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.

Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement have expressed views on a wide variety of topics. The LaRouche movement is made up of activists who follow LaRouche's views.

The LaRouche movement says that it is based around an original economic philosophy, and is praised by some commentators in Russia and China. Other commentators in Germany, Britain and the USA say the movement is conspiracist and antisemitic, and that its political and economic proposals are a cover for its actual beliefs.

Background

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.

According to Tim Wohlforth, during and after 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 realize 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 minimize costs (see neocolonialism.) 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.

Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy

In Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, a book published in 1975 by D. C. Heath and Company under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche attempted to show that numerous Marxists – ranging from the Monthly Review group to Ernest Mandel, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro and the "Soviet economists" – had failed to correctly understand and interpret Marx's writing. Marxists he admired – apart from Marx himself – were Rosa Luxemburg and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky.

According to a review by Martin Bronfenbrenner in The Journal of Political Economy, about 50% of the book were devoted to dialectical philosophy, "with a strong epistemological stress", with the other 50% devoted to discussions of economic and general history, anthropology and sociology, and actual economics, including a surprisingly large helping of business administration—Bronfenbrenner noted that LaRouche seemed to have "more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists", including a familiarity with the way speculative overcapitalization, operating at the borders of white-collar crime, creates "fictitious capitals" that later do not match their actual earning power. Like Thorstein Veblen, LaRouche subscribed to an overcapitalization theory of economic depression.

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed conventional economics as a "withered arm of philosophy", which had taken a wrong turn towards reductionism under the influence of British empiricists such as Locke and Hume. LaRouche's definition of reductionism was as follows:

The fundamental fallacy of ordinary understanding is the delusion that the universe is reducible to simple substance, or—the more Hume-like view—that the content of human knowledge is limited to simple-substance-like, self-evident sense perceptions. This discredited outlook—whether it takes the naive mechanistic [form] or the equivalent mechanistic outlook of empiricism—is termed reductionism. All varieties of reductionism are formally premised on the fallacious assumption of formal logic, that the universe can be represented as discrete points interconnected by formal relations.

From this it followed, Bronfenbrenner argued, that LaRouche viewed bourgeois economists' concern with prices as reductionism, versus the Marxian concern with values. The reductionist fallacy then lies in adjusting a value theory like labor theory to fit in with price theory; in LaRouche's view, economists should work in the opposite direction.

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed capitalist America as headed for a kind of fascism not much better than that of the Nazis; but he noted that LaRouche's own vision of socialism, and the trade-off between necessity and freedom in a centrally planned economy, seemed apt to result in the justification of a different kind of dictatorship:

Judging from his controversial manner, [LaRouche] impresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity or order.

LaRouche's campaign platforms

The campaign platforms of LaRouche and his followers have included these elements:

• A return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system, and fixed exhange rates;
• The replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;
• A war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;
• Ending the International Monetary Fund, creating an "International Development Bank", and expanding the U.S. Export-Import Bank;
• An emphasis on large-scale basic economic infrastructure, including the building of a world land bridge of railroads and a tunnel under the Bering Strait, the building of nuclear power plants, accelerating research on fusion energy, the North American Water and Power Alliance, and rebuilding or nationalizing the country's steel industry;
• A crash program to build particle beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);
• Opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war;
• Colonization of the planet Mars by 2025;
• The screening and quarantine of AIDS patients;
• Growth in food production and a farm debt moratorium;
• Low interest rates and opposition to the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget law;
• Opposition to environmentalism, health maintenance organizations, outcome-based education, gay rights, abortion, and the nuclear dismarmament movement.

In the late 1990s, LaRouche proposed a global infrastructure plan involving a version of the Eurasian Land Bridge. 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. The plan has been called a "new Silk Road."

Later orientation

According to a 2009 interview in China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche used to follow Marxism but now supports American-style capitalism. He said that the USA could return to a spirit of innovation if there is public control of financial capital and low-interest loans.

LaRouche argued that the banks which were presently being bailed out should be placed in receivership by the state. Public money should save only commercial banks which are necessary for the financing of productive enterprises. He said that a "firewall" should prevent state aid from being diverted to speculative entities, which should be allowed to fail to clean up the financial markets.

LaRouche said that he believes in the principles of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and favors state intervention in the economy. LaRouche also said that he supported the approach of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who established a banking system geared to develop production.

Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti, said that he had encountered LaRouche at a debate held in 2007 in Rome, and that he appreciates LaRouche's writings. According to an article by Ivo Caizzi in Corriere della Sera, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini asked the Berlusconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007. The legislation proposed that public money should save only the commercial infrastructure required for the financing of productive enterprises.

According to a 2009 interview with China Youth Daily Online, since the 1950s, LaRouche is said to have made nine correct predictions for the US and the world economy, including the 1973 US recession and the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis. China Youth Daily says LaRouche said during a July 25, 2007, webcast that a sweeping world financial crisis would occur if the U.S., Russian, Chinese and Indian governments failed to reshape the financial system, and that his prediction came true. On July 25, 2007, in a webcast that has been written about in Russia and China. LaRouche stated 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 the real economy (production) is dropping while the nominal economy (money and financial instruments) is going up. As the nominal economy greatly overreaches the real economy, an unavoidable economic crisis ensues.

Since 2000, the LaRouche movement has

• called for a moratorium on Third World debt.
• Citizens Electoral Council, the Australian arm of the LaRouche movement, was reported in 2006 to reject the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976.
• 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." He agreed with the British TV documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
• 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..." They support the renewal of Glass–Steagall Act regulations on banks.
• They assert that the September 11, 2001 attacks were comparable to the 1933 Reichstag fire.
• Opposition to New Age. The movement organized protests against Marilyn Ferguson's book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, which LaRouche called "a challenge to the nation's grasp on reality."
• Opposition to violent computer games. 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 First Person Shooter games such asCounter-Strike". Other writers responded that the official report on the massacre found that Cho played only non-violent video games growing up, and did not play at all in college.
• Helga Zepp-LaRouche has expressed support for "the principle of Classical composition of works in drama, poetry, music, or sculpture," saying that this approach fosters "a higher ideal of man, a more noble idea of man in his freedom"
• In 2007, LaRouche proposed a "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act". This called for the establishment of a federal agency that would "place federal- and state-chartered banks under protection, freeze all existing home mortgages for a period of time, adjust mortgage values to fair prices, restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates, and write off speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities". The bill envisioned a foreclosure moratorium, allowing homeowners to make the equivalent of rental payments for an interim period, and an end to bank bail-outs, forcing banks to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. A LaRouche spokesman said that bank bail-outs "reward corrupt swindlers with taxpayer money". The proposal attracted support from Democrats at city council and state legislature level. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski opposed the bill, stating it would involve government seizure of "every American bank". Mike Colpitts of Housing Predictor stated that LaRouche's economic forecasts had been correct, and that he might have received more mainstream credibility had it not been for his controversial history.

Neoplatonism

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

LaRouche's philosophy references an old dispute between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle believed in knowledge through empirical observation and experience. Plato believed in The Forms. According to LaRouche, history has always been a battle between Platonists—rationalists, idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and the primacy of ideas—and Aristotelians—relativists who rely on empirical data and sensory perception. Platonists in LaRouche's worldview include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche states that many of the world's ills are due to the fact that Aristotelianism, as embraced by British philosophers like Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Bentham and represented by "oligarchs", foremost among them wealthy British families, has dominated, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. LaRouche frames this struggle as an ancient one, and sees himself and his movement in the tradition of the philosopher-kings in Plato's Republic.

LaRouche and his followers use Neoplatonism as the basis for an economic model that posits "the absolute necessity of progress". Economies evolve in stages as humanity devises new technologies, stages that LaRouche compares to the hierarchical spheres in Kepler's model of the solar system based on the Platonic solids. The purpose of science, technology and business must be to assist this progress, enabling the Earth to support an ever-growing humanity. Human life is the supreme value in LaRouche's world view; environmentalism and population control are seen as retrogressive steps, promoting a return to the Dark Ages. Rather than curtailing progress, because of dwindling resources, LaRouche advocates using nuclear technology to make more energy available to humanity, freeing humanity to enjoy music and art.

In LaRouche's view, the people opposing this vision are part of the Aristotelian conspiracy. They may not necessarily be in contact with one another: "From their standpoint, [the conspirators] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously." Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led LaRouche to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, pro-lifers, and followers of the Ku Klux Klan—even though LaRouche counts the Klan itself among his foes.

George Johnson, in Architects of Fear (1983), has described LaRouche's Neoplatonist conspiracy theory as a "distortion of a real philosophical distinction". He has written that the resulting philosophy can be applied to any number of situations in a manner that becomes plausible once one accepts its basic premise. In his view, it forms the foundation of a conspiracy theory that rationalizes paranoid thinking, an opinion echoed by John George and Laird Wilcox in American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (1996). Writing in The New York Times in 1989, Johnson described LaRouche as "a kind of Allan Bloom gone mad" who seems to "believe the nonsense he spouts", a view of the world in which Aristotelians use "sex, drugs and rock-and-roll" and "environmentalism and quantum theory" to support wealthy oligarchs and create a civilization-destroying "new Dark Age".

Conspiracies

LaRouche wrote that conspiracy was natural in human beings. In 1998, he responded to critics of his conspiracism, such as Daniel Pipes and said that Pipes wrongly believed that all reports of conspiracy are axiomatically false.

In 2001, LaRouche said that rogue elements within the American military took part in, or planned, the September 11, 2001 attacks as part of a coup d'état.

The "British" conspiracy

LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. LaRouche's said 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 asserts 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.

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.

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 0-918388-08-2): 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 Salisbury, 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 0-933488-05-X): 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.

An article published in 1998 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard said that LaRouche had claimed that 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.

The Queen and drug trafficking

According to book critic and columnist Scott McLemee:

The emergence of the [LaRouche Youth Movement] is all the more surprising, given that LaRouche himself has long since become the walking punchline to a very strange joke. He is known for some of the most baroque conspiracy theories ever put into circulation. Members of the LYM now deny that he ever accused the Queen of England of drug trafficking—though in fact, he did exactly that throughout the 1980s. At the time, he won admirers on the extreme right wing by denouncing Henry Kissinger as an agent of the KGB and calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined.

A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review denied that he had said the Queen was a drug trafficker, calling it a "bit of black propaganda," but in 2004, in a segment about the death of Jeremiah Duggan during a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Wiesbaden in March 2003, BBC's Newsnight re-broadcast a BBC interview with LaRouche from 1980, in which he can be seen accusing the Queen of being involved in drug trafficking. He said: "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's happening and she isn't stopping it."

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. According 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 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".

Conspiracies directed at himself

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 said he had 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. In an interview the same year, he said that the Soviet Union opposed him because he invented the Strategic Defense Initiative. "The Soviet government hated me for it. Gorbachev also hated my guts and called for my assassination and imprisonment and so forth." LaRouche asserted that he has survived these threats because of protection by unnamed U.S. government officials. "Even when they don't like me, they consider me a national asset, and they don't like to have their national assets killed."

LaRouche's critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his current orientation as being a conspiracist worldview. 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. Daniel Pipes said that LaRouche personalizes his conspiracy theories, and associates "all of his adversaries with the forces of darkness."

PANIC proposal and AIDS

In 1974, an organisation affiliated to LaRouche predicted that there would be pandemics in Africa. 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. 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 believed that not only drug users and homosexuals are vulnerable to the disease.

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.

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 traveled 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.

LaRouche-affiliated candidates used AIDS as an issue as late as 1994.

The LaRouche movement targeted schools where children with AIDS were attending. In 1986 LaRouche supporters traveled 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!"

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." 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".

Music and science

LaRouche is fascinated by musical theory, as well as mathematics and physics, and this fascination also translates into his teachings; his followers for example have attempted to link the musical scale to his Neoplatonist model of economic evolution, and study singing and geometry. A common teaser used by the movement is to ask people whether they know how to "double the square"—draw a square whose area is twice the size of an existing square. A motto of LaRouche's European Workers' Party is "Think like Beethoven"; movement offices typically include a piano and posters of German composers, and members are known for their choral singing at protest events, using satirical lyrics tailored to their targets.

LaRouche and his wife have an interest in classical music up to the period of Brahms. LaRouche abhors contemporary music; holding that rock music is subversive, and was deliberately created to be so by British intelligence interests. LaRouche is quoted as saying that jazz music was "foisted on black Americans by the same oligarchy which had run the U.S. slave trade". This dislike for modern music also extends to more recent classical music; LaRouche movement members have protested at performances of Richard Wagner's operas, denouncing Wagner as an anti-Semite who found favor with the Nazis, and called a conductor "satanic" because he played contemporary music.

In 1988 LaRouche advocated that classical orchestras should return to the "Verdi pitch," a pitch that Verdi had enshrined in Italian legislation in 1884. Orchestras' pitches have risen since the 18th century, because a higher pitch produces a more brilliant orchestral sound, while imposing an additional strain on singers' voices. Giuseppe Verdi succeeded in 1884 in having legislation passed in Italy that fixed the reference pitch for A at 432 Hz, but in 1938, the international standard was raised to 440 Hz, with some major orchestras tuning as high as 450 Hz in recent times. LaRouche spoke about the resulting strain on singers' voices in his 1988 presidential campaign videos. By 1989 the initiative had attracted support from more than 300 opera stars, including Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé. While many of these singers may or may not have been aware of LaRouche's politics, Renata Tebaldi and Piero Cappuccilli ran for the European Parliament on LaRouche's "Patriots for Italy" platform and appeared as featured speakers at Schiller Institute conferences on the topic. The discussions led to debates in the Italian parliament about reinstating Verdi's legislation. LaRouche himself gave an interview to National Public Radio on the initiative in 1989 from prison. Stefan Zucker, the editor of Opera Fanatic (and, incidentally, the "world's highest tenor") opposed the initiative on the grounds that it would result in the establishment of a "pitch police," arguing that the way it presented the history of the tuning pitch was a "simplification", and that LaRouche was using the issue to gain credibility. The initiative in the Italian Senate failed to result in corresponding legislation being passed.

LaRouche considers pitch important, believing that the Verdi pitch has a direct relation to the structure of the universe, and that bel canto singing at the correct pitch maximizes the music's impact on both singers and listeners.

'Nazi' accusations against Obama's health reforms

The LaRouche movement said Obama's health reforms made him worse than Hitler

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. 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.

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." Several commentators noted a similarity between the LaRouche movement's opposition to the reforms, and Sarah Palin's use of the term "death panels" in relation to the same proposals.

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."

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. The Anti-Defamation League issued a report titled, "Lyndon LaRouche, Holocaust Imagery & the Health Care Debate".

Sexuality and politics

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 German, 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."

Minority politics

Gay rights

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 issued 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.

Judaism and Zionism

British journalist Roger Boyes wrote, "Anti-Semitism is at the core of LaRouche's conspiracy theories, which he adapts to modern events -most recently the war in Iraq." Daniel Levitas wrote in 1995 that LaRouche "has been consistent in creating and elaborating conspiracy theories that contain a strong dose of antisemitism". As an example of LaRouche's alleged antisemitism, Dennis King cited LaRouche's statement (under the pen name L. Marcus) in The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), "Jewish culture ... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." A movement newspaper asserted that "only" one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, according a 1979 story in the New York Times.

The charge of antisemitism 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."

Gregory Rose, an FBI informant within the U.S.L.P., described the contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, a far right group, as extensive and "intimate" in his 1979 article about LaRouche for The National Review. In a 1980 article for The Nation, Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg said that LaRouche made successful overtures the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace's American Independent Party, and that the U.S.L.P's "racist" policies endeared it to many members of the Ku Klux Klan. George and Wilcox stated that while the contact is often used to imply "'links' and 'ties' between LaRouche and the extreme right", it was in fact transient and marked by mutual suspicion. The Liberty Lobby pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche's views in 1981, because of what they described as his softness on "the major Zionist groups". According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed suspicion over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally. The white nationalist Tom Metzger stated to them that "no one in the neo-Nazi movement has regarded LaRouche as even vaguely sympathetic". Even so, George and Wilcox said that:

LaRouche's general antiestablishment views, often expressed with nastiness and stridency, clearly have been designed to defame, degrade, and offend. To the extent that this has included Zionism, Israel, the "Zionist lobby," and Jews as a class of people, hostility toward Jews has been plainly evident.

LaRouche has long denied that his movement is antisemitic. In 2006, LaRouche said "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism [is] the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today". Debra Freeman, a spokesperson for LaRouche, told a newspaper in 2010 that, "Hitler was a lunatic, but his policies were based principally on economic policy and staying in power. We mourn the loss of six million Jews and countless others."

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

The Encyclopaedia 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 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...

Chip Berlet argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses antisemitism 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.

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

As an example of the coded antisemitism, King wrote 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."

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 Queen Elizabeth runs drugs. When asked by an NBC reporter in 1984 about the Queen 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."

However, other critics of LaRouche believe that LaRouche’s anti-British statements really are intended to disparage the British people rather than the Jewish religion. Laird Wilcox and John George write that "Dennis King goes to considerable lengths to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi, even engaging in a little conspiracy-mongering of his own. King maintains, for example, that words like "British" were really code words for 'Jew.'"

According to Daniel Pipes, "Dennis King insists that [LaRouche's] references to the British as the ultimate conspirators are really 'code language' to refer to Jews. In fact, these are references to the British." Pipes does however agree that an alleged British-Jewish alliance lies at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.

Race

Manning Marable of Columbia University wrote in a 1997 column that LaRouche had a "long attempted to destroy and manipulate black leaders, political organizations and the black church". In a 1998 book he quoted LaRouche's 1977 comments that blacks who sought equal rights were obsessed with "zoological specifications of microconstituencies' self interests" and "distinctions which would be proper to the classification of varieties of monkeys and baboons". For the decade prior to the criminal trials of the late 1980s, one of LaRouche's closest aides and his paid security consultant was Roy Frankhouser, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon and American Nazi Party member, and a government informant. The LaRouche movement also spied on anti-apartheid activists in the U.S. on behalf of the South African government.

Manning wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled, and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for African-American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions – much the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not. Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf.

The African American civil-rights leader James Bevel was LaRouche's running mate in the 1992 presidential election, and in the mid-1990s, the LaRouche movement entered into an alliance with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Another LaRouche movement member with a distinguished civil-rights history is Amelia Boynton Robinson, who is vice-president of the Schiller Institute; she has described the movement as following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King: "Mr. And Mrs. LaRouche built a movement, taking up where Dr. King had left off. They realized ... there must be an universal image of mankind, which transcends all racial differences and barriers."

Accusations of fascism against the LaRouche movement

LaRouche's movement has frequently been described as fascist. Accusations of fascism or neo-fascism come from a variety of sources. Democratic National Committee chairman Paul G. Kirk called LaRouche's group as "freakish, "fascist", and "fanatic". New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned LaRouche's "neo-fascist Jew-baiting conspiratorial ideas", and a local Texas Democratic district committee passed a resolution calling the movement "racist, anti-Semitic, fascist and bigoted". Democratic activist Bob Hattoy called the LaRouche movement "racist, nationalist, watered-down but still frightening fascism". Adlai E. Stevenson III called the movement "neo-fascist, anti-Semitic and at best just plain eccentric" and refused to run on the same ticket in a statewide election in Illinois. Similar charges have been made by the Anti-Defamation League and the AFL-CIO. The New Alliance Party broke with LaRouche movement when, according to a spokesperson, they found he was "fascistic and brutal". LaRouche has said that accusations of him being neo-fascist and anti-Semitic "originate with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation - which is sometimes the same thing".

Dennis King, a former Marxist-Leninist and member of the Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s and early 1970s, used this thesis in the title of his book-length study of LaRouche and his movement, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). 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.

Writers such as Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons have similarly 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."

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. 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.

George Johnson, in a review of King's book in The New York Times, argued that King's presentation of LaRouche as a "would-be Führer" was "too neat", and that it failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish, while acknowledging that LaRouche's "conspiracy theory is designed to appeal to anti-Semitic right-wingers as well as to Black Muslims and nuclear engineers". In his 1983 book, Architects of Fear, Johnson described LaRouche's dalliances with radical groups on the right as "a marriage of convenience", and less than sincere; as evidence he cited a 1975 party memo that spoke of uniting with the right simply for the purpose of overthrowing the established order: "Once we have won this battle, eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy." At the same time, Johnson says, LaRouche also sought contact with the Soviet Union and the leftist Baath Party in Iraq; failing to recruit either the Soviets or right-wingers to his cause, LaRouche attempted to adopt a more mainstream image in the 1980s. Laird Wilcox and John George similarly stated that King had gone too far in trying "to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi" and that LaRouche's most severe critics, like King and Berlet, came from extreme leftist backgrounds themselves.

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 33502596Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• 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 (PDF). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press. ISBN 0-932323-21-9. OCLC 52554264.
• Johnson, George (1983). "The 'New Dark Ages' Conspiracy". Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. J.P Tarcher. ISBN 0874772753.
• Johnson, George (June 18, 1989). "A menace or just a crank?". The New York Times.
• 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 4492671Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link) 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

• LaRouche Political Action Committee