Political views of Lyndon LaRouche
Encyclopedia
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.
, Croatia, LaRouche's economic policies, developed from originally Marxist beginnings, call for a program modeled on the economic-recovery program of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, including fixed exchange rates, capital controls, exchange controls, currency controls, and protectionist
price and trade agreements among partner-nations. LaRouche also calls for a reorganization of debt world-wide, and a global plan for large-scale, continental infrastructure projects. He rejects free trade
, deregulation
, and globalization
.
and praised 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 Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" which was derived from Vladimir 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 Antonio 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:
under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche attempted to show that numerous Marxists – ranging from the Monthly Review
group to Ernest Mandel
, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky
, Joseph Stalin
, Mao Zedong
, 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 was 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:
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:
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 train
s), combined with other infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines and fiber-optic cables. The plan has been called a "new Silk Road."
, 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:
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".
and said that Pipes wrongly believed that all reports of conspiracy are axiomatically false.
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."
EIR in 2007 ran an "investigative report" titled Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist. It says:
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
.
, 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:
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 said about 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's happening and she isn't stopping it."
A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review
cited a statement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
in The Daily Telegraph
that described LaRouche as the "publisher of a book that accuses the Queen of being the world's foremost drug dealer", characterising it as a "bit of black propaganda" and a "reference to the book Dope, Inc., [...] which laid bare the role of the London-centered offshore financial institutions and allied intelligence services, in running the global drug trade, from the time of Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars against China." Evans-Pritchard further said LaRouche had claimed that the Queen was involved in the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
. The Executive Intelligence Review responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to Executive Intelligence Review reporter Jeff Steinberg's appearance on a British ITV
television program about the Diana controversy. In a brief part of an interview with Steinberg broadcast the following day by Channel 4
's Dispatches
, Steinberg said that while there was "no smoking gun proof" that Prince Philip asked British intelligence to assassinate Diana, he could not "rule out" the possibility.
within Neoconservatism
and the George W. Bush administration, "The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss", was written in March 2003. In the same year, a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan" later consolidated into a book, began appearing. 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". Political science scholars Catherine and Michael Zuckert say that LaRouche's writings were the first to connect Strauss to Neoconservatism and the Bush foreign policy and initiated the discussion of the topic, though the views about it changed as it percolated through to international journalism.
alleging that Prescott Bush
"had persevered with his comrades in the old Auschwitz gang" and that "the smoldering bodies in Auschwitz followed logically upon the race propaganda festival which had been staged by the Harriman-Bush enterprise a decade earlier in New York."
EIR published a book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, in 1992, which said that "virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman-Bush interests", and that "Bush’s family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results. [...] The President’s family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father’s partners in the Hitler project."
In 2006, The Larouche Political Action Committee and EIR published "FDR Defeated the Nazis, While Bushes Collaborated."
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 "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.
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".
, in seeing the human mind as a force that transforms and improves the biosphere
into a higher form, the noösphere
, through the development of infrastructure and other "natural products" of human cognition. LaRouche and his followers favor a vision of a highly industrialized, high "energy flux density" civilization reaching for innovation and interplanetary colonization. They see the environmental movement as part of a genocidal, eugenicist conspiracy to reduce the human population and move towards a "new Dark Ages". They equate environmentalism with the "green fascism" of Adolf Hitler and with a world government under the control of the British Royal Family. One follower called the ozone hole and global warming "racist hoaxes of white liberal elitist environmentalists." Movement literature says that the "top level" organizations in the "command structure" of the environmental movement include: the World Wildlife Fund, headed by Prince Philip, the Aspen Institute
, and the Club of Rome
.
According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming". The LaRouche movement's 21st Century Science & Technology magazine has been called "anti-environmental" by the magazine Mother Jones
. LaRouche publications were denouncing nuclear winter
, the theory that nuclear war could lead to devastating climate change, as early as 1983, calling it a "fraud" and a "hoax" popularized by the Soviet Union to weaken the U.S. The movement developed ideas that became part the Wise use
movement, and it remains peripherally involved. Together with the Wise use movement, the LaRouche movement is credited with waging a successful campaign to prevent ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity
by the U.S. Senate in 1994.
, which published the journal Fusion (later renamed to 21st Century Science & Technology). In his 1980 presidential platform, LaRouche promised 2500 nuclear power plants if elected. In 2007 LaRouche reiterated his position, saying that only the "massive investment" in fission and fusion technology could prevent the "collapse of human existence on this planet".
The movement has targeted opponents of nuclear power. Members of the Clamshell Alliance
, non-violent protesters at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant
in New Hampshire, were called "terrorists" in 1977. Representatives of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party
gave incriminating information to law enforcement about them, which the FBI later determined had been fabricated, according to King. During a large demonstration against the plant in 1989, an airplane carried a banner overhead which read, "Free LaRouche! Kill Satan — Open Seabrook".
The movement blames cabalists, including then-congressman Dick Cheney
, for inciting anti-nuclear sentiments during the late 1970s. LaRouche sources described the incident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island as sabotage, since they considered the control systems too sophisticated to fail by accident.
to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels
. 21st Century, which is produced by LaRouche supporters, has published papers by entomologist J. Gordon Edwards
, including one that urged the return of the insecticide DDT
because he said it has "saved more millions of lives than any other man-made chemical". Rogelio (Roger) Maduro, an associate editor with a bachelor's degree in geology, wrote that the ban on DDT was part of a plan to reduce the population and had caused the deaths of 40 million people.
s (CFCs) were not destroying the ozone layer
and opposed the proposal to ban them. It asserted that most chlorine in the atmosphere came from oceans, volcanoes, or other natural sources, and that CFCs were too heavy to reach the ozone layer. It went on to say that even if the ozone layer were depleted there would not be any harmful effects from additional ultraviolet radiation. It predicted that a ban would result in an additional 20 to 40 million deaths due to food spoilage. Lewis DuPont Smith, an heir to the DuPont Chemical fortune and a LaRouche follower, told Maduro that the DuPont Company had schemed to ban CFCs, which they had invented but which had become generic, in order to replace them with more expensive proprietary compounds. It has been called "probably the best known and most widely quoted text aimed at debunking the concept of ozone depletion". Its assertions were repeated by Dixie Lee Ray in her 1993 book Environmental Overkill, by Rush Limbaugh
, and by Ronald Bailey
. Some atmospheric scientists have said that it is based on poor research.
At a 1994 shareholder's meeting, Smith called on Dupont to continue producing CFCs, saying there was no evidence of their harmfulness and that "This is nothing less than genocide". By 1995 LaRouche was noted as calling the ozone hole a "myth". Maduro's writings were the basis for the Arizona legislature's passage of a 1995 bill to allow the production of CFCs in the state despite federal and international prohibitions.
(AGW) is a plot by the British royal family and communists to undermine the U.S. It was cited by science writer David Bellamy
.
LaRouche followers have promoted the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle
and attacked Al Gore
's An Inconvenient Truth
, infiltrating showings to promote their viewpoints. They have stood on street corners proclaiming the falsity of global warming, and have protested Gore's appearances.
21st Century Science & Technology has published papers by climate change contrarians including Zbigniew Jaworowski
, Nils-Axel Mörner
, Hugh Ellsaesser, and Robert E. Stevenson. A 2007 article by LaRouche science advisor Laurence Hecht suggested that the varying levels of cosmic rays, whose change is dependent on Earth's motion through the galaxy, has a larger effect on the climate than local factors such as greenhouse gases or solar and orbital cycles. Christopher Monckton
was praised as the leading spokesman of the "global warming swindle" in the introduction to an Executive Intelligence Review
interview with him in 2009, but he was also considered to have a relatively limited view of the cabal behind the hoax. A movement newsletter says that environmental groups seek to "force... CO2 emissions agreements down the throats of governments as a way of finishing off the nation-state system" on behalf of synarchist networks.
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.
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".
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 breakup 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:
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."
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.
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 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.
Chip Berlet
argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses antisemitism through the use of "coded language" and by attacking neoconservatives. According to Berlet:
"Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University", LaRouche says. He says "Zionism is not 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.
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.
Marable 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."
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:
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.
Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. is an American political activist and founder of a network of political committees, parties, and publications known collectively as the LaRouche movement...
and the LaRouche movement
LaRouche movement
The LaRouche movement is an international political and cultural network that promotes Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas. It has included scores of organizations and companies around the world. Their activities include campaigning, private intelligence gathering, and publishing numerous periodicals,...
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
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
and antisemitic, and that its political and economic proposals are a cover for its actual beliefs.
Economics and politics
According to Matko Meštrović, emeritus senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics of ZagrebZagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
, Croatia, LaRouche's economic policies, developed from originally Marxist beginnings, call for a program modeled on the economic-recovery program of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, including fixed exchange rates, capital controls, exchange controls, currency controls, and protectionist
Protectionism
Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations designed to allow "fair competition" between imports and goods and services produced domestically.This...
price and trade agreements among partner-nations. LaRouche also calls for a reorganization of debt world-wide, and a global plan for large-scale, continental infrastructure projects. He rejects free trade
Free trade
Under a free trade policy, prices emerge from supply and demand, and are the sole determinant of resource allocation. 'Free' trade differs from other forms of trade policy where the allocation of goods and services among trading countries are determined by price strategies that may differ from...
, deregulation
Deregulation
Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or...
, and globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
.
Marxist roots
Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a TrotskyiteTrotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
and praised Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
but he and his National Caucus of Labor Committees
National Caucus of Labor Committees
The National Caucus of Labor Committees is a political cadre organization in the United States founded and controlled by political activist Lyndon LaRouche, who has sometimes described it as a "philosophical association"....
abandoned this outlook in the 1970s. LaRouche no longer opposes capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
as an economic system, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
.
According to Tim Wohlforth
Tim Wohlforth
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth , is a United States former Trotskyist leader. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction....
, during and after his break with Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" which was derived from Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
helping workers develop their consciousness and realize their leading role in society. He was also influenced by Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
'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
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
's The Accumulation of Capital
The Accumulation of Capital
The Accumulation of Capital is the principal book length work of Rosa Luxemburg first published in 1913.It is in three sections as described below :# The Problem of Reproduction#...
and Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's Capital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
developing his own "theory of reindustralization", arguing that the west would attempt to industrialize the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
, particularly India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, 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
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control...
.) 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 CityNew York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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 CompanyD. C. Heath and Company
D.C. Heath and Company was an American publishing company located at 125 Spring Street in Lexington, Massachusetts, specializing in textbooks.-History:...
under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche attempted to show that numerous Marxists – ranging from the Monthly Review
Monthly Review
Monthly Review is an independent Marxist journal published 11 times per year in New York City.-History:The publication was founded by Harvard University economics instructor Paul Sweezy, who became the first editor...
group to Ernest Mandel
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter , was a revolutionary Marxist theorist.-Life:...
, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
, Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
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
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was an Old Bolshevik, an economist and a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Life:...
.
According to a review by Martin Bronfenbrenner
Martin Bronfenbrenner
Martin Bronfenbrenner was an internationally renowned economist who published over 250 scholarly papers and five books and served as William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University...
in The Journal of Political Economy, about 50% of the book was 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
White-collar crime
Within the field of criminology, white-collar crime has been defined by Edwin Sutherland as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" . Sutherland was a proponent of Symbolic Interactionism, and believed that criminal behavior was...
, creates "fictitious capitals" that later do not match their actual earning power. Like Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement...
, 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
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
and Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
. 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 systemBretton Woods systemThe Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century...
, including a gold-based national and world monetary system, and fixed exhange rates; - The replacement of the central bankCentral bankA central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is a public institution that usually issues the currency, regulates the money supply, and controls the interest rates in a country. Central banks often also oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries...
system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve SystemFederal Reserve SystemThe Federal Reserve System is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907...
, with a national bankNational bankIn banking, the term national bank carries several meanings:* especially in developing countries, a bank owned by the state* an ordinary private bank which operates nationally...
; - A war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;
- Ending the International Monetary FundInternational Monetary FundThe International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
, creating an "International Development Bank", and expanding the U.S. Export-Import BankExport-Import Bank of the United StatesThe Export-Import Bank of the United States is the official export credit agency of the United States federal government. It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring...
; - An emphasis on large-scale basic economic infrastructureInfrastructureInfrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...
, including the building of a world land bridge of railroads and a tunnel under the Bering Strait, the building of nuclear power plantNuclear power plantA nuclear power plant is a thermal power station in which the heat source is one or more nuclear reactors. As in a conventional thermal power station the heat is used to generate steam which drives a steam turbine connected to a generator which produces electricity.Nuclear power plants are usually...
s, accelerating research on fusion energyFusion powerFusion power is the power generated by nuclear fusion processes. In fusion reactions two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus . In doing so they release a comparatively large amount of energy arising from the binding energy due to the strong nuclear force which is manifested...
, the North American Water and Power AllianceNorth American Water and Power AllianceThe North American Water and Power Alliance was conceived in the 1950s by the US Army Corps of Engineers as a 'Great Project' to develop more water sources for the United States...
, and rebuilding or nationalizing the country's steel industryHistory of the modern steel industryThe history of the modern steel industry began in the late 1850s, but since then steel has been basic to the world's industrial economy. This article is intended only to address the business, economic and social dimensions of the industry, since the bulk production of steel began as a result of...
; - A crash program to build particle beam weaponParticle beam weaponA particle beam weapon uses an ultra-high-energy beam of atoms or electrons to damage a material target by hitting it, and thus disrupting its atomic and molecular structure. A particle beam weapon is a type of directed-energy weapon, which directs energy in a particular direction by a means of...
s and laserLaserA laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...
s, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense InitiativeStrategic Defense InitiativeThe Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic...
(SDI); - Opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war;
- Colonization of the planet MarsColonization of MarsThe colonization of Mars by humans is the focus of speculation and serious study because the surface conditions and availability of water on Mars make it arguably the most hospitable planet in the solar system other than Earth...
by 2025; - The screening and quarantine of AIDSAIDSAcquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
patients; - Growth in food production and a farm debt moratorium;
- Low interest rates and opposition to the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget lawGramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget ActThe Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act of 1987 were, according to U.S...
; - Opposition to environmentalismEnvironmentalismEnvironmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...
, health maintenance organizationHealth maintenance organizationA health maintenance organization is an organization that provides managed care for health insurance contracts in the United States as a liaison with health care providers...
s, outcome-based educationOutcome-based educationOutcome-based education is a recurring education reform model. It is a student-centered learning philosophy that focuses on empirically measuring student performance, which are called outcomes. OBE contrasts with traditional education, which primarily focuses on the resources that are available...
, gay rights, abortionAbortionAbortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
, and the nuclear disarmament movement.
In the late 1990s, LaRouche proposed a global infrastructure plan involving a version of the Eurasian Land Bridge
Eurasian Land Bridge
The Eurasian Land Bridge, sometimes called the New Silk Road, is a term used to describe the rail transport route for moving freight and passengers overland from Pacific seaports in Siberia and China to seaports in Europe...
. It would be a network of "infrastructure corridors", comprising high-speed rail (preferably Maglev train
Maglev train
Maglev , is a system of transportation that uses magnetic levitation to suspend, guide and propel vehicles from magnets rather than using mechanical methods, such as friction-reliant wheels, axles and bearings...
s), 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 OnlineChina Youth Daily
The China Youth Daily is the official newspaper of Communist Youth League of China , and is a popular official daily newspaper and the first independently operated central government news media portal in the People's Republic of China.In 1980s it was regarded as the best newspaper in mainland...
, 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
Firewall (construction)
A firewall is a fireproof barrier used to prevent the spread of fire between or through buildings, structures, electrical substation transformers, or within an aircraft or vehicle.- Applications :...
" 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
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
, and favors state intervention in the economy. LaRouche also said that he supported the approach of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...
, who established a banking system geared to develop production.
Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti
Giulio Tremonti
Giulio Tremonti is an Italian politician. He served in the government of Italy as Minister of Economy and Finance under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2004, from 2005 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2011....
, 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
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...
, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini
Oskar Peterlini
Oskar Peterlini is a Representative of the German-speaking South Tyrolean Minority in South Tyrol, Italy. He is a member of the Italian Senate in the Italian Parliament and used to be President of the district of the South Tyrolean Unterland of the South Tyrolean People's Party 2001-2010.- Life...
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
China Youth Daily
The China Youth Daily is the official newspaper of Communist Youth League of China , and is a popular official daily newspaper and the first independently operated central government news media portal in the People's Republic of China.In 1980s it was regarded as the best newspaper in mainland...
, since the 1950s, LaRouche is said to have made nine correct predictions for the US and the world economy, including the 1973 US recession
1973–75 recession
The 1973–75 recession in the United States or 1970s recession was a period of economic stagnation in much of the Western world during the 1970s, putting an end to the general post-World War II economic boom. It differed from many previous recessions as being a stagflation, where high unemployment...
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 moratoriumDebt moratoriumA debt moratorium is a delay in the payment of debts or obligations. The term is generally used to refer to acts by national governments. A moratory law is usually passed in some special period of political or commercial stress; for instance, on several occasions during the Franco-Prussian War,...
on Third WorldThird WorldThe term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
debt. - Citizens Electoral CouncilCitizens Electoral CouncilThe Citizens Electoral Council of Australia is a minor nationalist political party in Australia affiliated with the international LaRouche Movement, led by American political activist and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. It reported having 549 members in 2007...
, the Australian arm of the LaRouche movement, was reported in 2006 to reject the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976In Australian history, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act established the basis upon which Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory could claim rights to land based on traditional occupation. The Act was strongly based on the recommendations of Justice Woodward, who chaired the Aboriginal Land...
. - They believe that the idea of man-made global warmingGlobal warmingGlobal warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
is a "fraud", and have referred to the Oscar-winning documentary film An Inconvenient TruthAn Inconvenient TruthAn Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.Premiering at the...
as "the Great LudditeLudditeThe Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanised looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life...
Hoax." He agreed with the British TV documentary, The Great Global Warming SwindleThe Great Global Warming SwindleThe Great Global Warming Swindle is a polemical documentary film that suggests that the scientific opinion on climate change is influenced by funding and political factors, and questions whether scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming exists....
. - They oppose deregulationDeregulationDeregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or...
. 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 attacksSeptember 11, 2001 attacksThe September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
were comparable to the 1933 Reichstag fireReichstag fireThe Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin on 27 February 1933. The event is seen as pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany....
. - Opposition to New AgeNew AgeThe New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
. The movement organized protests against Marilyn FergusonMarilyn FergusonMarilyn Ferguson was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture....
'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 massacreVirginia Tech massacreThe Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people...
shooter, was addicted to First Person Shooter games such as Counter-StrikeCounter-StrikeCounter-Strike is a tactical first-person shooter video game developed by Valve Corporation which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe...
". 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-LaRoucheHelga Zepp-LaRoucheHelga Zepp-LaRouche is a German political activist, wife of American political activist Lyndon LaRouche, and founder of the LaRouche movement's Schiller Institute and the German Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität party .She has run for political office several times in Germany, representing small...
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
According to LaRouche, history has always been a battle between Platonists
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...
—rationalists
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
, idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and the primacy of ideas
Theory of Forms
Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms , and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized...
—and Aristotelians
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
—relativists who rely on empirical
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
data and sensory perception. Platonists in LaRouche's worldview include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
, and Leibniz. LaRouche states that many of the world's ills are due to the fact that Aristotelianism, as embraced by British philosophers like Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
, Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
, Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
and represented by "oligarchs", foremost among them wealthy British families, has dominated, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, embraces moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. 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
Republic (Plato)
The Republic is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato around 380 BC concerning the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and the just man...
.
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
Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...
and population control
Population control
Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...
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
George Johnson (writer)
George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics , and writes for a number of publications, including The New York...
, in Architects of Fear (1983), 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
Laird Wilcox
Laird M. Wilcox is an American researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements. He is the founder of the "Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements," said to be one of the largest collections of American political material in the United States. It is housed in the...
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
Allan Bloom
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University...
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 PipesDaniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...
and said that Pipes wrongly believed that all reports of conspiracy are axiomatically false.
LaRouche's critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet
Chip Berlet
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations...
, characterize his current orientation as being a conspiracist worldview. They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class
Ruling class
The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
, and the Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...
. Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...
said that LaRouche personalizes his conspiracy theories, and associates "all of his adversaries with the forces of darkness."
EIR in 2007 ran an "investigative report" titled Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist. It says:
- Perhaps the only name that sends the VRWC gang more into orbit than either Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the name Lyndon LaRouche. The very same apparatus that waged a billion-dollar slander campaign against the President and the First Lady thoughout much of the mid- and late 1990s, has an even longer track record of venomous slander and frame-up campaigns against LaRouche and his political movement.
- Of course, the reality is that it was the Bush-Cheney campaign, backed by the Scalia Supreme Court, that actually stole the 2000 election in Florida.
In 2001, LaRouche said that rogue elements within the American military took part in, or planned, the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
as part of a coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
.
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 EmpireBritish Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
, which he asserts is an oligarchic
Oligarchy
Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with an elite class distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, commercial, and/or military legitimacy...
financial consortium like that of medieval Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, 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
Chip Berlet
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations...
and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth II is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize,...
, 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 have continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money launderingMoney launderingMoney laundering is the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources. The methods by which money may be laundered are varied and can range in sophistication. Many regulatory and governmental authorities quote estimates each year for the amount...
in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of LondonCity of LondonThe City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...
.
- 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 ConfederacyConfederate States of AmericaThe Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
against the Union in the American Civil WarAmerican Civil WarThe American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, because they preferred North America to be a primitive agrarian economy that they could dominate through policies of free tradeFree tradeUnder a free trade policy, prices emerge from supply and demand, and are the sole determinant of resource allocation. 'Free' trade differs from other forms of trade policy where the allocation of goods and services among trading countries are determined by price strategies that may differ from...
.
- The New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White, 1980 (ISBN 0-933488-05-X): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand RussellBertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
and H.G. Wells attempted to control scientific progress in order to keep the world backward and more easily managed by ImperialismImperialismImperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
. 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 logicLogicIn philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, that would prohibit the introduction of new ideas. This conspiracy also involved the promotion of the countercultureCountercultureCounterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
.
The Queen and Prince Philip
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.
In 2004, in a segment about the death of Jeremiah Duggan
Jeremiah Duggan
Jeremiah Duggan was a British student at the Sorbonne who died on 27 March 2003 in Wiesbaden, Germany, while attending a youth cadre school organized by the LaRouche movement, an international network led by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche....
during a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Wiesbaden in March 2003, BBC's Newsnight
Newsnight
Newsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for over two decades....
re-broadcast a BBC interview with LaRouche from 1980, in which he said about the Queen
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth II is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize,...
: "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."
A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review is a weekly newsmagazine founded in 1974 by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. Based in Leesburg, Virginia, it maintains offices in a number of countries, according to its masthead, including Wiesbaden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Melbourne, and Mexico City...
cited a statement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the international business editor of the Daily Telegraph.A long-time opponent of the EU's constitution and monetary union, he was the Telegraph's Europe correspondent in Brussels from 1999 to 2004....
in The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
that described LaRouche as the "publisher of a book that accuses the Queen of being the world's foremost drug dealer", characterising it as a "bit of black propaganda" and a "reference to the book Dope, Inc., [...] which laid bare the role of the London-centered offshore financial institutions and allied intelligence services, in running the global drug trade, from the time of Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars against China." Evans-Pritchard further said LaRouche had claimed that the Queen was involved in the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
On 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, France. Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz W140, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Fayed's...
. The Executive Intelligence Review responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to Executive Intelligence Review reporter Jeff Steinberg's appearance on a British ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
television program about the Diana controversy. In a brief part of an interview with Steinberg broadcast the following day by Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
's Dispatches
Dispatches (TV series)
Dispatches is the British television current affairs documentary series on Channel 4, first transmitted in 1987. The programme covers issues about British society, politics, health, religion, international current affairs and the environment, usually featuring a mole in an organisation.-Awards:*...
, Steinberg said that while there was "no smoking gun proof" that Prince Philip asked British intelligence to assassinate Diana, he could not "rule out" the possibility.
Leo Strauss
LaRouche's initial essay on the influence of Leo StraussLeo Strauss
Leo Strauss was a political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States...
within Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism in the United States is a branch of American conservatism. Since 2001, neoconservatism has been associated with democracy promotion, that is with assisting movements for democracy, in some cases by economic sanctions or military action....
and the George W. Bush administration, "The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss", was written in March 2003. In the same year, a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan" later consolidated into a book, began appearing. LaRouche charges that there was a conspiracy dominated by what are called Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss was a political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States...
) within the Bush administration, and that the dominant personality in this conspiracy was Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney
Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney served as the 46th Vice President of the United States , under George W. Bush....
(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
Office of Special Plans
The Office of Special Plans , which existed from September 2002 to June 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, as charged by then-United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with...
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
Shadia Drury
Shadia B. Drury is a Canadian academic and political commentator of Egyptian Arab Christian origin. She is Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at the University of Regina, in Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan, Canada...
.
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
Reichstag fire
The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin on 27 February 1933. The event is seen as pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany....
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". Political science scholars Catherine and Michael Zuckert say that LaRouche's writings were the first to connect Strauss to Neoconservatism and the Bush foreign policy and initiated the discussion of the topic, though the views about it changed as it percolated through to international journalism.
Bush family
The Executive Intelligence Review published an article by Anton ChaitkinAnton Chaitkin
Anton "Tony" Chaitkin is an author, historian, conspiracy theorist, and political activist with the LaRouche movement. He serves as History Editor for Executive Intelligence Review....
alleging that Prescott Bush
Prescott Bush
Prescott Sheldon Bush was a Wall Street executive banker and a United States Senator, representing Connecticut from 1952 until January 1963. He was the father of George H. W. Bush and the grandfather of George W...
"had persevered with his comrades in the old Auschwitz gang" and that "the smoldering bodies in Auschwitz followed logically upon the race propaganda festival which had been staged by the Harriman-Bush enterprise a decade earlier in New York."
EIR published a book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, in 1992, which said that "virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman-Bush interests", and that "Bush’s family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results. [...] The President’s family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father’s partners in the Hitler project."
In 2006, The Larouche Political Action Committee and EIR published "FDR Defeated the Nazis, While Bushes Collaborated."
- LaRouche blasted Rumsfeld, reminding him that it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who defeated Hitler and the Nazis, while many American right-wingers of the 1930s and ’40s were promoters of Mussolini, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hermann Goering. And among the extreme American Fascists and Nazis of the period, there were some who openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler, by intention or practice.
- “Let us not ignore the role of George Shultz, the man behind the Bush Presidency, the power of Vice President Cheney, and the promotion of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Even leading Republicans know Shultz to be an outright totalitarian, who has used the Bush Presidency to impose a ‘Pinochet Model’ of top-down dictatorship and radical free-market economics upon the United States. Shultz’s promotion of the privatization of war, on the SS model, has been backed,” LaRouche noted, “by Felix Rohatyn.”
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 "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
Armand Hammer
Armand Hammer was an American business tycoon most closely associated with Occidental Petroleum, a company he ran for decades, though he was known as well as for his art collection, his philanthropy, and for his close ties to the Soviet Union.Thanks to business interests around the world and his...
and Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
.
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
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
to Lebanon, Oregon
Lebanon, Oregon
Lebanon is a city in Linn County, Oregon, United States. Lebanon is located in northwest Oregon, southeast of Salem. The population was 12,950 at the 2000 census and the 2008 census data shows the population at 15,397.-Geography:...
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
Elementary school
An elementary school or primary school is an institution where children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as elementary or primary education. Elementary school is the preferred term in some countries, particularly those in North America, where the terms grade school and grammar...
in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen
Lower West Side, Chicago
Lower West Side located on the west side of Chicago, Illinois, is one of 77 well-defined Chicago community areas.-Government and infrastructure:The United States Postal Service operates the Pilsen Post Office at 1859 South Ashland Avenue....
, 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
Safe sex
Safe sex is sexual activity engaged in by people who have taken precautions to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. It is also referred to as safer sex or protected sex, while unsafe or unprotected sex is sexual activity engaged in without precautions...
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.
Opponents characterized it as an anti-gay measure that would force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine
Quarantine
Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
, 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".
Environment and energy
Meštrović says that LaRouche believes that policy-makers should take counsel from Russian-Ukrainian biogeochemist Vladimir VernadskyVladimir Vernadsky
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was a Russian/Ukrainian and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and of radiogeology. His ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to Russian cosmism. He also worked in Ukraine where he...
, in seeing the human mind as a force that transforms and improves the biosphere
Biosphere
The biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed and self-regulating system...
into a higher form, the noösphere
Noosphere
Noosphere , according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the "sphere of human thought". The word is derived from the Greek νοῦς + σφαῖρα , in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere". Introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1922 in his Cosmogenesis"...
, through the development of infrastructure and other "natural products" of human cognition. LaRouche and his followers favor a vision of a highly industrialized, high "energy flux density" civilization reaching for innovation and interplanetary colonization. They see the environmental movement as part of a genocidal, eugenicist conspiracy to reduce the human population and move towards a "new Dark Ages". They equate environmentalism with the "green fascism" of Adolf Hitler and with a world government under the control of the British Royal Family. One follower called the ozone hole and global warming "racist hoaxes of white liberal elitist environmentalists." Movement literature says that the "top level" organizations in the "command structure" of the environmental movement include: the World Wildlife Fund, headed by Prince Philip, the Aspen Institute
Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1950 as the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. The organization is dedicated to "fostering enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialogue on contemporary issues." The...
, and the Club of Rome
Club of Rome
The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. Founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, the CoR describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity." It consists of current and...
.
According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming". The LaRouche movement's 21st Century Science & Technology magazine has been called "anti-environmental" by the magazine Mother Jones
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
. LaRouche publications were denouncing nuclear winter
Nuclear winter
Nuclear winter is a predicted climatic effect of nuclear war. It has been theorized that severely cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or even years could be caused by detonating large numbers of nuclear weapons, especially over flammable targets such as cities, where large...
, the theory that nuclear war could lead to devastating climate change, as early as 1983, calling it a "fraud" and a "hoax" popularized by the Soviet Union to weaken the U.S. The movement developed ideas that became part the Wise use
Wise use
The wise use movement in the United States is a loose-knit coalition of groups promoting the expansion of private property rights and reduction of government regulation of publicly held property. This includes advocacy of expanded use by commercial and public interests, seeking increased access to...
movement, and it remains peripherally involved. Together with the Wise use movement, the LaRouche movement is credited with waging a successful campaign to prevent ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity
Convention on Biological Diversity
The Convention on Biological Diversity , known informally as the Biodiversity Convention, is an international legally binding treaty...
by the U.S. Senate in 1994.
Nuclear power
LaRouche says that nuclear and especially fusion power is necessary for the continued growth of civilization. He founded the Fusion Energy FoundationFusion Energy Foundation
Fusion Energy Foundation was a non-profit think tank cofounded by Lyndon LaRouche in 1974 in New York. It promoted the construction of nuclear power plants, research into fusion power and beam weapons and other causes. The FEF was called fusion's greatest private supporter...
, which published the journal Fusion (later renamed to 21st Century Science & Technology). In his 1980 presidential platform, LaRouche promised 2500 nuclear power plants if elected. In 2007 LaRouche reiterated his position, saying that only the "massive investment" in fission and fusion technology could prevent the "collapse of human existence on this planet".
The movement has targeted opponents of nuclear power. Members of the Clamshell Alliance
Clamshell Alliance
The Clamshell Alliance is an anti-nuclear organization co-founded by Paul Gunter, Howie Hawkins, Harvey Wasserman, Guy Chichester and other activists in 1976. The alliance's coalescence began in 1975 as New England activists and organizations began to respond to U.S...
, non-violent protesters at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant
Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant
The Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, more commonly known as Seabrook Station, is a nuclear power plant located in Seabrook, New Hampshire, approximately north of Boston and south of Portsmouth. Two units were planned, but the second unit was never completed due to construction delays, cost overruns...
in New Hampshire, were called "terrorists" in 1977. Representatives of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party
U.S. Labor Party
The U.S. Labor Party was a political party formed in 1973 by the National Caucus of Labor Committees . It served as a vehicle for Lyndon LaRouche to run for President of the United States in 1976, but it also sponsored many candidates for local offices and Congressional and Senate seats between...
gave incriminating information to law enforcement about them, which the FBI later determined had been fabricated, according to King. During a large demonstration against the plant in 1989, an airplane carried a banner overhead which read, "Free LaRouche! Kill Satan — Open Seabrook".
The movement blames cabalists, including then-congressman Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney
Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney served as the 46th Vice President of the United States , under George W. Bush....
, for inciting anti-nuclear sentiments during the late 1970s. LaRouche sources described the incident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island as sabotage, since they considered the control systems too sophisticated to fail by accident.
DDT
21st Century Science & Technologys managing editor, Marjorie Mazel Hecht, called DDT the "'mother' of all the environmental hoaxes". Other articles compared anti-DDT campaigner Rachel CarsonRachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....
to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
. 21st Century, which is produced by LaRouche supporters, has published papers by entomologist J. Gordon Edwards
J. Gordon Edwards (entomologist and mountaineer)
J. Gordon Edwards was an entomologist, mountain climber, author, and park ranger. Edwards was professor, and later emeritus professor of Biology, San Jose State University.-DDT and environmental issues:...
, including one that urged the return of the insecticide DDT
DDT
DDT is one of the most well-known synthetic insecticides. It is a chemical with a long, unique, and controversial history....
because he said it has "saved more millions of lives than any other man-made chemical". Rogelio (Roger) Maduro, an associate editor with a bachelor's degree in geology, wrote that the ban on DDT was part of a plan to reduce the population and had caused the deaths of 40 million people.
Ozone hole
LaRouche was part of what was called the "ozone backlash". 21st Century Science & Technology, which conducted what has been called "a very effective campaign of misinformation on the issue of ozone depletion", published The Holes in the Ozone Scare in 1992. The book, by LaRouche followers Rogelio Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer, said that chlorofluorocarbonChlorofluorocarbon
A chlorofluorocarbon is an organic compound that contains carbon, chlorine, and fluorine, produced as a volatile derivative of methane and ethane. A common subclass are the hydrochlorofluorocarbons , which contain hydrogen, as well. They are also commonly known by the DuPont trade name Freon...
s (CFCs) were not destroying the ozone layer
Ozone layer
The ozone layer is a layer in Earth's atmosphere which contains relatively high concentrations of ozone . This layer absorbs 97–99% of the Sun's high frequency ultraviolet light, which is potentially damaging to the life forms on Earth...
and opposed the proposal to ban them. It asserted that most chlorine in the atmosphere came from oceans, volcanoes, or other natural sources, and that CFCs were too heavy to reach the ozone layer. It went on to say that even if the ozone layer were depleted there would not be any harmful effects from additional ultraviolet radiation. It predicted that a ban would result in an additional 20 to 40 million deaths due to food spoilage. Lewis DuPont Smith, an heir to the DuPont Chemical fortune and a LaRouche follower, told Maduro that the DuPont Company had schemed to ban CFCs, which they had invented but which had become generic, in order to replace them with more expensive proprietary compounds. It has been called "probably the best known and most widely quoted text aimed at debunking the concept of ozone depletion". Its assertions were repeated by Dixie Lee Ray in her 1993 book Environmental Overkill, by Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...
, and by Ronald Bailey
Ronald Bailey
Ronald Bailey is the science editor for Reason magazine. He was born in San Antonio, Texas and raised in Washington County, Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A...
. Some atmospheric scientists have said that it is based on poor research.
At a 1994 shareholder's meeting, Smith called on Dupont to continue producing CFCs, saying there was no evidence of their harmfulness and that "This is nothing less than genocide". By 1995 LaRouche was noted as calling the ozone hole a "myth". Maduro's writings were the basis for the Arizona legislature's passage of a 1995 bill to allow the production of CFCs in the state despite federal and international prohibitions.
Global warming
The "Greenhouse effect" hoax: a world federalist plot, another book by Maduro, says that the theory of anthropogenic global warmingGlobal warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
(AGW) is a plot by the British royal family and communists to undermine the U.S. It was cited by science writer David Bellamy
David Bellamy
David James Bellamy OBE is a British author, broadcaster, environmental campaigner and botanist. He has lived in County Durham since 1960.-Career:...
.
LaRouche followers have promoted the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle
The Great Global Warming Swindle
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a polemical documentary film that suggests that the scientific opinion on climate change is influenced by funding and political factors, and questions whether scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming exists....
and attacked Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
's An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.Premiering at the...
, infiltrating showings to promote their viewpoints. They have stood on street corners proclaiming the falsity of global warming, and have protested Gore's appearances.
21st Century Science & Technology has published papers by climate change contrarians including Zbigniew Jaworowski
Zbigniew Jaworowski
Zbigniew Jaworowski was a Polish physician, and alpinist.-Life:Zbigniew Jaworowski was chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation...
, Nils-Axel Mörner
Nils-Axel Mörner
Nils-Axel Mörner, born 1938, is the former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University. He retired in 2005. He was president of the International Union for Quaternary Research Commission on Neotectonics...
, Hugh Ellsaesser, and Robert E. Stevenson. A 2007 article by LaRouche science advisor Laurence Hecht suggested that the varying levels of cosmic rays, whose change is dependent on Earth's motion through the galaxy, has a larger effect on the climate than local factors such as greenhouse gases or solar and orbital cycles. Christopher Monckton
Christopher Monckton
Christopher Monckton may refer to:* Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley , British journalist and politician* Christopher J. Monckton , English conductor, singer, and organist...
was praised as the leading spokesman of the "global warming swindle" in the introduction to an Executive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review is a weekly newsmagazine founded in 1974 by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. Based in Leesburg, Virginia, it maintains offices in a number of countries, according to its masthead, including Wiesbaden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Melbourne, and Mexico City...
interview with him in 2009, but he was also considered to have a relatively limited view of the cabal behind the hoax. A movement newsletter says that environmental groups seek to "force... CO2 emissions agreements down the throats of governments as a way of finishing off the nation-state system" on behalf of synarchist networks.
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
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
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
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
'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
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
had enshrined in Italian legislation in 1884. 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
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
succeeded in 1884 in having legislation passed in Italy that fixed the reference pitch for A
A (musical note)
La or A is the sixth note of the solfège. "A" is generally used as a standard for tuning. When the orchestra tunes, the oboe plays an "A" and the rest of the instruments tune to match that pitch. Every string instrument in the orchestra has an A string, from which each player can tune the rest of...
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
Joan Sutherland
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s....
, Placido Domingo
Plácido Domingo
Plácido Domingo KBE , born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range...
, Luciano Pavarotti
Luciano Pavarotti
right|thumb|Luciano Pavarotti performing at the opening of the Constantine Palace in [[Strelna]], 31 May 2003. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of [[St...
and Montserrat Caballé
Montserrat Caballé
Montserrat Caballé is a Spanish operatic soprano. Although she sang a wide variety of roles, she is best known as an exponent of the bel canto repertoire, notably the works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi....
. While many of these singers may or may not have been aware of LaRouche's politics, Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi was an Italian lirico-spinto soprano popular in the post-war period...
and Piero Cappuccilli
Piero Cappuccilli
Piero Cappuccilli was an Italian operatic baritone, particularly associated with Verdi roles, especiallyMacbeth and Simon Boccanegra; he was renowned for his extraordinary breath control and smooth legato, and is widely regarded as one of the finest Italian baritones of the second half of the 20th...
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
Stefan Zucker
Stefan Zucker is an American singer, expert on Italian opera and self-described "opera fanatic." He was listed in the 1980 Guinness Book of Records as the "world's highest tenor" for having hit and sustained an A above high C for 3.8 seconds at The Town Hall in New York City on September 12,...
, 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
Bel canto
Bel canto , along with a number of similar constructions , is an Italian opera term...
singing at the correct pitch maximizes the music's impact on both singers and listeners.
'Nazi' accusations against Obama's health reforms
LaRouche's organization opposed the Obama administration's health care reformPatient Protection and Affordable Care Act
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a United States federal statute signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. The law is the principal health care reform legislation of the 111th United States Congress...
proposals, and its comparisons of U.S. President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
to German dictator Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
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
Hill-Burton Act
The Hospital Survey and Construction Act is a U.S. federal law passed in 1946, during the 79th United States Congress...
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
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
'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
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
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
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
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
Machismo
Machismo, or machoism, is a word of Spanish and Portuguese origin that describes prominently exhibited or excessive masculinity. As an attitude, machismo ranges from a personal sense of virility to a more extreme male chauvinism...
. 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 breakup 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."
Homosexuality
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
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
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
Nancy Kissinger
Nancy Sharon Maginnes Kissinger is a philanthropist, and the second wife of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The couple married on March 31, 1974, in Arlington, VA; a year earlier she had said that speculation that the two would marry was "outrageous."Nancy Kissinger was raised in...
, seized the young woman by the throat. LaRouche later said he thought it was an appropriate question.
Judaism and Zionism
British journalist Roger BoyesRoger Boyes
Roger Boyes is a British journalist and author. He is the Berlin correspondent for British newspaper The Times, covering Germany and northern Europe...
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
Jeremiah Duggan
Jeremiah Duggan was a British student at the Sorbonne who died on 27 March 2003 in Wiesbaden, Germany, while attending a youth cadre school organized by the LaRouche movement, an international network led by the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche....
, who had been attending a Schiller Institute
Schiller Institute
The Schiller Institute is an international political and economic thinktank, one of the primary organizations of the LaRouche movement, with headquarters in Germany and the United States, and supporters in Australia, Canada, Russia, and South America, among others, according to its website.The...
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
Willis Carto
Willis Allison Carto is a longtime figure on the American far right. He describes himself as Jeffersonian and populist, but is primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.-Influences on Carto:...
's Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto. In their own words,-Antisemitic world-view:...
, 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
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, Frank Donner
Frank Donner
Frank Donner was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Project on Political Surveillance...
and Randall Rothenberg
Randall Rothenberg
Randall Rothenberg is the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for interactive marketing in the U.S.He received an undergraduate degree in classics from Princeton University....
said that LaRouche made successful overtures the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace
George Wallace
George Corley Wallace, Jr. was the 45th Governor of Alabama, serving four terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. "The most influential loser" in 20th-century U.S. politics, according to biographers Dan T. Carter and Stephan Lesher, he ran for U.S...
's American Independent Party
American Independent Party
The American Independent Party is a right-wing political party of the United States that was established in 1967 by Bill and Eileen Shearer. In 1968, the American Independent Party nominated George C. Wallace as its presidential candidate and retired Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay as the vice...
, and that the U.S.L.P's "racist" policies endeared it to many members of the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
. 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
Tom Metzger
Thomas Metzger is an American white nationalist who founded White Aryan Resistance . His far-right activist groups, including WAR, have been monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American organization that tracks hate groups...
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'rithB'nai B'rithB'nai B'rith International |Covenant]]" is the oldest continually operating Jewish service organization in the world. It was initially founded as the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith in New York City, on , 1843, by Henry Jones and 11 others....
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 OdessaOdessaOdessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
...
Chip Berlet
Chip Berlet
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations...
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. He says "Zionism is not 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
Rothschild family
The Rothschild family , known as The House of Rothschild, or more simply as the Rothschilds, is a Jewish-German family that established European banking and finance houses starting in the late 18th century...
banking family, the British Royal family
British Royal Family
The British Royal Family is the group of close relatives of the monarch of the United Kingdom. The term is also commonly applied to the same group of people as the relations of the monarch in her or his role as sovereign of any of the other Commonwealth realms, thus sometimes at variance with...
, and the Italian Mafia, and the Israeli Mossad
Mossad
The Mossad , short for HaMossad leModi'in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim , is the national intelligence agency of Israel....
, General Pike
Albert Pike
Albert Pike was an attorney, Confederate officer, writer, and Freemason. Pike is the only Confederate military officer or figure to be honored with an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C...
, and the B'nai B'rith
B'nai B'rith
B'nai B'rith International |Covenant]]" is the oldest continually operating Jewish service organization in the world. It was initially founded as the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith in New York City, on , 1843, by Henry Jones and 11 others....
. (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
Laird Wilcox
Laird M. Wilcox is an American researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements. He is the founder of the "Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements," said to be one of the largest collections of American political material in the United States. It is housed in the...
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
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...
, "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 MarableManning Marable
William Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. Marable authored several texts and was active in progressive political causes...
of Columbia University wrote in 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
Roy Frankhouser
Roy Everett Frankhouser, Jr. , was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a member of the American Nazi Party, a government informant, and a security consultant to Lyndon LaRouche. Frankhouser was reported by federal officials to have been arrested at least 142 times...
, a former Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
Grand Dragon and American Nazi Party
American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party was an American political party founded by discharged U.S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists , but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in...
member, and a government informant. The LaRouche movement also spied on anti-apartheid
Internal resistance to South African apartheid
Internal resistance to the apartheid system in South Africa came from several sectors of society and saw the creation of organisations dedicated variously to peaceful protests, passive resistance and armed insurrection. It came from both black activists like Steve Biko and Desmond Tutu as well as...
activists in the U.S. on behalf of the South African government.
Marable wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled, and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute
A. Philip Randolph Institute
The A. Philip Randolph Institute is an organization for African American trade unionists.-History:Following passage of the Voting Rights Act, APRI was co-founded in 1965 by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin...
, an organization for African-American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions – much the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis
Roy Innis
Roy Emile Alfredo Innis is an African American civil rights activist. He has been National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality since his election to the position in 1968....
, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality
Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...
, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not. Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf.
The African American civil-rights leader James Bevel
James Bevel
James L. Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement who, as the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era:...
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
Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan Muhammad, Sr. is the leader of the African-American religious movement the Nation of Islam . He served as the minister of major mosques in Boston and Harlem, and was appointed by the longtime NOI leader, Elijah Muhammad, before his death in 1975, as the National Representative of...
's Nation of Islam
Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
. Another LaRouche movement member with a distinguished civil-rights history is Amelia Boynton Robinson
Amelia Boynton Robinson
Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama. A key figure in the 1965 march that became known as Bloody Sunday, she later became vice-president of the Schiller Institute affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche. She was awarded the Martin Luther King,...
, 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 MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times . He declined to run for re-election in 2000...
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
Bob Hattoy
Bob Hattoy was an American activist on issues related to gay rights, AIDS and the environment.Hattoy worked in the White House under American President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1999. He also served as chairman of the research committee of the Presidential Commission on HIV/AIDS, having himself...
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
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
and the AFL-CIO
AFL-CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL–CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions, together representing more than 11 million workers...
. The New Alliance Party
New Alliance Party
The New Alliance Party was an American political party formed in New York City in 1979. Its immediate precursor was an umbrella organization known as the Labor Community Alliance for Change, whose member groups included the coalition of Grass Roots Women and the New York City Unemployed and...
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
Chip Berlet
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations...
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
Anti-fascism
Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals, such as that of the resistance movements during World War II. The related term antifa derives from Antifaschismus, which is German for anti-fascism; it refers to individuals and groups on the left of the political...
. King states that LaRouche's public statements do not reflect his actual views.
George Johnson
George Johnson (writer)
George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics , and writes for a number of publications, including The New York...
, in a review of King's book in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, 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
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the leftist Baath Party
Baath Party
The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was a political party mixing Arab nationalist and Arab socialist interests, opposed to Western imperialism, and calling for the renaissance or resurrection and unification of the Arab world into a single state. Ba'ath is also spelled Ba'th or Baath and means...
in Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
; 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
Laird Wilcox
Laird M. Wilcox is an American researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements. He is the founder of the "Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements," said to be one of the largest collections of American political material in the United States. It is housed in the...
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.