Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. Although he has no formal qualifications, he has written extensively on economic as well as political subjects. He has run for President of the United States eight times, but has never gained significant electoral support.

LaRouche is probably the best-known exponent of conspiracy theories in the United States. He is frequently described as an extremist or a cult leader, and is accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. He denies these charges, and his followers regard him as a major political figure, indeed a world leader.

In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations.

This article is a biographical article about LaRouche. For a discussion of LaRouche's political views, see Lyndon LaRouche: political views

Early life

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in India. During this period he read works by Karl Marx and was converted to Marxism. After leaving the Army in 1946, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern.

LaRouche and Trotskyism

In 1949 LaRouche joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party and began using the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work. In 1954 he moved to New York City and married a fellow SWP member, Janice Neuberger.

In line with the SWP's policy of "proletarianizing" their members, LaRouche obtained work at a General Electric factory in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1952 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was fired from his job for absenteeism. Twenty years later, LaRouche said of his breakdown that he went through a serious period of introspection which involved:

stripping away all the layers of my persona, like an onion. If you take this far enough, you get to the point where you become terrified that there's nothing inside all the peelings-that you're a nobody. This put me in a suicidal state. It was only my tremendous ego-strength, which my parents had provided me, that saved me from suicide.

Following his recovery, LaRouche obtained work as a management consultant including, paradoxically for a Marxist, advising companies on how to use computers to maximise efficiency and speed-up production to the detriment of workers.

LaRouche remained in the SWP until 1965, making him a veteran member in a group which always had a high turnover of members. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism and stayed in the SWP only as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this, saying that he was a loyal and zealous party member, although this is not definitive evidence that he was not an FBI informer. During these years LaRouche developed his interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. He is undoubtedly well-read in these and other subjects. Janice left him in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956) and, in the late 1960s, she became a leader of the New York City branch of the National Organization of Women. In the 1990s she was a founder of Veteran Feminists of America.

In 1964 LaRouche, while still in the SWP, became a supporter of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the party (as LaRouche himself was to be expelled the next year) and was under the influence of the British dissident Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy. Healy was leader of the British Socialist Labour League, ancestor of the later Workers Revolutionary Party. Those familiar with the left in this period believe that LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's catastrophic world-view and his advocacy of violence and intimidation, something foreign to the intellectual tradition of mainstream Trotskyism. For six months he worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth who later wrote:

LaRouche had a gargantuan ego. Convinced he was a genius, he combined his strong conviction in his own abilities with an arrogance expressed in the cadences of upper-class New England. He assumed that the comment in the Communist Manifesto that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class..." was written specifically for him. And he believed that the working class was lucky to obtain his services.

LaRouche possessed 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. It was contradictory. His explanations were a bit too pat, and his mind worked so quickly that I always suspected his bravado covered over superficiality. He had an answer for everything. Sessions with him reminded me of a parlor game: present a problem, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eye, LaRouche would dream up the solution. [1]

In 1965, LaRouche left Wohlforth's group and joined the Spartacist League, another group of expelled SWP members, which had also split with Wohlforth. He left the Spartacist League after a few months and then wrote a letter to the SWP declaring that all factions and sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead, and announcing that he and his new common-law wife, Carol Schnitzer, were going to build the Fifth International.

After his break with Trotskyism LaRouche remained active in the left. In 1966, the LaRouches joined the New Left Committee for Independent Political Action and formed a branch in New York's West Village. He began giving classes for the New York Free School on "dialectical materialism" and attacted around him a group of graduate students from Columbia University many of whom were involved with the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) group which was itself very prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

LaRouche's movement was heavily involved in the 1968 student strike and occupation of Columbia and he was able to win control of the university's SDS and PL branches by putting forward a political program linking student struggles with those of Blacks in Harlem, located just off campus. His growing following allowed him to create a third tendency within the SDS competing with the two dominant tendencies, the "Action Faction" led by Mark Rudd (which soon became the Weather Underground) and the "Praxis Axis" which saw students as the vanguard of the revolution.

LaRouche organised his faction as the "SDS Labor Committee". He criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture and not enough toward labor. He held meetings in the Columbia area. Wohlforth attended one and writes:

Twenty to 30 students would gather in a large apartment and sit on the floor surrounding LaRouche, who now sported a very shaggy beard. The meeting would sometimes go on as long as seven hours. It was difficult to tell where discussions of tactics left off and educational presentation began. Encouraging the students, LaRouche gave them esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Georges Sorel to discover Rudd's anarchistic origins, or studying Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. Since SDS was strong on spirit and action but rather bereft of theory, the students appeared to thoroughly enjoy this work.

He was heavily involved in SDS despite not being a student, and in the PL's internal battles despite not being a member. Once again, LaRouche now maintains that he was an FBI agent during all this activism, but his closest colleagues from this period dismiss this suggestion as absurd.

LaRouche and the NCLC

In 1969, after being expelled from the SDS, the SDS Labor Committee became the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), a grouping of ex-SDS activists, ex-SLers and some ex-Trotskyists such as LaRouche and his partner.

Despite its name the NCLC had no significant connection with the labor movement. It soon developed the hallmarks of a cult, with a charismatic leader (LaRouche), a catastrophist and conspiratorial ideology, and an esoteric vocabulary known only to initiates. NCLC members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader. Like many cults, the LaRouche organization developed an internal discipline technique, called "ego stripping," which reinforced conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.

Initially, the NCLC had a relatively open internal regime in which debates would ensue about the proper course for the group. As the founder of the group and as the most "experienced" member being a generation older than the rest of the group, LaRouche was the group's leading authority and had the title of "Chairman". Following the breakup of the SDS and the decline of the student movement, a factional debate broke out within the NCLC between younger members at Columbia and City College such as Tony Papert and other ex-PLers who argued for an activist approach around local issues and a faction of more experienced members such as LaRouche and his closest followers such as Ed Spannus and Nancy Spannus who argued for a turn towards theory and study. In January 1970 Papert and Steven Fraser, another ex-PLer, proposed orienting the NCLC towards the emerging ecological movement in the United States. A faction fight broke out between LaRouche and his followers and the Fraser-Papert tendency which the LaRouchians dubbed "the Bavarians".

LaRouche and his "Positive Political Tendency" accused "the Bavarians" of being too loose and "ultra-democratic" resisting the need to tighten up the NCLC from a federation of chapters into a disciplined cadre organization.

Consolidating his position, LaRouche suspended Fraser from the NCLC's executive committee. Papert defected from Fraser's tendency and joined LaRouche. The struggle intensified as LaRouche's PPT responded to Fraser's calls for developing a broad coalition with personal attacks. Ultimately, LaRouche had Fraser and his followers expelled from the NCLC for "factionalism". This allowed LaRouche to strengthen his hegemony over the movement and brought to an end any serious possibility of a political or organizational challenge to LaRouche emerging from within the NCLC. The expulsion of Fraser also removed the only serious intellectual rival to LaRouche.

From left to right

Under LaRouche's direction the NCLC adopted violent and disruptive tactics, physically attacking meetings of the Communist Party and later of the SWP and other groups, who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." "Operation Mop-Up" began with LaRouche's declaration that ""We must take hegemony from the CP-from here on in, the CP cannot hold a meeting on the East Coast. We'll mop them up in two months." NCLC members engaged in a series of well-documented beatings of members of the Communist Party . Some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.

The NCLC claimed, and LaRouche's supporters continue to claim, that they acted in self-defense, even though all other accounts say that it was the NCLC that initiated the violence. LaRouche supporters claim that a document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that the FBI encouraged the CPUSA to attack the NCLC. [2] But there are no documented incidents of CPUSA or SWP members initiating attacks on NCLC members. According to a court judge who reviewed classified FBI files as part of an unrelated lawsuit by the Socialist Workers Party against the US government, the FBI sent the NCLC a list of SWP members and their home addresses, presumably in the hope that the NCLC would attack these individuals[3].

Biographical issues

Separating fact from fiction in LaRouche's biography is made difficult by the barrages of conflicting propaganda generated both by LaRouche and by the many anti-LaRouche commentaries. According to LaRouche's writings and of the material produced by his followers, LaRouche developed his present political and economic ideas in the 1950s and has advocated them consistently ever since. He is represented as a respected economist and commentator on world affairs. He is credited with pioneering such ideas as the International Development Bank, manned space flight to Mars, the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars," and the so-called Eurasian Land-Bridge. It has been claimed that he regularly meets with world leaders and that they listen respectfully to his ideas. It also claimed that he was used by the Reagan administration as a "back-channel" for negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Some of these claims are clearly untrue. LaRouche did not develop his current political and economic ideas in the 1950s or '60s: until at least 1969 he was a Trotskyist, although an increasingly unorthodox one. He would have been expelled from the SWP much earlier than he was had he advocated anything like his current ideas at that time. Some of his specific claims can be disproved. Although the expression "Eurasian Land-Bridge," for example, has been used to refer to the proposed Asian Highway, there is no evidence that LaRouche has ever had anything to do with this project. Other claims cannot be definitely disproved, but are highly unlikely to be true.

It is true, however, that LaRouche had some contacts with low-level officials of the Reagan Administration. Between 1981 and 1985 LaRouche met with Norman Bailey, then a member of the National Security Council (NSC), and with some other NSC and Central Intelligence Agency officials. This followed a concerted campaign by LaRouche to develop close relations with the Reagan Administration, by publishing flattering articles about administration officials in the LaRouche press. Bailey later claimed that LaRouche was able to provide him with useful information, gathered by LaRouche's network of affiliates in many countries, but other intelligence officials deny the Administration gained any useful intelligence from LaRouche. The contacts between LaRouche and the administration ended after protests from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other prominent Republicans.

LaRouche has had contact with some foreign leaders. On May 23, 1982, LaRouche met with Mexican President José Lopez Portillo, and advised him to suspend foreign debt payments (which was done in August 1982), and to declare exchange controls and nationalize Mexico's banks (done in September 1982). Years later, on December 1, 1998, while sharing the podium with Helga Zepp-LaRouche before a meeting of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics in Mexico City, former President Lopez Portillo said "It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche."

In 1974 a former member of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party, Gregory Rose, published an article in National Review alleging that LaRouche had established contacts with Palestinian terrorist organisations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and also with the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York. These contacts culminated in LaRouche's visit to Baghdad in 1975, during which he met with PFLP leaders. During 1975 LaRouche's newspaper New Solidarity began running articles favourable to Iraq, and extensively quoting Saddam Hussein, at that time Iraq's vice-president. Rose also alleged that LaRouche at this time was in contact with Soviet diplomats. At about this time LaRouche's attacks on the pro-Soviet U.S. Communist Party ceased, and LaRouche publications began to run pro-Soviet articles.

The only substantial biography of LaRouche is Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, by Dennis King (Doubleday, 1989). King is not a historian or a political scientist, and his book is avowedly hostile to LaRouche. King's thesis is that LaRouche is both a fascist and an anti-Semite (although LaRouche expresses these views in coded language), and that his organization is the spearhead of a dangerous "new American fascism."

Demonstrating this thesis lends King's book a polemical tone which in the opinion of some reviewers weakens its credibility, but King has nevertheless researched LaRouche's writings thoroughly, and the factual basis of his book (as opposed to his opinions) has not been successfully challenged. LaRouche polemicists have made much of the fact that King received funding from the conservative Smith-Richardson Foundation to write the book, but there has been no clear demonstration that this funding influenced the content of the book.

Presidential bids

From the late 1970s to the present, LaRouche has pursued a dual strategy. He has continued to promote his apocalyptic conspiracy theories and to make regular predictions of imminent economic catastrophe. These are a staple of the extreme right, although also characteristic of Trotskyism. At the same time he has sought to enter the political mainstream by contesting elections and primary elections. In 1971 he founded the U.S. Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, but this achieved no success and was wound up in 1979. In 1976 he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%).

Since 1979 LaRouche has concentrated on infiltrating his followers into the Democratic Party. In 1979 he formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a name designed to convey the impression that it is part of the Democratic Party. LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times beginning in 1980. His current Political Action Committee is called "LaRouche PAC."

The Democratic Party has consistently asserted that LaRouche is not a Democrat, but the U.S. electoral system makes it impossible for the party to prevent LaRouche followers entering Democratic primaries. LaRouche himself has polled negligible vote totals, but continues to promote himself as a serious political candidate, a pretension which is sometimes accepted by elements of the media and some political figures. In 1999, however, a court ruled that the Democratic National Committee had the right to keep LaRouche from electing delegates to the Democratic National Convention, based on a party requirement that a Democratic nominee must be a registered voter. LaRouche, as a convicted felon, is not eligible to be a registered voter in the state of Virginia, where he lives.

The use of the NDPC name has, however, allowed LaRouche followers to compete seriously in Democratic primaries for lesser offices, and even occasionally to win them. The best known example was in 1986, when a LaRouche candidate, Mark Fairchild, won the Democratic primary for the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Senator Adlai Stevenson, III, refused to run on the same ticket as Fairchild and formed a new party for the election. Fairchild's victory was attributed to low voter turnout and a poor "regular" candidate, but also to some genuine support for the LaRouche anti-establishment message. NDPC candidates have won several other Democratic primaries in various states, but LaRouche's organizations have never suceeded in entering the mainstream.

Some of the LaRouche organization's successes have come from exploiting public fears about the AIDS epidemic, which they blame on international conspirators. In 1985 LaRouche wrote: "It is in the strategic interests of Moscow to see to it that the West does nothing to stop this pandemic; within a few years, at the present rates, the spread of AIDS in Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas would permit Moscow to take over the world almost without firing a shot." This prediction, like all of LaRouche's apocalyptic warnings, has proved to be baseless.

Criminal conviction

By the 1980s LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built a extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The International Caucus of Labor Committees claimed to have affiliates in France, Italy, Sweden, Canada and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group, the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), and regularly contest elections. The LaRouche organisation published a weekly newspaper, The New Federalist, and a weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review. At one time there was a LaRouche publishing house, Benjamin Franklin Books, which issued a steady stream of works by LaRouche and his followers. The real membership of LaRouche's organisation is not known.

The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. The LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also solicits donations by phone. More seriously, however, LaRouche was accused of fraudently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people.

In October 1986 the FBI and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. He and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud, and LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return. In December 1988 a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted LaRouche and his associates, and LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served five.

The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983 (however, the amount that was not repaid was $294,000). The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.

Judge Albert V. Bryan ruled that the defense would not be permitted to discuss, or even allude to, the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice filed, on April 20, 1987, an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy petition against two LaRouche-controlled publications companies on whose behalf the loans had been solicited. Federal trustees were placed in charge of the companies, and they immediately suspended repayment of loans to creditors (who were, for the most part, political supporters of the LaRouche movement). On October 25, 1989, Judge Martin V.B. Bostetter ruled that the government's bankruptcy action was illegal. Bostetter said the government acted in "objective bad faith" and the bankruptcy was obtained by a "constructive fraud on the court."

In addition to LaRouche, his chief fund-raiser, William Wertz, was convicted on ten mail fraud counts. LaRouche's legal adviser, Edward Spannaus, and several other fundraising operatives were convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Michael Billington received a 77 year sentence for "conspiracy to fail to register as a securities broker." [4] LaRouche denied all the charges, calling them "an all-out frame-up by a state and federal task force," and said that the federal government was trying to kill him. "The purpose of this frame-up is not is not to send me to prison. It's to kill me," LaRouche said. "In prison it's fairly easy to kill me... If this sentence goes through, I'm dead." This proved to be another false prediction: LaRouche was released unharmed in 1993.

One of the most striking aspects of the trial was the revelation of LaRouche's personal wealth. While lenders were told that LaRouche had no money to repay their loans, he in fact spent US$4.2 million on real estate in Virginia and on "improvements" to his 200-acre Leesburg estate. These included a swimming pool and horse riding ring.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark supported LaRouche's claims that his prosecution was politically motivated. In 1995 he wrote to Attorney-General Janet Reno: "I bring this matter to you directly, because I believe it involves 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." [5]

(Clark, who was Attorney-General under Lyndon Johnson, has since become a regular radical critic of U.S. government actions. He has supported, among others, Slobodan Milosevic, alleged war criminal Radovan Karadzic, an alleged leader of the Rwandan Genocide, as well as Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier and antiwar activist Father Phillip Berrigan. A 1999 article in Salon.com described him as "the war criminal's best friend," and "the tool of left-wing cultists.")

After the release of LaRouche from prison, full page advertisements calling for him to be exonerated (paid for by the LaRouche movement) appeared in papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post (see text of the statement.) Among the signators were Arturo Frondizi, former President of Argentina; figures from the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement Amelia Boynton Robinson and Rosa Parks; former Minnesota Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy; and artists such as classical vocalist William Warfield, and violinist Norbert Brainin, former 1st Violin of the Amadeus Quartet.

See also

• North American Labour Party
• Party for the Commonwealth of Canada

External links

Media reports

• The cult and the candidate by Terry Kirby, July 2004 (The Independent of London)
• Response to the Independent article
• Ideological odyssey: from old left to new right by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Some officials find intelligence network "useful" by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Loudoun Newcomer Lives On Heavily Guarded Estate by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Group makes political inroads by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Some are out to kill me, LaRouche says by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• LaRouche convicted of mail fraud By Caryle Murphy 1988 (Washington Post)
• Elderly seek refunds from LaRouche By Alison Howard 1990 (Washington Post)
• LaRouche paroled after five years in prison By Peter Pae and Leef Smith 1994 (Washington Post)
• Lyndon LaRouche's Long Campaign (Newsday article on LaRouche's record of eight consecutive Presidential campaigns)
• Larouche Exposed - Pasadena City College
• Anti-LaRouche article from the Australian paper, The Age ~ from the website of Rick Ross

Critical sites

• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag ~ Chip Berlet
• The LaRouchite Secret Elite Synthesis by PRA
• Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam by Nizkor Project
• LaRouche Exposed by Matthew Robinson
• Lyndon LaRouche, a Short Bio, by TOTSE
• Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Review) ~ book by Dennis King
• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue ~ Chip Berlet
• Lyndon LaRouche - Disinfopedia article
• Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents ~ Chip Berlet (Temple Of The Screaming Electron website)

Recollections by former colleagues

• LaRouche: Sex Maniac & Demagogue by Clara Fraser, a former colleague of LaRouche in his Trotskyist days - reproduced in the second part of this email to the Marxmail e-list.
• 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.
• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue: A '60's Socialist Takes a Hard Right by Tim Wohlforth who worked closely with LaRouche in 1964 and 1965 and also observed him afterwards.

LaRouche sponsored sites

• The John Train Salon
• The Government-imposed Involuntary Bankruptcy of LaRouche-affiliated companies
• Lyndon LaRouche 2004 Presidential campaign
• Executive Intelligence Review: LaRouche Publications
• World LaRouche Youth Movement
• 'He's a Bad Guy, But We Can't Say Why'
• Hey, You Liars, Who Is Lyndon LaRouche, Really?
• A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler
• LaRouche PAC
• Schiller Institute