, but the measure failed by a larger margin. In response to a survey which predicted that 72% of voters would oppose the measure, a spokesman called the poll is "an obvious fraud", saying that pollsters deliberately worded questions to prejudice respondents against the initiative. He additionally said that the poll was part of a "big lie...witch hunt" orchestrated by Armand Hammer and Elizabeth Taylor.

During the 1986 campaign LaRouche speculated that if governments did not take "credible measures," lynch mobs of violence-prone teenagers might begin to attack suspected AIDS carriers, beginning in Britain and then spreading to other countries. He said that if governments did not take action, such lynch mobs "might be seen by future generations' historians as the only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction". In an interview with a radio show in California, LaRouche said that, ""A person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around shooting up a neighborhood" and blamed the Soviet Union for creating the "AIDS conspiracy". In a speech reported in his magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche wrote that politicians were not acting because "[t]hey did not want...to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby...I don't know why they're "gay," they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw!" In My Program Against AIDS he wrote that, "AIDS demonstrates afresh...that if society promotes the violation of the principles' of our bodies' design, that society shall suffer in some way or another for this obscenity."

The LaRouche movement targeted schools where children with AIDS were attending. As early as 1985 NDPC members ran for local school boards on a platform of keeping infected students out of school. In 1986 LaRouche supporters travelled from Seattle, Washington to Lebanon, Oregon to urge the school board there to reverse a policy that would allow children with AIDS to enroll. In 1987 followers tried to organize a boycott of an elementary school in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, sending a van with loudspeakers through the district. They disrupted an informational meeting and according to press accounts told parents, "The blood of your own children will be on your hands if you allow this child with AIDS in your school," or shouted at opponents, "He has AIDS! He has AIDS!"

LaRouche purchased a national TV spot during his 1988 presidential campaign, in which he summarized his views and proposals with respect to the AIDS epidemic. He said most statements about how AIDS is spread were an "outright lie" and that talk of safe sex was just propaganda put out by the government to avoid spending the money required to address the crisis. According to his 1992 campaign book, the three main points he presented were: an $8 billion a year "crash program" to find a cure, use of public health measures including universal screening, and a hospital-building program to handle the expected increase in patients due to AIDS.

LaRouche-affiliated candidates used AIDS as an issue as late as 1994. In a 1999 webcast to followers, LaRouche said about AIDS medications:

Who cares about whether the guy's a homosexual? It's irrelevant! It's a human being who is suffering from a disease, who needs help and protection . . . Who wants to make a category of "homosexuals"? I don't believe in it; it's not a legitimate category. It's just people, people who are suffering and dying.

The LaRouche organization continues to blame the IMF for the spread of AIDS.

Culture and identity

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

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

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

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

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

Zionism, Jews, and the Holocaust

LaRouche condemned anti-Semitism in 2006, when he wrote "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today." However, he has often been accused of anti-Semitism and also Holocaust denial. In a 1980 slander case brought against the Anti-Defamation League by LaRouche organizations and activists, New York state Judge Michael Dontzin ruled that: "Upon consideration of the voluminous evidence presented to the court, it is clear that ADL's characterization of plaintiffs as anti-Semitic constitutes fair comment. Plaintiffs have continuously expressed highly critical views about prominent Jewish figures, families and organizations, such as ADL and B'nai Brith and have connected them with plaintiffs' critical views on Zionism, Zionists, Mid-East foreign policy and international monetary policies."

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

Dennis King has described LaRouche as expressing anti-Semitic ideas in both open and coded form. As an example of the open form, King cites LaRouche's statement (under the pen name L. Marcus) in The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), where he said that "Jewish culture ... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." As an example of the coded form, King alleges that when LaRouche and his followers use the term "British" in certain contexts which King characterizes as "conspiracist" or "racialist", they actually mean "Jewish." One example is an unsigned editorial in the official LaRouche newspaper New Solidarity in 1978 which states: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."

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

It is argued that the culmination of the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust proves that Zionism is so essential to 'Jewish survival' that any anti-Zionist is therefore not only an anti-Semite, but that any sort of criminal action is excusable against anti-Zionists in memory of the mythical 'six million Jewish victims' of the Nazi "holocaust." This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive "appropriate technology" for the employment of "inferior races", a small fraction of the tens of million of others– especially Slavs– who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn proposes today. Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of Gypsies and the butchery of Communists.

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

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

"Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University", LaRouche says. LaRouche denies equating "Zionism" with Judaism.

In 1978, the same year LaRouche's article cited The Protocols, the LaRouche group published Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War against the U.S., which cited the Protocols and defended its authenticity, likening the "Elders of Zion" to the Rothschild banking family, the British Royal family, and the Italian Mafia, and the Israeli Mossad, General Pike, and the B'nai B'rith. (Dope, Inc.) Later editions left out cites to The Protocols. This is the genesis of the claim that LaRouche has said the Queen of England runs drugs. When asked by an NBC reporter in 1984 about the Queen of England and drug running, LaRouche replied, "Of course she's pushing drugs...that is in a sense of responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it." Also in 1978, LaRouche wrote the essay entitled "The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites," in which he refers to "the myth of the 'international Jewish conspiracy'" while discussing the "role of the Jewish financial houses in the horrors which have beset civilization since the eight century BC."

LaRouche has said, Zionism is controlled by the financiers of London: "Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of the international Jewry", and "Zionist cultism is among the most important of the levers through which British criminality and miscalculation is plunging the world towards [war]." "You cannot be a Zionist and also a Jew", he writes.

In 1999, LaRouche issued "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In the course of a discussion on the contributions of Moses Mendelssohn and his family to German culture, he says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." He further says that, "We cannot allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." Warning that forgetting the contributions of Mendelssohn would amount to a second holocaust, he says "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews (among his numerous other victims), but how many today, in the name of Holocaust, subject those victims to a second holocaust, by implicitly effacing the faces of the victims even from their own tombstones?" LaRouche later published an article by a member of the movement praising Yiddish Renaissance.

The Encyclopedia Judaica interprets the title of a 2003 LaRouche pamphlet, "Children of Satan", to be a form of "masked anti-Semitism." An entry in the encyclopedia includes this passage: "A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the "Children of Satan," which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel. In a twisted irony, the pamphlets imply the neoconservatives are the real neo-Nazis." Robert Bartley writes that "Mr. LaRouche has chosen an Aryan-nation phrase for Jews (descendants of Cain, who was the result of Satan seducing Eve, in this perfervid theology)," and calls the "Children of Satan" title "overt anti-Semitism." He also suggests that the use of the terms "Straussian" and "Neo-conservative" may be coded anti-Semitism when used by LaRouche and other writers.

The charge of anti-Semitism in the LaRouche network resurfaced in the media in 2004 in accounts of the death of a young Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who had been attending a Schiller Institute event in Germany. British press reports described LaRouche as "the American leader of a sect with a fascist and antisemitic ideology", and said he was "infamous for his anti-Semitic views and claims the world's governments have been taken over by a Zionist conspiracy."

Chip Berlet argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses anti-Semitism through the use of "coded language" and by attacking neoconservatives. According to Berlet:

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

Daniel Levitas writes:

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

Psycho-sexuality and political organizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gays

LaRouche and his supporters frequently wrote articles or made comments containing animosity toward gay people. Press reports indicate that during the 1970s and '80s political enemies and even people who would not sign petitions were accused of being homosexual, often in vulgar slang terms. Errant members of the movement were allegedly berated in front of their peers with charges of homosexuality or other sexual improprieties. Amid legal troubles, followers published leaflets accusing a federal prosecutor of being homosexual.

LaRouche's 1985 campaign book, "A Program for America", called homosexuality a "filthy and immoral practice", and said that he would get the support of voters who were upset by the Democratic Party's embrace of gays. In 1987 he wrote that homosexuality is a "pathology" and a "terrible affliction", and that homosexuals' human rights could be cared for by curing them of their condition.

LaRouche made a particular campaign of attacking Henry Kissinger as a homosexual. LaRouche called him a "faggot" in a deposition, and in 1982 he issuee a press release entitled "Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry", a phrase that appeared on posters handed out by followers. In 1982, a LaRouche follower shouted to Kissinger in an airport, "Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" In response his wife, Nancy Kissinger, seized the young woman by the throat. LaRouche later said he thought it was an appropriate question.

Cultural outlook

LaRouche often disparages the counterculture. In 1978, he wrote that "The Beatles had no genuine musical talent, but were a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division (Tavistock) specifications, and promoted in Britain by agencies which are controlled by British intelligence." LaRouche publications have also criticized China's ten year Cultural Revolution, characterizing it as a British-directed project to weaken China by countering the movement of Sun Yat-Sen and reducing China to a "primativist hell." LaRouche wrote in 1975 that:

The paranoid state is characteristic of the 'village commune' culture. Objectively, the model 'oriental village commune' is characterized by the fixing of the mode of production with a rigidity paralleling the behavioral stagnation of lower animal life....All the cognitive and related cultural achievements of capitalist development in music, philosophy, and so forth, are symptomatically denounced as 'in favor of the philosophical and cultural ideological relics of pre-1949 China's long barbarian past. Out of this hideous muck comes first a reactionary, actually counterrevolutionary rejection of the working class..."

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

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

Another target of LaRouche was New Age writer Marilyn Ferguson. The movement organized protests against her book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, which LaRouche called "a challenge to the nation's grasp on reality."

Video games

Lyndon LaRouche and associates have connected violent video games with campus shootings. In 2007, the LaRouche PAC and the LaRouche Youth Movement issued statements to the effect that Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech massacre shooter, was addicted to point-and-shoot video games including "Counter-Strike". LPAC representative Donald Phau testified before the Virginia inquiry that these video games are based on "killing simulators" developed by the army and should be banned. These assertions brought forth responses in video game forums and blogs. Writers pointed to the official Commonwealth of Virginia report on the massacre, which found that Cho played only non-violent video games growing up and did not play at all in college.

References

• Berlet, Chip; Joel Bellman (1989). Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag. Political Research Associates.
• Berlet, Chip; Lyons, Matthew N. (2000). "Right-wing populism in America: Too Close for Comfort". New York: Guilford Press. ISBN 978-1572305625. OCLC 185635579.
• Berlet, Chip (October 30–31, 2005). Protocols to the Left, Protocols to the Right: Conspiracism in American Political Discourse at the Turn of the Second Millennium (dedicated to Jeremiah Duggan),. Reconsidering "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion": 100 Years After the Forgery. The Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University.
• Beyes-corleis, Aglaja; Küenzlen, mit Einem Vorwort von Gottfried (1994), Verirrt, Freiburg: Herder, ISBN 3-451-04278-9, OCLC 33502596
• Fraser, Clara (1998). "LaRouche: Sex Maniac & Demagogue". Revolution, She Wrote. Red Letter Press. ISBN 0932323049.
• Gilbert, Helen (2003). Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism restyled for the new Millennium. Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press. ISBN 0-932323-21-9. OCLC 52554264.
• King, Dennis (1989). Lyndon LaRouche and the new American fascism. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-23880-0. OCLC 18684318.
• Kalimtgis, Konstandinos; Goldman, David; Steinberg, Jeffrey (1978), Dope, inc, New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Pub. Co., ISBN 0918388082, OCLC 4492671 On the Protocols, see pp. 31–33; on the Rothschilds, see the chart on pp. 154–55, consult index for more than 20 page entries on the Rothschilds.
• Wohlforth, Tim. (n.d.) A '60's Socialist Takes a Hard Right

External links

Supportive

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

Critical

• John Mintz, The Cult Controversy includes a 1995 series on LaRouche and links to other Washington Post articles on LaRouche
• LaRouche's Virginia conviction, The Washington Post, December 17, 1988
• No Joke (the effect LaRouche has on young recruits)– Washington Post, October 2004
• Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents
• Dennis King's LaRouche Watch site.
• Articles about LaRouche from Political Research Associates.
• Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam, Nizkor Project
• Lyndon Larouche/Executive Intelligence Review Series of articles from the Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults
• True History of Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche) and the Labor Committees 1975 article published by the International Workers Party whose members joined LaRouche's NCLC for a period in the early 1970s.
• Terry Kirby, The cult and the candidate, July 2004 (The Independent of London)

Responses to critics

• "The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons," Steinberg, Jeffrey, Executive Intelligence Review, June 25, 2004
• "Chip Berlet and the Ford Zoo," Chaitkin, Anton, Executive Intelligence Review, June 16, 2006
• "The John Train "Salon" and the Evidence of Criminal Fraud Filed With the Fourth Circuit Court," Executive Intelligence Review website
• "He's a bad guy, but we can't say why"