Subject: Re: Lyndon LaRouche & the Liberty L

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Jul 92 08:15 PDT

The LaRouche organization and Liberty Lobby had a longstanding relationship,
a fact attested to by former staff members in both groups. This relationship
first surfaced publicly in lawsuits involving Liberty Lobby. The relationship
primarily consisted of regular background briefings and information swap
sessions between members of LaRouche's intelligenc staff and researchers
for Liberty Lobby and its <Spotlight> newspaper.

In the mid 1980's this informal information-swapping arrangement was
expanded to include private investigators and researchers for the Christic
Institute. It was through this secret mechanism that unfounded conspiracy
theories were woven into the Christic case. Former Christic plaintiff
Tony Avirgan argues that it was these conspiracy theories that allowed the
judge an excuse to throw the Chistic case out of court (although the move
was iclearly unfair).

I base these coments on interviews with former staffers at Liberty Lobby
and the LaRouche organization, court records and depositions and affidavits,
and material in Dennis King's excellent "Lyndon LaRouche and the New American
Fascism." I also discuss these matters in my study "Right Woos Left" which
is available from Political Research Associates, 678 Mass. Ave., #205, 
Cambridge, MA 02139 ($6.50 includes postage). This 40,000 word study is
posted on Peacenet in the <pn.publiceye> conference, and has been circulated
on USENET in several Newsgroups.
-Chip Berlet

(P.S. having been sued by LaRouche several times, I assure you I have my facts
straight. He lost all the cases....

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Aug 92 08:17 PDT

Steve dismisses any general convergence of policy viewpoints
between Liberty Lobby and the LaRouche group by dragging a red
herring across the trail. There is ample evidence that Liberty
Lobby and the LaRouchians worked together for many years. That is
one issue. The issue of similarity of views can be addressed
alone.
  There is substantial overlap betwen the policy views of Liberty
Lobby and the LaRouchians. Both are based on a paranoid assumption
that the world is controled by secret elites. Both point to rich
Jewish banking families and their allies. Both assume that Israeli
intelligence and British intelligence have polluted the CIA and
U.S. foreign policy. Both depend heavily on the intellectual ideas
of Spengler (Decline of the West) and the false assertion that
today's "Jews" are actually an Asiatic race called the Khazars who
converted to Judaism and thus have no moral claim to the heritage
of Biblical Jews. Both divide capitalist control into
industrialists (productive) and financiers (parasitic) and side
with the small business interests against the interests of
multi-national corporations (an idea that was promoted by the
early Populist movements of the late 1800's).
  I have read the newspapers of both groups for ten years as part
of my job studying fascist organizations. Both groups well deserve
the term fascist.  While there are many differences between the
two groups, much of the underlying philosophy is the same.
-Chip Berlet Analyst Political Research Associates

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Aug 92 21:12 PDT

Folks, try some intelligent analysis. Any large academic study of fascism
will give a far more complex definition than authoritarian repression by
a government. The major academic work on Liberty Lobby by Mintz, for example,
discusses at great length the fascist tendencies of the group and the role
it plays in bridging the neo-Nazi right and the reactionary right. The major
error you folks are making about fascism, is that it is widely recognized that
there is a dramatic difference between fascism as a political movement, with itspopulist and pseudo-radical appeals to the middle and working class, and the
brutul form it takes when it gains state power.
  Please read Hannah Arendt on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" and her
careful discusion of Fascism as a political movement: it sounds just like the
appeals of LaRouche and Liberty Lobby: no surpise, both are fascist movements.
Please recall that as movements, fascism in Italy and Germnany attacked the
regimes in power as corrupt, and promised to represent the average person
against the elites.
  Sorry suckers, you're falling for the con again. I would have thought
thinking folks would not make the same error twice...at least not in
the same century.
  I will post a lengthier discussion I co-wrote on LaRouche in a new
topic.
  And please do some reading in a real library, not just issues of
LaRouchian and Liberty Lobby screed.

George Seldes, author of "Sawdust Caesar," first biography of Il Dulce:
"This guy LaRouche is pushing the same line as the Italian Fascists, it's
Italian Fascist Economic theory...anyone can see that."
   (Interview with Seldes at age 96 at his home in Vermont, 1986)

-Chip Berlet
Sued twice by LaRouche for calling him a fascist...LaRouche lost both cases.
One was a jury trial...they did their homework...why don't you?

[Editor's Note:: Three files comprising the PRA briefing paper on 
Lyndon LaRouche omitted.  These files may be obtained by addressing a 
request to [email-masked] and using the following commands as 
the message text:

get fascism larouche.PRA1
get fascism larouche.PRA2
get fascism larouche.PRA3

The remainder of this file includes most of the LaRouche thread. knm]

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Monday, 31 Aug 1992 07:44:35 EDT

that referencce to an unfortunately "respected" -in some circles-- source.
   What M U S T  always be addressed in political analysis is: toward what
telos or end is all of this functioning.  FASCISM  always everywhere (from
1922 Italy, 1923 Bulgaria ,  1933 Germany, etc)  has intense AUSTERITY as
its directing goal.
    In Germany it was the trusted-by-the-workers Sociakl Democratic Party which
inaugurated the austerity in the 1920s and did not fight the National
Sociualist German Workers' Party --NAZI--until too late.
    Now the defining thing about LaRouche--the ABSOLUITELY SALIENT thing--
is that he is against austerity and for economic and intellectual growth.
    A little SERIOUS thought then makes the La-Rouche-is-a Nazi nonsense from
spaced-out and intelligence community controlled former scribbler for HIGH TIME
Chip Berlet look like the raving propagandidt he is.
   If you support the marijuana/cocaine/crack culture and its advocates,
then you'll probably go with Berlet.
    If you think Mussolini was not a Fascist, not a Totalitarian then you'll
probably hold that LaRouche IS.
   One think is for sure: LaRouche and Mussolini (whom the Liberals just loved
in the 1920s and 1930s)  are direct enemies.

---

From: [email-masked] (Kingsley Morse)
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 16:25:32 GMT

In alt.activism, NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]> writes:

> The major academic work on Liberty Lobby by Mintz, for example,
> it plays in bridging the neo-Nazi right and the reactionary right. 

Would you mind sharing the specifics with us?

>   Please read Hannah Arendt on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" 

No time. Would you mind sharing the specifics with us?

> fascism in Italy and Germnany attacked the regimes in power as corrupt, 
> and promised to represent the average person against the elites.

Liberty Lobby's "Spotlight" does this also. I don't understand how blowing
the whistle on corruption and representing the average person against the 
elites is fascist. For example, the "Spotlight" was one of the first 
publications to alert readers to the Savings and Loan scandal. How can that
be bad? Furthermore, Democrats and presidential candidates say
they'll represent the average person against the elites. Are they fascist
too? I don't think so. There might be a fascist under your bed though. Look
out! ;-)

>   I will post a lengthier discussion I co-wrote on LaRouche in a new

Please do.

>    (Interview with Seldes at age 96 at his home in Vermont, 1986)

I'd like to learn more about it.

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 01 Sep 92 19:52 PDT

It is indeed a total mischaracterisation to call LaRouche a Libertarian or
a conservative. Just because the mainstream media is incapable of describing
LaRouche in accurate terms doesn't mean that the description of LaRouche as
a fascist is also innacurate.
  To argue that since LaRouche <Says> he is an anti-Fascist he can't be a
fascist is not logical. People lie all the time.
   In Germany and Italy, the fascist movements both promised to throw the bums
out. They both said the regimes in power were corrupt. They both claimed to
represent the interests of the working and middle classes and the farmers.
Both betrayed those promises once in power. That's the sucker punch.
  I have read LaRouche's newspaper for ten years. I have read most of the books
he has written. I do not base my opinions on secondary sources. 
  I hope that personal attacks and snidly whiplashes can be left out of this
discussion. I have posted the long article on "LaRouchians as Fascists" later
in this conference.
-Chip

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 06 Sep 92 19:35 PDT

The Rev. James Bevel was brought up as proof that LaRouche could not be a 
fascist. Bevel was indeed an early civil rights leader, but in recent years he
has become very opportunistic. I interviewed him in Chicago when he was being
paraded arounded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon people for his support of CAUSA,
their anti-communist group active in South and Central America. The noted
African-American columnist and academic, Manning Marable, denounced Bevel for
his alliance with fascists. Bevel began working with LaRouche several years ago.   To argue that a group cannot be racist because it has Black supporters, or
cannot be anti-Jewish because it has Jewish members, is to mistake heredity for
politics. Blood line does not determine politics, that's the argument of
eugenicists and Nazis. Biological determinism is the term. Kahane was a fascist
even though he was Jewish. What made that true was his politics of scapegoating.   What many people see in LaRouche are the promises he makes for the "average"
person. Keep an eye on which groups are scapegoated by LaRouche, which persons
populate his vast conspiracies. Key to his schemes are scapegoating of the British monarchy and Jewish banking families. It should sound familiar to anyone
who has studied the European or American fascist movements. Anglophobia and
Anti-semitism (anti-Jewish myths) are core beliefs in fascist theory in the
Eurocentric branch of the ideology, just as anti-Korean and anti-Chinese
bigotry were central to the Japanese variant.
-Chip Berlet

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Monday, 7 Sep 1992 11:55:42 EDT

families. He does attack various prominent financial interests, most of which
are not Jewish. He does not shy away from attacking those that are Jewish. I
hope those following this thread will do their own reading on this point. He
certainly does attack the British monarchy and various related interests,
most of whom are not Jewish. I don't get the comparison to the fascist elements
in Japan (in the 1930s) attacking the Chinese or the Koreans.
     I will not dispute that the Rev. James Bevel was in the company of the
"Moonies" because I have no information on this. Bevel is not the only civil-
rights figure involved with LL, and those claiming a longtime investigative
relationship to the Labor Committees surely are aware of the hostility
between the NCLC and the followers of Rev. Moon. If this statement about
Bevel is correct, I'm genuinely sorry to hear it. But I repeat: no genuinely
"KKK-affiliated" organization will have a long history (20 years) of running
many Afro-Americans for public office.
     I must agree that mixed racial makeup does not insure nonracist politics
(it counts as some prima facie evidence against it, though). But I urge that
the soul of a political movement is in its programs, particularly its economic
programs. I urge all concerned to study the programs of all groups competing
for attention. Decide for yourselves who has serious, detailed programs for
alleviating the misery of the underdeveloped sectors of the world and uplifting
the condition of humanity. All worthy of attention swear allegiance to these
principles. Those, however well intentioned, who think there are too many
people on the planet, or humanity has reached its natural limits, cannot
consistently implement these principles. Good luck to us all.

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Sep 92 20:31 PDT

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet>
Subject: Re: Lyndon LaRouche & the Liberty L

/* Written  9:14 pm  Aug 25, 1992 by cberlet in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "LaRouchians as Fascists!" ---------- */
From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet>
Subject: LaRouchians as Fascists!

/* Written 10:13 pm  Dec 18, 1990 by nlgclc in cdp:publiceye */
/* ---------- "LaRouchians as Fascists!" ---------- */
LYNDON LAROUCHE:
Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag

by Chip Berlet and Joel Bellman

3/10/89

A Political Research Associates
Briefing Paper

IN THREE PARTS

PART ONE

   Outside the Boston federal courthouse a photographer 
discretely snaps pictures of certain persons 
entering the building. In the echoing halls, 
private security guards whisper into tiny two-way 
radios. Those entering the second-floor courtroom 
pass through the gleaming arch of an electronic 
metal detector. When the main defendant leaves 
the courtroom, husky bodyguards surround him as 
he is hustled to a car waiting in the basement 
parking garage.

   The scene is from the 1987 trial of perennial 
Presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. 
That trial, involving charges of credit card 
fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice, was 
declared a mistrial due to numerous delays, but a 
later criminal indictment in Virginia saw 
LaRouche and several of his key followers 
convicted on charges involving illegally 
soliciting unsecured loans and tax code violations.

   Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. is frequently 
dismissed as a crank or political extremist with 
no further explanation of his views or the 
phenomenon he represents. In a democracy based on 
informed consent, to not understand the nature of 
the LaRouche phenomenon is a dangerously naive 
rejection of the lessons of history--because 
Lyndon LaRouche represents the most recent 
incarnation of the unique twentieth-century 
phenomenon known as totalitarian fascism. 
LaRouche is hardly the first proponent of these 
views, and he is unlikely to be the last. 
Therefore there is a deadly serious reason to 
study the rise and fall of Lyndon LaRouche, the 
man who brought us fascism wrapped in an American 
flag.

 Who is Lyndon LaRouche?

   LaRouche spent his formative years in the small 
industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts as a 
Quaker, and the past fifteen years forging a 
fascist movement out of cadre originally drawn 
from idealistic Marxist college students. His 
name became more familiar to Americans in April 
of 1986 when two Illinois followers of LaRouche 
scored primary victories--garnering the official 
Democratic Party ballot slots for Lieutenant 
Governor and Secretary of State. In repudiating 
the LaRouche candidates, the Democratic Party's 
candidate for Illinois governor, Adlai Stevenson, 
removed himself from the official ticket saying 
he could not in good conscience run on the same 
ticket with "neo-Nazis."

   With increased media coverage of the LaRouche 
network's legal difficulties and clearly unusual 
political theories, most Americans probably think 
they already know all they need to know about 
Lyndon LaRouche. Yet the picture most people 
envision when they hear of the "LaRouchies" is a 
caricature of a complicated and troubling 
phenomenon which appears more sinister than 
comical when the details are sketched in with 
information emerging from court records, a 
careful reading of LaRouche's theoretical 
writings, and interviews with dozens of former 
members, most of whom prefer not to be quoted by 
name.

   They have been called crooks, con artists, a 
cult, obsessed with conspiracy theories, a 
private intelligence army, anti-Semitic. Some 
critics have called LaRouche America's leading 
neo-fascist. A handful insist he is a neo-Nazi.

   They call themselves visonaries, 
nation-builders, walking in the footsteps of 
Lincoln, Hamiltonian Constitutionalists, 
neo-Platonic thinkers. Supporters consider 
LaRouche to be one of the great minds of the 
Twentieth Century, and the world's leading economist.

   Even his sharpest critics generally agree that 
Lyndon LaRouche himself is highly intelligent and 
well-read, with an astounding ability to garnish 
his conversation with historical references drawn 
from memory. And there is no doubt that LaRouche 
has built a multi-million dollar financial empire 
from a small publishing company and a software 
consulting firm programming Wang mainframe 
computers for the garment and trucking 
industries. The LaRouche network now runs 
publishing and information services linked 
worldwide by computerized electronic 
telecommunications systems. Estimates of the 
recent yearly gross income from the dozens of 
related front groups ranges from 10 to 30 million 
dollars, although several years of legal problems 
have apparently reduced that figure substantially.

   Under different circumstance LaRouche might 
have ended up a mental derelict drifting the 
streets--a deranged ancient mariner pressing 
tracts crammed with conspiracies into the palms 
of startled passersby.

   How did LaRouche take a handful of sincere 
Marxist student intellectuals and turn them into 
an international intelligence and publishing 
operation? How did a former pacifist Quaker end 
up sending his followers into the streets to beat 
up opponents? How did LaRouche become the guru of 
a group churning out conspiracy theories 
detailing a sinister plan by prominent Jews, 
Russian communists, and New Age Aquarians to 
manacle western culture with a new Dark Age? How 
can LaRouche claim to trace this conspiracy from 
Henry Kissinger and Walter Mondale back through 
history to the days of the Babylonian Empire?  
Why do the followers of someone so obviously 
deranged attract tens of thousands of votes in 
American election races? And why do most 
mainstream media outlets refuse to use terms such 
as "anti-Semite" and "small-time Hitler" when 
court actions have resulted in those terms being 
found not defamatory but "fair comment?"

   Unravelling the Gordian Knot that is LaRouche 
is not difficult when you realize the 
multi-faceted nature of LaRouche and his 
organization. LaRouche is the Elmer Gantry of 
American politics; mixing equal parts of cynical 
con and fanatic fervor. The terms to describe 
LaRouche can be gleaned from the pages of any 
political science textbook. LaRouche's political 
ideology is authoritarian. His view of history is 
paranoid. His economic theories are similar to 
Italian Fascism. His conspiratorial views are 
laced with racial and cultural bigotry and a 
large dose of anti-Jewish hysteria. His zealous 
stormtroopers are motivated by an internal 
organizational structure that is to politics what 
the blitzkrieg was to international 
diplomacy--that distinctive twentieth 
century phenomenon...the totalitarian movement. 
History teaches us that to ignore or dismiss such 
a person as an ineffectual crank can have 
devestating consequences.

The Long Road to Federal Court

   As LaRouche's self image and 
paranoia grew so too did his appetite for 
expensive intelligence-gathering and high-tech 
security devices. His quest for Presidential 
power made him bold. The funds needed to maintain 
LaRouche's gargantuan self-image as the world's 
premiere political economist and spymaster 
apparently forced his followers to use 
questionable methods of obtaining cash.

   The resulting over-zealous fundraising efforts 
are what caught the attention of a Boston federal 
grand jury some four years ago. In the fading 
days of his 1984 Presidential bid, when the 
cash-starved LaRouche organization was buying 
expensive commercial air-time, hundreds of 
persons found unauthorized credit card charges 
totalling tens of thousands of dollars paid to 
one of the many front groups operated by the 
LaRouche network. LaRouche says it all was a 
mistake. The grand jury thought otherwise, 
indicted several of his top lieutenants, and 
cited three of his related organizations. Law 
enforcement agents raided his Virginia corporate 
offices searching for documents to verify the allegations.

   In the course of the probe, LaRouche loyalists 
are alleged to have destroyed evidence and sent 
key witnesses out of the country. When the grand 
jury indicted LaRouche on a charge of conspiring 
to obstruct justice, he blithely told the press 
the CIA had suggested that documents be shredded 
and witnesses made scarce.

   Linda Ray, a former member of what she calls 
the "LaRouche Cult" says his followers may have 
been "the guinea pigs for pioneering the 
financial fraud in the late 1970's" when members 
with credit cards were persuaded to take out 
personal loans to finance LaRouche organizations. 
Former members say these internal loans were 
seldom properly repaid.

   According to Ray, who has written of her 
experiences, she and other "LaRouchies" staffing 
LaRouche-controlled companies often did not 
receive paychecks; the money instead was used to 
keep the LaRouche global telecommunications 
network humming. "We were told that one of the 
top priorities for meeting expenses was 
maintaining a 24-hour communications link with 
the European central office," she recalls. Other 
former members report they were under intense 
pressure to meet daily financial quotas.

   Former LaRouche loyalists, who often call 
themselves "defectors," say they were willing to 
make personal sacrifices and raise money using 
questionable methods because they were convinced 
they were part of a historic mission to save the 
world from an evil global conspiracy--a belief 
they now reject as an illusion. Intense peer 
pressure, manipulation of guilt feelings, attacks 
on their sexuality and fear are used to control 
LaRouche loyalists, say former members. The sum 
of the LaRouche organizational techniques equals 
the formula for the cult-like totalitarian 
movement defined by political scientist Hanna 
Arendt.

 From Socialist to Totalitarian Fascist

   After serving as a non-combatant in World War 
II, LaRouche firted with the Communist Party, USA 
and then drifted into the Socialist Workers Party 
(SWP) where he spent much of the 1960's. After 
leaving the SWP, LaRouche became the political 
guru of the Labor Caucus of the Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS) until SDS voted to expel 
them in 1969. LaRouche (using the name Lyn 
Marcus) then created the National Caucus of Labor 
Comittees, which in 1972 had some 1,000 members nationwide.

   But in 1973 NCLC underwent a drastic upheaval. 
LaRouche suddenly vowed to either destroy or 
establish his "political hegemony" over the 
American left. He began talking of the need for 
rapid industrialization to build the working 
class. He talked of a historic tactical alliance 
between revolutionaries, the working class and 
the forces of industrial capital against the 
forces of finance capital. He began developing an 
authoritarian world view with a glorification of 
historic mission, metaphysical commitment and 
physical confrontation. He told reporters that 
only he was capable of bringing revolution and 
socialism to the United States, and his speeches 
began to take on the tone and style of a 
demagogue. 

   In many ways LaRouche was adopting the same 
ideas and styles which took National Socialism, 
and turned it into part of the European fascist 
movement, and eventually played a key role in 
Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany. In fact, 
LaRouche was denounced as a neo-Nazi by U.S. 
Communists following a series of 1973 physical 
attacks on leftists. To be precise, NCLC members 
were likened to Hitler's violent Brownshirts.

   What happened to cause this dramatic shift? 
Some say it was a dramatic incident in LaRouche's 
personal life. In 1972 LaRouche's common-law 
wife, Carol Schnitzer, left him for a young 
member of the London NCLC chapter named 
Christopher White, whom she eventually married. 
For LaRouche, it was a crushing blow. His first 
wife Janice had similarly walked out on him a 
decade earlier, taking with her the couple's 
young son.

   This personal event apparently triggered 
LaRouche's political metamorphosis. LaRouche went 
into seclusion in Europe, and defectors tell of 
his suffering a possible nervous breakdown. In 
the spring of 1973, he returned. His previous 
conspiratorial inclinations had now grown into a 
bizarre tapestry weaving together classical 
conspiracy theories of the 19th century and 
post-Marxian economics. He began articulating a 
`psycho-sexual' theory of political organizing.

   Sexism and homophobia became central themes of 
the organization's theories. A September 1973 
editorial in the NCLC ideological journal 
<Campaigner> charged that "Concretely, 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. . . ." 
The problem with making the revolution, LaRouche 
apparently had concluded, was that women are 
castrating bitches. One former member left in 
disgust when she was told women's feelings of 
degradation in modern society could be traced to 
the physical placement of female sexual organs 
near the anus which caused women to confuse sex 
with excretion.

   In an August 16, 1973 internal memo, "The 
Politics of Male Impotence," LaRouche told his 
followers:"The principle source of impotence, 
both male and female, is the mother. . . .to the 
extent that my physical powers do not prevent me, 
I am now confident and capable of ending your 
political--and sexual-- impotence; the two are 
interconnected aspects of the same problem. . . .
I am going to make you organizers--by taking 
your bedrooms away from you until you make the 
step to being effective organizers. What I shall 
do is to expose to you the cruel fact of your 
sexual impotence, male and female. . . .I shall 
destroy your sense of safety in the place to 
which you ordinarily imagine you can flee. I 
shall not pull you back from fleeing, but rather 
destroy the place to which you would attempt to flee."

   In a cruel sense, LaRouche was true to his 
twisted words, those members who challenge the 
increasingly macabre political and social 
theories expounded by their leader were 
confronted by loyalists as politically and 
sexually inadequate traitors to the cause.

   LaRouche also developed a fevered, 
comprehensive paranoid fantasy about the 
importance of his role in history--and a 
militant, new-found resolve to act upon it, 
wiping out all opposition to his leadership of 
the U.S. revolutionary movement. The result was 
Operation Mop-Up. Lyndon LaRouche took his sexual 
identity crisis into the streets.

   Operation Mop-up raged from May to September 
of 1973. LaRouche's followers in NCLC were 
ordered to brutally assault rivals from the 
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Socialist 
Workers Party (SWP). NCLC thugs used bats, 
chains, and martial arts weapons in a campaign to 
establish "hegemony" over the American 
revolutionary movement. There were many injuries 
and some persons required hospitalization.

   "Our hearts were not in it," a former NCLC 
member says about his participation in Operation 
Mop-Up. "But with LaRouche it was all or nothing; 
the attacks were supposed to harden the 
membership." Forcing student intellectuals into 
violent confrontations was an exercise in 
self-degradation which cemented their loyalty to 
NCLC, ex-members say, Their working-class Marxism 
gave way to an unquestioning, cult-like devotion 
to LaRouche. "Most of us now find the whole thing 
was crazy," says a seven-year NCLC veteran who 
left the group in the mid-1970's. Operation 
Mop-Up, however, was just the beginning.

   LaRouche spent the summer and early fall of 
1973 obsessed with his broken marriage, brooding 
over the humiliating betrayal, according to 
ex-members. Late in December, a revelation came; 
Christopher White, having already stolen his 
wife, had in addition been programmed by the KGB, 
with the aid of the MI5 division of British 
intelligence, to assassinate LaRouche himself--in 
retaliation for Mop-Up's assaults on pro-Soviet 
Communist groups! Further, the CIA--jealous of 
LaRouche's success in uncovering a previous NCLC 
victim of KGB brainwashing--had resolved either 
to kidnap LaRouche to extract his secret, or kill 
him itself to prevent his falling into Soviet hands.

   Only LaRouche possessed the intelligence and 
perception to uncover and foil this fiendish 
plot, and not surprisingly, he alone held the 
keys for the cure--in White's case, days of 
isolation and intense pressure from a battery of 
LaRouche inquisitors. White finally caved in and 
confessed to his alleged "psychosexual 
brainwashing" by the KGB/CIA/MI5 conspirators. 
Based on tape-recordings offered by NCLC members 
as "proof," the <New York Times> later 
carried a harrowing account of this so-called 
"deprogramming" session. LaRouche's revenge was 
complete; White--who had taken his wife--had been 
reduced to a repentant, sobbing psychological wreck.

   LaRouche lost no time in applying his cure. 
Any sign of restiveness or dissent on the part of 
NCLC members now became evidence of 
"brainwashing" by the KGB, the CIA, or both.

   One young woman, attempting to quit what was 
rapidly becomming a totalitarian cult, was held 
prisoner in a New York apartment by six fellow 
members in an effort to "deprogram" her. She 
somehow managed to fold a plea for help into a 
paper airplane, sailing it out the window--where 
it was found by a passerby who called the police. 
Among the NCLC members arrested were Edward 
Spannaus, a national spokesman for LaRouche who 
faced trial in the failed Boston prosecution; 
and Khushro Ghandhi, co-sponsor of Proposition 64, a 
LaRouche-sponsored California AIDS initiative 
defeated several years ago after an intensive 
public awareness campaign in which the initiative 
was widely-denouced as a witch hunt against the 
homosexual community. Other defendants in the 
Boston case were part of the NCLC deprogramming 
drive, according to former members.

   On January 3, 1974, the day the six 
"deprogrammers" were arraigned, LaRouche gave a 
long, rambling and altogether extraordinary 
speech--later reprinted in his own <New 
Solidarity>--laying out his theory of how 
sinister forces had secretly kidnapped and 
brainwashed his followers. According to LaRouche, 
the methods used by the KGB and British 
Intelligence to brainwash the membership of NCLC 
caused fear of impotence and homosexuality to 
immobilize each member and thus destroy their 
capability to organize effectively. LaRouche's 
pronouncements can easily be dismissed as a 
deranged conspiracy theory--but the words reveal 
his emotional and intellectual state at the time 
of the speech.

   While perhaps offensive to some 
readers, only direct quotes can fully convey the 
incredible nature and content of LaRouche's 
demented discourse:

   "How do you brainwash somebody? Well, 
first of all, you generally pull 
a psychological profile or develop one in a 
preliminary period. You find every vulnerability 
of that person from a psychoanalytic standpoint. 
Now the next thing you do is you build them up 
for fear in males and females of homsexuality, 
aim them for an anal identification with anal 
sex, their mouth is identified with fellacio. 
Their mouth is identified only with the 
penis--that kind of sex, and with woman. 
Womanhood is the fellacio of the male mouth in a 
man who has been brainwashed by the KGB; that is 
sucking penises. . . ."

   "First they say your father was nothing, 
your father was a queer, your father 
was a woman. They play very strongly on 
homosexual fears. It doesn't work on women. . . 
.Most women are to a large degree homosexual in 
this society. The relationship between daughter 
and mother is homosexual, so the thing is not 
much of a threat."

   "But to young men it is 
generally a grave threat. . fears about 
masturbation. . . .They say, `See that sheep. 
Wouldn't you like to do that to a sheep?'"

   "It's not the pain that brainwashes, it's forcing the 
victim to run away from the pain by taking the 
bait of degrading himself. This persistant 
pattern of self-degradation, self-humiliation, is 
what essentially accomplishes the 
brainwashing."

   "Any of you who say this is a 
hoax--you're cruds! You're subhuman! You're not serious. 
The human race is at stake. Either we win or 
there is no humanity. That's the way she's cut."

   LaRouche was speaking of the brainwashing plot 
he believed was being initiated against his 
followers. In fact, according to former members, 
LaRouche and his closest aides used this belief 
to justify a an internal campaign which was 
a"chain of psychological terror" as two members 
called it in their resignation letter. They 
charged the LaRouche-mandated sessions to cure 
their alleged "psychosis" were in fact an attempt 
to crush the will of "all individuals who have 
expressed political and intellectual opposition 
to the tendencies" surfacing inside the LaRouche 
organization. "What really happened," 
says a dismayed former member, "is that LaRouche 
had gone bonkers and was systematically 
brainwashing us to accept his total control over 
the organization."

   Linda Ray says hundreds of persons left the 
LaRouche organization during this period. For Ray 
and others who remained, however, LaRouche's 
increasingly bizarre and bigoted theories were 
accepted without question to avoid being 
subjected to "de-programming" sessions.

A Tactical Alliance with the Reactionary Right

   In 1974 LaRouche first began to seek contact 
with extremist and anti-Semitic right-wing groups 
and individuals in an effort to forge a tactical 
alliance in opposing imperialism and ruling class 
banking interests in general--and the 
Rockefellers in particular. LaRouche's obsession 
with conspiracy theories blossomed. Dovetailing 
with today's American radical Right and 
neo-fascist neo-populist ideologies, his theories 
of a Rockefeller-directed global conspiracy of 
banking interests found a receptive audience. 

   Yet the core followers of LaRouche still 
thought of themselves as Leftists forging a 
temporary and cyncial tactical alliance with 
`progressive' industrialists to help rebuild a 
strong economy. With a healthy economy leading to 
full employment for the working class, the 
LaRouche followers figured they could then lead 
the reconstituted working class to revolution. 
Defectors report that during this period they 
were required to study Marxist and Leninist 
tracts and participate in paramilitary training 
classes led by fellow members. 

   Having founded the U.S. Labor Party as the 
NCLC's electoral arm in 1973, LaRouche mounted 
his first presidential campaign under the USLP 
banner in 1976. His platform of "Impeach Rocky to 
prevent imminent nuclear war" garnered only 
40,000 votes, but it afforded LaRouche more 
organizing opportunities on the far Right. 
Despite its declared Marxist stance, the NCLC 
stepped up efforts, with mixed success, to 
penetrate or co-opt such groups as the American 
Conservative Union, the John Birch Society, the 
Young Americans for Freedom, and the KKK.

   Drawing upon his new contacts on the far Right 
(reportedly relying in part on Pennsylvania KKK 
leader Roy Frankhauser) LaRouche arranged with 
former CIA officer Mitchell WerBell III to 
provide the NCLC security force with armed 
self-defense training at WerBell's paramilitary 
camp in Powder Springs, Georgia. Now deceased, 
WerBell introduced LaRouche into wider right-wing 
circles including a shadowy netherworld of spys, 
mercenaries, and intelligence operatives.

   It was during this period that NCLC began to 
collect and disseminate intelligence on 
progressive groups. LaRouche publications 
frequently report their security staffers offer 
intelligence to domestic and foreign government 
agencies. While documents released under the 
Freedom of Information Act reveal that U.S. 
government agencies frequently dismissed the 
material provided by the NCLC, it was provided 
nonetheless. Legal actions against some police 
agencies have discovered NCLC material in active 
files on terrorism and subversion.

   As LaRouche's fear of persecution and 
assassination intensified he moved further and 
further into right-wing circles. His ideological 
theories were constantly being repackaged to 
appeal to his new-found friends. One shift in 
LaRouche's perception of who controlled the 
worldwide conspiracy came at the time of Nelson 
Rockefeller's death; an event which left a major 
hole in LaRouche's theoretical bulwark.

   Ever alert to exploit shifting sentiment and 
historical opportunities, the U.S. Labor Party 
began to de-emphasise Rockefeller as the 
archenemy of civilization, replacing him with a worldwide 
conspiracy under the control of the "British 
Oligarchy" and their stooge. . .the Queen of 
England. A careful reading of USLP published 
material reveals, however, that a remarkable 
number of the British and other co-conspirators 
were Jews. It is this fact that prompted several 
major Jewish groups to denounce LaRouche's 
theories as anti-Semitic.

   This turn toward a Jewish conspiracy theory of 
history came shortly after the quasi-Nazi Liberty 
Lobby began praising a 1976 USLP pamphlet titled 
<Carter and the International Party of 
Terrorism.> The pamphlet outlined the 
"Rockefeller-CIA-Carter axis," which was 
supposedly trying to "deindustrialize" the U.S. 
and provoke a war with the Soviet Union by 1978. 
(At this point LaRouche had not yet discarded his 
support for the Soviet Union, nor announced his 
support for "Star Wars" defense against his 
perceived threat of imminent Soviet attack.)

   In an overall favorable review of the USLP 
treatise on the Rockefeller-controlled global 
conspiracy, Liberty Lobby's newspaper, 
<Spotlight> complained that the report 
failed to mention any of the "major Zionist 
groups such as the notorious Anti-Defamation 
League" in its extensive list of government 
agencies, research groups, organizations and 
individuals controlled by the 
"Rockefeller-Carter-CIA" terrorism apparatus.

   LaRouche, never one to miss a cue, soon was 
running articles in his newspaper <New 
Solidarity> with themes that betrayed 
increasingly bigoted view of Jews and Jewish 
institutions. By the end of 1976, LaRouche had 
completed his drift to the extremist-right of the 
political spectrum where his bigoted conspiracy 
theories linking international bankers, 
influential Jewish families, furtive KGB agents, 
and secret societes found fertile ground. 

   Soon LaRouche was expounding a view linking 
certain Jewish institutions and Zionist movements 
to a plot to destroy Western civilization and 
usher in a "New Dark Age." Linda Ray thinks that 
more recent LaRouche converts are not even aware 
of the group's real history, nor of the cult-like 
inner circle which controls the secret 
financial operations.

   Opportunistic or not, LaRouche's erratic lurch 
to the right brought gains to the NCLC in 
membership and financial strength. Yet his 
right-wing theories and affiliations are still 
opaque to many observers who dismiss LaRouche on 
the basis of his cranky conspiratorial world view 
and general lunacy.

END OF PART ONE

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Sep 92 20:32 PDT

/* Written 10:16 pm  Dec 18, 1990 by nlgclc in cdp:publiceye */
/* ---------- "LaRouchians as Fascists!" ---------- */

LAROUCHE AS FASCIST: PART TWO

------

 The Paranoid Style

   LaRouche's parlaying of personal and political 
conspiracy theories into a multi-million dollar 
financial empire is unique, but paranoid 
political movments occur cyclically in American 
history. In his widely-quoted essay "The Paranoid 
Style in American Politics," professor Richard 
Hofstadter argues that in times of economic, 
social or political crisis, small 
conspiracy-minded groups suddenly gain a mass 
following. The anti-Catholic hysteria of the 
1800's, the anti-immmigrant movement which led to 
the Palmer Raids in 1919, the Red Scare of the 
1950's and other societal convulsions, are 
examples, wrote Hofstadter.

   Such movements rise and fall periodically, 
according to Hofstadter, appealing to people 
fearful about the world political and economic 
situation, and longing for simple solutions to 
complex problems. The use of scapegoats is common 
among these movements.

   The findings of two academics who studied a 
LaRouche campaign contributor list (available 
from the Federal Election Commission) lend 
support to the thesis that LaRouche appeals to a paranoid 
constituency. In a 1986 press release, "Who 
Controls Us: A Profile of Lyndon LaRouche's 
Campaign Contributors," John C. Green and James 
L. Guth of Furman University identify LaRouche as 
"a new celebrity on the extreme right."

   "An analysis of his campaign contributors 
suggests that LaRouche should be taken seriously, 
not as a candidate, but as evidence of the 
failure--and success--American politics," wrote 
the professors.

   According to the results of the study, among 
LaRouche's contributors are a significant 
proportion of Northern neo-populist 
conservatives, "profoundly uncomfortable with 
modern America and susceptible to conspiratorial 
explanations of their distress. One seemed to 
speak for the others when he listed his major 
concern as `who really controls us?' To many of 
these alienated people, LaRouche's outlandish 
views offer a plausible answer to this question." 

According to the study:

   "Though LaRouche campaigns 
as a Democrat, most of his donors are 
independents, with the largest group `leaning' 
Republican. but ordinary people as well, 
believing that no one can be trusted `most of the 
time.' Very few say they are optimistic about 
their future or that of the country.  They are 
equally disillusioned with politics, 40% report 
having become discouraged and ceased 
participating at some point. These attitudes 
extend to current political groups as well.  
Three-quarters feel `far' from mainstream 
conservative organizations such as the Chamber of 
Commerce. Roughly equal numbers feel `close' and 
`far' from more reactionary groups like the John 
Birch Society. Uniform dislike, however, is 
reserved for liberal advocates of change; the 
ACLU, Common Cause and Ralph Nader.

   "LaRouche is most criticized for his 
political intolerance, a trait exhibited 
by his contributors. To measure 
tolerance, we asked all donors to name a group 
they regarded as `dangerous' and then asked if 
they would allow a member of that group to run 
for president, speak in a public place or teach 
in public school. Only a quarter of the 
LaRouchians would allow a member of their 
`dangerous' group to engage in all three 
activities and another quarter would allow 
none.

   "LaRouche would probably approve of their 
choice of `dangerous' groups: more than half of 
the mentions figure prominently in `conspiracy' 
theories of politics, such as communists, drug 
dealers, Jews, bankers, intellectuals and the 
mass media.  Some `conspiracies' are explicitly 
named: the `zionist-socialist movement,' the 
`international drug ring,' `cartel control of 
money' and the `post-industrial counter-culture.' 
 But other donors identify mainstream 
organizations and leaders as `dangerous,' 
including the `unilateral disarmament advocates,' 
`eco-freaks,' `Hayden and Fonda,' `socialist 
Democrats' and `big labor bosses.'

   "These kinds of attitudes occur among other 
conservative activists, but rarely to this extent. 
And the LaRouchians differ from other conservatives 
in demographic terms as well.  LaRouche's donors 
seem to be the remnant of the `small town 
America' of a generation ago. Nearly 
three-quarters were born in the Midwest or 
Northeast and more than half still live there, 
outside the major cities. Most spent their adult 
life in one or two states; the only major move 
they have ever made was to retire to the Sunbelt. 
Two-thirds are 55 or older, male, of WASP or 
German extraction, and products of [nuclear 
two-parent] families. They are not, however, 
particularly religious; most belong to mainline 
Protestant denominations and few are active 
church members. "

   The authors concluded, "it is alienated people 
who make fringe candidates possible. LaRouche 
should be taken seriously as a symptom of 
distress in a small part of the body politic.  
His limited appeal is a sign of the basic health 
of America politics."

   One historian, author George Seldes, thinks 
LaRouche has followed another seldom travelled 
but clearly recognizable historic path--the road 
from Socialism through National Socialism to 
Fascism. Seldes has authored some ten books 
concerning authoritarianism and thinks LaRouche's 
theories and style represent classic 
"Mussolini-style fascist" ideology. Seldes' 
analysis carries weight especially since he wrote 
a biography of Mussolini in 1935 titled 
<Sawdust Caesar.>

 Secret Agent LaRouche

   In a sense LaRouche is a "Silicon Caesar" 
since he has risen to power through a 
sophisticated computerized telecommunications 
network which gathers political and economic 
intelligence and then packages it for 
dissemination through newsletters, magazines, 
special reports and consulting services. Former 
Reagan advisor and National Security Council 
senior analyst, Dr. Norman Bailey, told NBC 
reporter Pat Lynch the LaRouche network was "one 
of the best private intelligence services 
in the world."

   Not everyone shares the view. When Henry 
Kissinger was told of how LaRouche operatives met 
with high Reagan Administration officials in the 
early 1980's, he told the <New Republic>, 
"If this is true, it would be outrageous, stupid, 
and nearly unforgivable." Dennis King, co-author 
of the <New Republic> article which examined 
LaRouche's influence in scientific and 
intelligence circles, says during the first 
Reagan term LaRouche aides managed to gain 
"access to an alarming array of influential 
persons in government, law enforcement, 
scientific research and private industry." These 
ties form the basis of the LaRouche "CIA defense" 
against the charges he conspired to obstruct 
justice. LaRouche claims he believed his security 
aide Roy Frankhauser, a former Ku Klux Klan 
leader and government law enforcement informant, 
was a covert conduit to the CIA.

   John Rees, an ultra-conservative whose 
<Information Digest> newsletter reports on 
political extremes on the left and right, 
says he "believes the <New Republic> 
story that LaRouche staffers had 
access to a lot of people." But he points out, 
"If you have all the electronic resources and 
information-gathering staff that LaRouche 
posesses you are bound to come up with occasional 
gems, that's what most people were interested in, 
not the LaRouche philosophy." Both King and Rees 
feel the Reagan Administration consciously began 
distancing itself from contacts with the LaRouche 
network following the <New Republic> 
and NBC stories.

   Russ Bellant, a long-time LaRouche watcher 
from Detroit, notes that in the mid-1970's 
LaRouche simultaneously turned to the right and 
tried to link up with more respectable groups, 
including, for a brief period, several state 
Republican Party organizations. "Some tactical 
political alliances with various right-wing 
groups were made on the basis of LaRouche's 
scurrilous disruption campaigns against mutual 
enemies, especially liberal Democrats," says 
Bellant. In fact, LaRouche has consistently 
targetted the American left, and done so with 
material and moral support from small but 
significant elements in law enforcement, the 
Republican Party and the American far right. 
There is also evidence to suggest that the 
LaRouche organization maintained a cozy 
relationship with certain elements in U.S. and 
foreign intelligence, military 
and police agencies.

   Bellant and other LaRouche-watchers feel the 
LaRouche network and its questionable finances 
and intelligence activities may have been 
overlooked by certain individuals in intelligence 
and law enforcement agencies. "These persons were 
focusing more on the information being churned up 
by LaRouche's intelligence-gathering apparatus," 
says Bellant.

   LaRouche-related financial operations have run 
afoul of the law before, but by adopting an 
aggressive legal strategy his groups have been 
able to fend off successful prosecution for years 
until cases were dropped or settled by exhausted 
plaintiffs and prosecutors. One Illinois case 
involving LaRouche-backed mayoral candidate 
Sheila Jones and LaRouche's Illinois Anti-Drug 
Coaliton has dragged on for over six years.

   The 1986 Illinois primary victory by two 
LaRouche followers, however, raised the ante. 
"The visibility that came to LaRouche after the 
Illinois primary lent credibility to the 
investigations into his financial operations by 
bringing forward scores of persons who claimed to 
have been defrauded by LaRouche operations over 
the years," says Bellant.  There are probably a 
variety of reasons why the ties between LaRouche 
and various government agencies and personalities 
were severed in the mid-1980's. Highly-publicized 
incidents such as the airport battle between 
LaRouchies and Henry Kissinger and his wife 
helped doom the LaRouche network's relationship 
with the Reagan Administration--their profile 
just became too visible for a continued 
relationship. 

   Principled conservatives challenged 
the Reagan Administration to justify its 
flirtation with an anti-Semitic group. 
Intelligence specialists questioned the wisdom of 
sharing thoughts with a group which historically 
worked both sides of the political fence 
separating allies from adversaries. Even Oliver 
North got into the act when his fundraisers and 
security specialists found LaRouche emissaries 
were getting underfoot.

   LaRouche security expert Jeff Steinberg, who 
used to meet with National Security Council 
staffers at the Old Executive Office Building in 
the White House compound, spent much of 1988 in a 
Boston courtroom facing criminal charges. However 
it appears the criminal investigation which led 
to the current legal problems faced by LaRouche 
and his followers began before the controversy 
over his ties to the Reagan Administration had 
reached key decision-makers in government 
agencies. While there is some evidence of 
prosecutorial misconduct and civil liberties 
violations in the course of some of the federal 
investigations and prosecutions, the claim by 
LaRouche spokespersons that the indictments are 
part of a government conspiracy to silence 
LaRouche appear to be without foundation.

Political Puzzle?

   Russ Bellant's articles on LaRouche have 
appeared in liberal Michigan weeklies and 
progressive publications, while John Rees tills 
the right side of the journalistic garden. But 
both agree LaRouche's ideology is now neither 
Marxist nor conservative. Rees, who for years has 
written for conservative, anti-communist, and 
New-Right publications (including several 
magazines published by the John Birch Society), 
thinks it is unfair ever to have called LaRouche 
a conservative simply because he has tried to woo 
that political block.

   "He is emphatically not a conservative," says 
Rees, "he is a totalitarian extremist with a cult of 
personality to rival Joseph Stalin's." Rees 
concedes that LaRouche's politics are distorted 
and strange, saying "he is difficult to 
categorize--in a sense LaRouche is a remedial 
Fascist. At least Mussolini could make the trains 
run on time. I doubt LaRouche is capable 
of doing that."

   Rees claims that "when LaRouche was rejected 
by the totalitarian left, he simply tried the 
other side of the totalitarian spectrum." 
According to Rees, ties between the LaRouche 
network and several racist and anti-Semitic 
groups are well-established. "Former LaRouche 
organizers report cooperation with elements of 
the Aryan Nations Network," adds Bellant who says 
the LaRouche network is a "neo-Nazi type of 
cult." 

 Racism and Anti-Jewish Rhetoric 

   LaRouche has many connections to the racist 
political right in this country. Richard 
Lobenthal, Midwest Regional Director for the 
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, observes 
that LaRouche security advisor Roy Frankhauser 
"has been identified as present with other white 
supremacists at meetings held at the farm of 
Pastor Bob Miles in Michigan." Leaders of the 
notoriously racist and anti-Semitic Aryan Nations 
have attended the same meetings.

   "Frankhauser's background and connections are 
myriad, he is obviously a LaRouchite, he is a 
professed racist and anti-Semite and was a close 
associate of neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln 
Rockwell," says Lobenthal.

   LaRouche not only works in coalitions with 
bigots, he has also propounded ideas which are 
widely perceived to represent outright racism.

   LaRouche, for instance, offended the Hispanic 
community in a November, 1973 essay (published in 
both English and Spanish) titled "The Male 
Impotence of the Puerto-Rican Socialist Party." 
An internal memo by LaRouche asked "Can we 
imagine anything more viciously sadistic than the 
Black Ghetto mother?"  He described the majority 
of the Chinese people as "approximating the lower 
animal species" by manifesting a "paranoid 
personality. . . .a parallel general form of 
fundamental distinction from actual 
human personalities."

   LaRouche's use of hysterical Jewish conspiracy 
theories for ulterior political motives has lead 
him to be branded an anti-Semite by several major 
Jewish groups. 

   One ADL spokesperson, Irwin Suall, was once 
sued for defamation by LaRouche for calling him a 
"small time Hitler." The jury ruled against 
LaRouche. According to LaRouche, only a million 
and a half Jews perished in the concentration 
camps, and they died primarily from overwork, 
disease, and starvation. This denial of the 
Holocaust is coupled with pronouncements saying 
there is nothing left of Jewish culture except 
what couldn't be sold to Gentiles, or claiming 
British Jews brought Hitler into power.

   While many of the ringleaders of the global 
conspiracy, according to the LaRouche philosophy, 
are Jewish, members of the LaRouche group rebut 
charges of anti-Semitism by pointing out that a 
number of them--including Janice Hart, former 
Democratic nominee for the Illinois Secretary of 
State--are Jewish. The Anti-Defamation League of 
B'nai B'rith, which has successfully beat back 
several costly LaRouche lawsuits, rejects this 
explanation and insists the group is a paranoid, 
anti-Semitic political cult.

   For his part, LaRouche claims to be merely 
anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Jewish groups and 
political scientists acknowledge the important 
distinction, but LaRouche rhetoric--such as 
leaflets distributed in California bearing 
the offensive headline "Smash the Kosher 
Nostra!" and naming a number of Jewish figures as 
part of a global conspiracy, leaves little doubt.

   Since 1976, the NCLC's ties to anti-Semitic, 
ultra-right groups and individuals have been well 
documented. LaRouche associates have cultivated 
ties to Willis Carto, a notorious racist and 
anti-Semite who helped found Liberty Lobby and 
the pseudo-scholarly Institute for Historical 
Review. This latter group publishes "historical 
revisionist" literature deriding the Nazi 
Holocaust as a Jewish hoax.

   Former staffers at both the Liberty Lobby and 
LaRouche's NCLC claim the two groups cooperated 
closely on several projects. In the March 2, 1981 
issue of its newspaper <Spotlight>, Liberty 
Lobby cynically defended the relationship this 
way: "It is mystifying why so many 
anti-communists and `conservatives' oppose the 
USLP [U.S. Labor Party --the NCLC's original 
electoral arm]. No group has done so much to 
confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left as they 
have. . .the USLP should be encouraged, as should 
all similar breakaway groups from the Left, for 
this is the only way that the Left can be 
weakened and broken."

   Linda Ray, the outspoken former member of the 
LaRouche group, recently published a first-person 
account of her experiences in the Chicago-based 
national weekly <In These Times>. She 
recalls that after leaving the group, someone 
showed her a LaRouche organization pamphlet she 
had once sold on the street. "In it the Jewish 
symbol, the Star of David, was used as a 
centerpiece to point to six different aspects of 
the illegal drug trade. In this context, the Star 
of David was a symbol of evil." She was shocked 
when she realized she had not recognized this 
while still working with LaRouche.

   "Many people find it difficult 
to understand how Jews--such as 
I--could have worked for an anti-Semitic group. 
Perhaps the answer is that the members get so 
hypnotized by the simplistic `good guys and bad 
guys' approach to history that they do not hear 
what LaRouche is really saying."

   Ray recalls how LaRouche claimed the British 
were a different "subhuman species" and how his 
<Campaigner> magazine concocted the charge 
that the British created the Nazi movement."Since 
the blasts were overtly directed against the 
British, Jewish members often did not recognize 
the subliminal anti-Semitism of the attacks. 
LaRouche, like the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler and 
Goebbels, was attacking the Rothschilds and other 
British-Jewish banking interests. In the wake of 
these anti-Semitic writings, many of us were 
confused. But we continued to defend LaRouche by 
lamely saying, `We're not anti-Semitic. So many 
of our members are Jews. We always say in our 
publications that we are against the Nazis.'

   "I remember reading in detail about the `subhuman 
species' concept. Although I knew it did not make 
scientific sense, I presumed that it was a deep 
intellectual metaphor that was over my head."

   When Ray left the group and finally came to 
grips with her role as a Jew working in an 
anti-Semitic organization, she says "It was as if 
I was waking from a nightmare." 

   LaRouche's relationship with Blacks--including 
his own Black NCLC members--is similarly 
confusing and complex. While LaRouche's writings 
are replete with racialist assertions extolling 
white Northern European values at the expense of 
other ethnic values, he has in some cases 
succeeded in forging alliances with rightist or 
opportunist black politicians and civil rights 
leaders, such as Roy Innis of the Congress of 
Racial Equality (CORE) and Hulan Jack, a former 
Borough president and powerhouse in the New York 
Democratic Party. Articles from LaRouche's <Executive 
Intelligence Review> have appeared in publications
of Rev. Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

   At the same time they are recruiting Blacks, 
LaRouche publications praise the wisdom of the 
Botha government in South Africa, and attack 
those who protest the system of apartheid. 

   LaRouchian rhetoric can often offend numerous 
constituencies simultaneously. The July 7, 1986 
issue of the <Illinois Tribunal>, an insert 
tucked into LaRouche's <New Solidarity> (now 
<New Federalist>) newspaper, covered the Ku 
Klux Klan counter rally against Chicago's annual 
Gay Pride parade by charging: "The idea behind 
the KKK outburst was--amid heavy media coverage 
of a mere two dozen Klan demonstrators--to make 
citizens think anyone who wants to take serious 
measures against AIDS is a cross-burner and a 
Nazi. . . .In fact, the Klan does not 
exist--except as a special dirty-tricks operation 
of the FBI and the B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation 
League. "

   The article went on to say the founders of 
B'nai B'rith were "about as Jewish as Josef 
Goebbels."When Illinois Congressman Sidney Yates 
faced LaRouche-backed challenger Sheila Jones, 
LaRouche supporters distributed leaflets titled 
"So, What's A Nice Jewish Boy Doing Supporting 
Sodomy?" Former Chicago mayor Jane Byrne was 
targetted in one mayoral race with a LaRouche 
candidate's campaign slogan of "Byrne the Witch." 

   In attacking political enemies, LaRouche 
propoganda often utilizes racist, anti-Jewish, 
sexist or homophobic stereotypes. 

Defining the Terms

   The LaRouche cult fits the description of a 
totalitarian movement as outlined by Hanna Arendt 
in <The Origins of Totalitarianism.> 
Totalitariansim is correctly defined by its 
all-encompasing style, structure and methods, not 
by its stated or apparent ideological premises or 
goals. Arendt wrote that not all fascist groups 
were necessarily totalitarian and not all 
totalitarian groups were necessariy fascist.

   Is LaRouche a fascist? The goal of fascism is 
always raw power, and it will adopt or abandon 
any principle to obtain power. The chameleon-like 
nature of fascist theories is one of its 
hallmarks, and often leads to confusion as to 
whether it is on the political left or right as 
it opportunistically gobbles up popular slogans 
from existing movements.

   Journalist James Ridgeway notes there are real 
contradictions in LaRouche's politics: "While it 
maintains contacts with far-right groups, 
LaRouche's organization is ideologically at 
cross-purposes with many which are nativist and 
anarchist. LaRouche is an internationalist and a 
totalitarian: he believes the masses are 
`bestial' and unfit for citizenship."

   Freelance journalist Nick Gallo takes us a 
step further. In <The Seattle Weekly> he 
acknowledges that much of what LaRouche espouses 
"appears kooky, if only because his ideas 
certainly defy conventional political analysis. . 
. .However go beyond the individual positions on 
different issues and beneath the surface lurk 
echoes of sinister themes that have been 
prevalent in the 20th century: preservation of 
Western Civilization, purity of culture and 
youth, elimination of Jewish and homosexual 
influence, suspicion of international 
banking conspiracies."

   The opportunistic exploitation of 
anxiety-producing issues by LaRouchies is no 
surprise to Clara Fraser who knew LaRouche when 
he was in the Socialist Workers Party. Writing in the 
<Freedom Socialist> newspaper, she explains, 
 "The pundits are intrigued and puzzled by his 
amalgam of right and left politics, a tangled web 
of KKK, Freudian, encounter therapy, Populist, 
Ayn Rand-like, and Marxist notions. They needn't 
be. His is the prototypical face of fascism, 
which is classically a hodgepodge of 
pseudo-theories crafted for mass appeal. . . ."

   Themes generally associated with fascism 
frequently recur in LaRouche's writings. In the 
aggregate, LaRouche seems to like the idea of 
society with an authoritarian governing body, 
exercising social, political, economic, and 
cultural control, using force when necessary to 
maintain order and attain desired goals. 
Traditional democracy is contemptuously dismissed 
by LaRouche, who describes himself as a 
"traditional Democrat," as the "rule of 
irrationalist episodic majorities."

   When LaRouche touts his followers as  
"neo-Platonic" theorists, most people aren't 
aware that in <The Republic,> Plato outlined 
his view of a political system in which only a 
handful of enlightened "Golden Souls" would be 
allowed to participate in societal 
desision-making. While this was certainly a step 
forward from imperial dictatorship and rule by 
fiat, it is hardly a step forward for a 
participatory democracy. LaRouche, incidently, 
has said his followers are "Golden Souls."

   Combining fascism and totalitarianism makes 
for a potent mixture, but even a totalitarian 
fascist is not necessarily a Nazi--for that you 
must include a "Master Race" theory and roots in 
an ostensibly socialist agenda for empowering the 
working class. . movement and German Nazi 
movement. In German the word itself--NAZI--was an 
acronym for the National German Workers Socialist 
Party. Most socialists now are painfully aware of 
that error. LaRouche apparently repeated the error.

   But can an organization which has Jews and 
Blacks as members be called Nazi? The LaRouche 
network's printed materials are full of 
ethnocentric, racist, and anti-Jewish rhetoric, 
but that doesn't necessarily make it Nazi. Where 
is LaRouche's theory of a master race? In fact, 
LaRouche himself has repeatedly enunciated just 
such a theory, but in his typically convoluted way.

   In the mind of Lyndon LaRouche, personal or 
political opponents are not even human, Jerry 
Brown and Tom Hayden are "creatures;" the rest of 
us are merely "beasts" or "sheep."

   According to Dennis King, it is LaRouche's 
belief that his enemies are subhuman and his 
followers superhuman which makes "LaRouche more 
than a political fascist, but a neo-Nazi." King, 
whose book on LaRouche is slated for publication 
in 1989, adds that "people afraid of that 
characterization should sit down and read his 
ideological writings. LaRouche talks about the 
existence of two parasitic species descended from 
Babylonian culture, the British-Jewish and 
Russian-Orthodox species, then there are the 
subhuman masses, then humanity represented by 
LaRouche and his followers, the Golden Souls, and 
then a new superhuman race which will evolve from 
the Golden Souls. It really is pure 
Nazism," says King.

   And if that makes no rational sense; and if 
some of his followers are Jews and Blacks? "So 
what?" retorts King "LaRouche is a totalitarian, 
he can define anyone he wants to as being a 
member of the human race, and anyone he wants to 
as being a member of an inferior race, and he can 
change the definitions from week to week--who is 
going to argue with him?"

End of Part Two

---

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Sep 92 20:33 PDT

/* Written  9:15 pm  Aug 25, 1992 by cberlet in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "LaRouchians as Fascists!" ---------- */
From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet>
Subject: LaRouchians as Fascists!

/* Written 10:18 pm  Dec 18, 1990 by nlgclc in cdp:publiceye */
/* ---------- "LaRouchians as Fascists!" ---------- */
LAROUCHE AS FASCIST: PART THREE

How Serious a Threat?

   A surprisingly broad range of LaRouche's 
critics think his political movment should be 
taken very seriously.

   Richard Lobenthal of ADL warns that the 
LaRouche organization "Obviously should not be 
dismissed lightly, they are more than just kooks. 
They are anti-Semitic extremists. His aspirations 
are to gain legitimacy and power through, amongst 
other ways, the electoral process. To snicker 
about LaRouche is to snicker about any bigot or 
extemist who would ascend to political office and 
then subvert that office for their own purposes," 
he says.

   In California a LaRouche-backed referendum, 
Proposition 64, establishing restrictive public 
health policies regarding Acquired Immune 
Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) demonstrates how the 
small LaRouche group there had a devasting effect 
when it found a fearful audience for its 
simplistic scapegoating theories.

   Mark L. Madsen, a public health specialist for 
the California Medical Association says the 
LaRouche initiative, Proposition 64, was based on 
"absolute hysteria and calculated deception," but 
even though the initiative was soundly defeated 
"it has set back public health education efforts 
at least five years. The LaRouche people have 
almost wiped out all that we have done so far in 
educating the public about AIDS."

   The LaRouche intitiative "created an 
immeasurable medical problem far beyond AIDS 
victims," says Madsen. In California the number 
of regular blood donors went down 30%, and one 
health expert blames this directly on fear by 
blood donors of repercussions from possibly being 
identified as carrying the AIDS virus. "This 
fear, whipped up substantially by the hysterical 
LaRouche theories about AIDS, led to critical 
shortages of blood in the state of California," 
says Madsen.

   Leonard Zeskind of the Atlanta-based Center 
for Democratic Renewal helped build a coalition 
of Christian, Jewish, farm advocacy and civil 
rights groups to confront the spread of 
hate-mongering theories in the wake of the 
devastation of the rural economy throughout the 
farm belt. He calls the LaRouche 
ideology "Crank Fascism".

   "The LaRouche organizers are not as active in 
the farm belt as they once were, but they are 
still there. For those farmers who may have 
bought into these bigoted snake-oil theories, the 
effect has been harmful," says Zeskind. " The 
LaRouche group "has also been very disruptive in 
the Black community where they exploit legitimate 
issues such as drug pushing and widespread 
unemployment. Those of us who have to deal with 
the victims of the LaRouche philosophy don't find 
it very humorous at all," says Zeskind.

   Prexy Nesbitt, a consultant to the American 
Committee on Africa who has led campaigns calling 
for divestment in South Africa, agrees the 
LaRouche organization should be taken more 
seriously. "His people have deliberately made 
themselves an obstacle to our organizing and 
disrupted our activities," says Nesbitt. "The 
LaRouche people spied on anti-apartheid activists 
and South African exiles in Europe and then 
provided information to the South African 
government," charges Nesbitt. "This is a very 
dangerous and potentially deadly game," he says. 
"Critics of the South African Government have 
disappeared or been killed, their offices have 
been blown up," charges Nesbitt.

   In 1981 the respected British magazine <New 
Scientist> ran an article titled "American Fanatis 
put Scientists' Lives at Risk." According to the article, 
LaRouche's <Executive Intelligence Review> 
had circulated a report naming a number of 
scientists working in the Middle East as being 
involved in an insurgent conspiracy against 
established governments. "In certain Middle East 
countries with hypersensitive governments," 
warned the magazine, "these allegations, however 
indirect, can easily lead to arrests, prison 
sentences and even executions."

   Many conservative and New Right groups have 
also taken stands against LaRouche's brand of 
bigotry and opportunism. One staffer at the 
Heritage Foundation, a New Right think-tank based 
in Washington, D.C., called LaRouche an 
"intellectual Nazi" and a Heritage Foundation 
report warned of LaRouche's danger to national 
security as a reckless purveyor of 
private intelligence.

   New Right military specialist, retired General 
Daniel O. Graham, says LaRouche followers have 
significantly hampered his work. Graham, Director 
of Project High Frontier which supports and 
helped develop President Reagan's Strategic 
Defense Initiative plan for anti-missile defense, 
says the LaRouche groups have "caused a lot of 
problems by adopting our issue in an effort to 
sieze credit for the idea." "They also mounted a 
furious attack on me personally," says Graham. 
"Even today I get mail asking if I'm in league 
with LaRouche," he adds wearily.

   "LaRouche does not just represent some nut to 
simply backhand away. . .he's very clever, you 
have to go to great lengths to get around those 
people." He adds: "Look, these people are purely 
interested in power. LaRouche doesn't care about 
these issues one bit, it's just a way to raise 
money and consolidate his political base."

   Jonathan Levine, the Chicago-based Midwest 
Regional Director of the American Jewish 
Committee (AJC) agrees that opportunism and 
exploitation of issues is a key factor with the 
LaRouche ideology. "Extremists have traditionally 
tried to piggyback on substantive issues to gain 
legitimacy for themselves. Never mind that the 
way the LaRouche candidates frame issues does not 
warrant serious discussion in a political 
campaign, but LaRouche may appeal to frustrated, 
apathetic voters nevertheless."

   Bruce B. Decker, a lifelong Republican who has 
served on the staff of President Gerald Ford 
and on an AIDS advisory panel appointed by California 
Governor George Deukmejian, thinks the response to 
LaRouche's bigoted theories should cut across traditional 
party politics and electoral constituencies. He 
lists the forces who joined the California `Stop 
LaRouche' coalition which beat back the 
LaRouche-sponsored Proposition 64, widely 
percieved as a homophobic and anti-civil 
liberties response to the AIDS crisis:"We united 
Republicans and Democrats, progressives and 
conservatives, religious leaders representing 
Protestants, Catholics, Jews and other beliefs, 
ethnic groups including Blacks, Latinos and 
Asians, professionals associations and labor 
unions. Isn't that a lesson we've learned from 
history? That we all have an obligation to stand 
up together and forcefully oppose the 
victimization and scapegoating spread by these 
types of demogogues?"

   After the Illinois primary Senator Daniel 
Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) blasted his own party for 
pursuing a policy of ignoring the "infiltration 
by the neo-Nazi elements of Lyndon H. LaRouche," 
and worried that too often, especially in the 
media, "the LaRouchites" are "dismissed as kooks."

   "In an age of ideology, in an age of 
totalitarianism, it will not suffice for a 
political party to be indifferent to and ignorant 
about such a movement," said Moynihan. 
Ironically, when the <New York Times> 
covered Moynihan's speech, they essentially 
censored him by repeatedly substituting the 
softer term "fascist" wherever Moynihan 
had said "nazi."

   Edward Kayatt, publisher of <Our Town> a 
weekly community newspaper on New York City's 
upper East Side, is angered by that type of 
self-censorship and by the cowardice of most 
mainstream media on this point.

   Kayatt has published dozens of articles on 
LaRouche, describing him as a neo-Fascist, 
neo-Nazi, anti-Semite and racist, including a 
lengthy series by Dennis King. Following the 
Illinois primary victory, Kayatt penned an 
editorial which blasted his colleagues in the 
press for covering up LaRouche's political ideology.

   Kayatt noted that "newspapers are of course 
afraid of libel suits (even though the New York 
State Supreme Court has ruled it is `fair 
comment'to call LaRouche an anti-Semite). But how 
can the media justify censorship of a U.S. 
Senator who is sounding the alarm against 
neo-Nazism? The beast must be named, but within 
the media world only NBC-TV has shown the courage 
to do so."

   Both Kayatt and Chicago journalist Michael 
Miner lay some blame for the Illinois LaRouche 
victory at the feet of those media which chose 
not to publicize the LaRouchies. Kayatt and Miner 
note LaRouche's use of litigation to silence 
critics. Miner wonders if some of the the 
"media's disdain [for LaRouche] was not partly a 
reluctance to borrow trouble." Kayatt agrees. "In 
the late 1920s, when Adolf Hitler began his march 
to power, one of the tactics was to entangle all 
his opponents in libel suits," wrote Kayatt.

   It is admittedly hard to cover LaRouche, 
especially since the media in this country tend 
to ignore historical connections and are 
reluctant to analyze ideological positions or 
treat a fringe political group seriously. 
Political coverage in the U.S. is frequently 
based on personalities and style rather than 
political content. Furthermore, when LaRouche is 
challenged by a reporter, he simply denies 
everything, or says it was taken out of context, 
and then claims his enemies are plotting against 
him--it is difficult for a mainstream reporter to 
report what LaRouche really says without 
appearing biased and vindictive or making 
LaRouche sound totally crazy.

   But Kayatt isn't satisfied with excuses. He 
reflects the sentiment of many who are concerned 
about media coverage of LaRouche when he says, 
"LaRouche will not march to power in America, but 
he can have a serious destabilizing effect on our 
institutions and can create a beachhead for 
organized anti-Semitism. To drive him back into 
political isolation, America's publishers and 
editors must show some of their traditional 
courage and backbone."

   LaRouche's legal troubles haven't stopped his 
followers. They actively organized for the New 
Hampshire Presidential primary, and purchased 
several half-hour time slots on network 
television for campaign programming. For the most 
part, LaRouche fundraisers continue to use the 
same boiler-room phone-bank techniques they have 
used for years. Following the criminal 
indictments, LaRouche loyalists called people 
from whom they had previously secured loans and 
told them to blame the government for 
non-repayment of the original. They then asked 
for donations to fight the ongoing legal battles 
which they claim are part of a plot to 
destroy LaRouche.

   The criminal indictments have slowed down 
LaRouche organizing and fundraising campaigns, 
but they have by no means solved the problem. 
No matter what the outcome in the legal 
arena, LaRouche and his followers can 
still do a lot of damage by further spreading 
prejudiced views. Russ Bellant sums it up when he 
says LaRouche is "just a symbol of a larger 
problem of authoritarianism which can be very 
appealing in times of crisis. The LaRouche 
phenomenon indicates that we need to educate 
Americans about the theories and 
tactics of demagogues."

   If we intend to defend democracy we had best 
learn to recognize its enemies, and not be afraid 
to stand up and call them by name.

END OF PART THREE
END OF ARTICLE
- - - - -

 Chip Berlet is staff researcher at Political Research 
Associates (PRA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 Joel Bellman is a former editorial page writer and 
columnist for the <Los Angeles Herald Examiner>.
 Both Bellman and Berlet have written extensively about 
the LaRouche organization.

Political Research Associates is an independent, 
non-profit, tax-exempt research institute which 
collects and disseminates information on right-wing 
political groups and trends. 

Staff:
 Jean V. Hardisty, Ph.D., Director
 Chip Berlet, Analyst
 Margaret Quigley, Archivist

Suite 205
678 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 661-9313

END OF FILE