Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. Although he has no formal qualifications, he describes himself as an economist and has written extensively on economic as well as political subjects. He has run eight times for President of the United States, but has never gained significant electoral support. He is probably the best-known exponent of conspiracy theories in the U.S. He is widely seen as an extremist or a cult leader, and is frequently accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. He denies these charges, and his followers regard him as a major political figure, indeed a world leader. In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for illegally soliciting unsecured loans and tax code violations.

Early life

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in India. During this period he read works by Karl Marx and was converted to Marxism. After leaving the Army in 1946, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern and took a factory job in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1949 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party. In the SWP he used the pseudonym Lyn Marcus. In 1954 he moved to New York City and married a fellow SWP member, Janice Neuberger.

LaRouche has characterized the field of economics during this period in the following way:

The moral and intellectual degeneration of the practice of political-economy, as that corruption is usually taught and practiced in American, European, and other universities today, reflects two successive phases of moral degeneration of academic and related thought in higher education. The difference between these two, was reflected in a raging debate among U.S. economists, during the 1950s, between Harvard economist Wassily Leontief and what Leontief dubbed "the ivory tower" school, the latter headed, during the 1950s, by Tjalling Koopmans and his "Operations Research" circles.

Near the close of the 1950s, I intervened in the debate still raging. Although I had already defined my criticism of the linear methods associated with Leontief's work in the domain of national-income accounting, Leontief was sane; the "ivory tower" fanatics who followed Bertrand Russell's clones Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, clearly were not sane. That was the difference. I have maintained my emphasis on that distinction throughout my work during subsequent decades. While there is a serious error of method in the work of Leontief and kindred opponents of the radical empiricists of the "ivory tower" faction, Leontief et al. have been travelling in the real world, but in need of a better map. Today, with the rise of the "post-industrial" utopianism of Zbigniew Brzezinski et al. during the post-Kennedy 1960s, lunacy prevails, while the generation now in power enforces that lunacy as the prevalent dogma of their generation, the currently reigning generation.

LaRouche remained in the SWP until 1966, making him a veteran member in a group which always had a high turnover of members. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism and stayed in the SWP only as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this, saying that he was a loyal and zealous party member, although this is not definitive evidence that he was not an FBI informer. During these years LaRouche developed his interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. He is undoubtedly well-read in these and other subjects. He separated from Janice in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956).

In 1966 LaRouche was expelled from the SWP and became a supporter of the British dissident Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League (ancestor of the later Workers Revolutionary Party). LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's conspiratorial world-view and his advocacy of violence and intimidation, something foreign to the intellectual tradition of mainstream Trotskyism. He was briefly linked with the U.S. Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth and also with the Spartacist League, another Trotskyist group.

After his break with Trotskyism LaRouche remained active in the left. He began giving classes on "dialectical materialism" to members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) (a Maoist group) and other radical groups on campuses around the East Coast. These lectures attracted a following, which coalesced into a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society which was called the "SDS Labor Committee," because LaRouche criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture, and not enough toward Labor. (This was a common complaint in the New Left, which was largely composed of students and of drop-outs like LaRouche.) He was heavily involved in SDS despite not being a student, and in the PLP's internal battles despite not being a member. Once again, LaRouche now maintains that he was an FBI agent during all this activism, but his closest colleagues from this period dismiss this suggestion as absurd.

LaRouche and the NCLC

In 1969 LaRouche formed the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), a grouping of ex-SDS activists and other ex-Trotskyists. Despite its name the NCLC had no significant connection with the labor movement. It soon developed the hallmarks of a cult, with a charismatic leader (LaRouche), a catastrophist and conspiratorial ideology, and an esoteric vocabulary known only to initiates. NCLC members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader. Like many cults, the LaRouche organization developed an internal discipline technique, called "ego stripping," which reinforced conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.

In the 1970s LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining (as he still does) an outward stance of anti-fascism. He began to regard himself and his followers as "Prometheans," superior to all other people, and under his direction the NCLC adopted violent and disruptive tactics, physically attacking meetings of the SWP, the Communist Party and other groups, who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." During "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members engaged in a series of well-documented beatings of members of these groups. Some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.

During the 1970s LaRouche steered the NCLC away from the left and towards the extreme right, while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left (as did the founder of fascism, the ex-Socialist Benito Mussolini, and many others since). The Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a gigantic conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a secret cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations and other standard villains of the extreme right, many though not all of them Jewish. LaRouche added some novel variations on this theme. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, was the financial elite of the City of London. LaRouche has always been violently anti-British - a trait shared by many American isolationists - and has included Queen Elizabeth II, among others, in his list of conspirators.

In the 1980s LaRouche's political rhetoric and accusations grew more detached from generally accepted reality. Hitler had been a British agent as was Marx. Menachem Begin was a Nazi. The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." Both Communism or Fascism were facets of the great overarching conspiracy of the "Synarchy," an oligarchical network of financiers and manipulators who rule the world. Only LaRouche and his "humanist elite" fully understand this vast conspiracy, and possess the willpower and knowledge to withstand it. LaRouche's personal egotism is a significant force driving his politics. In 1979 he wrote: "My principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date." Some of LaRouche's conspiracy theories appear to border on self-parody, "Who is pushing the world toward war?" he asked in 1981. "It is the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."

LaRouche claims that there is also a conspiracy by the "Establishment" and the press it allegedly controls to deny him coverage and prevent his views becoming known. He cites as evidence for this a September 24, 1976 opinion piece in the Washington Post, entitled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," and written by Stephen Rosenfeld, a senior editor (who is Jewish). Rosenfeld wrote: "We of the press should be chary of offering them [the NCLC] print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms." In fact LaRouche has continued to recieve considerable press coverage, more in fact than the real importance of his organization might seem to warrant, although most of this coverage has been hostile.

Economic views

Although he has no academic qualifications, LaRouche claims to be an economist, and has written extensively on economic subjects. Since he is not taken seriously by mainstream economists, there is no academic literature analysing his economic ideas. He claims that his economic ideas are descended from the "American System," a slogan originally associated with Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and the main critic of the policies of Jeffersonian liberalism), and later with Henry Clay. In practice this amounts to advocating centralised, though not socialist, state control of the economy, with heavy state investment in industry and science, and presumably administered by members of the "Promethian" elite such as LaRouche himself. Economists would classify these ideas as mercantilist or corporatist.

LaRouche's theory (in more or less his own words) is that the principal subject of economics is the ability of the cognitive powers of the individual human mind to make new discoveries of universal principles. These discoveries, LaRouche says, lead to revolutions in technology, which re-define Man's relationship to Nature in a "non-linear way." Such revolutions, he says, are contingent on the viability of the culture, on its capacity to absorb and transmit new ideas: LaRouche asserts that the most historically successful variety of culture is what he terms the classical culture of Greece during the time of Plato, or the culture of Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance.

LaRouche claims to draw upon the ideas of mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann to describe the "non-linear" effects of the technological revolutions he describes, and he uses the term "potential relative population density" to describe a measure of the success of a given economy or society. According to LaRouche's followers, a Russian scientist, Pobisk Kuznetsov, proposed that the unit for measuring this parameter be called the "La" (for "LaRouche").

In practical rather than theoretical terms, LaRouche's economic policies are not particularly radical or original. He opposes deregulation, free trade, NAFTA and globalization. He advocates government-issued credits for infrastructure projects, and claims to be an admirer of the economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt. He calls for greater federal investment in science and technology, particularly the space program. These are all staples of both the traditional left and the modern anti-globalization movement.

Despite LaRouche's rhetorical skill in presenting them as revolutionary, LaRouche's economic ideas are hardly original: they formed the basis of the corporatist system in Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar. What makes LaRouche's ideas distinctive is his belief that capitalism is not, as Marxists argue, the principal enemy of progress. Instead he has developed the elaborate conspiracy theory described above, in which he claims that a secret elite called the Synarchy really rules the world. This elite conspiracy, he says, predates and transcends both capitalism and socialism.

Biographical issues

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential bids

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

Since 1979 LaRouche has concentrated on infiltrating his followers into the Democratic Party. In 1979 he formed a body called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a name designed to convey the impression that it is part of the Democratic Party. Since 1980 LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States six times. He claims to be running again in 2004.

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

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

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

LaRouche and the Jews

LaRouche has been regularly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Jewish organisations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have devoted much time and energy to documenting LaRouche's various writings and speeches on these subjects. LaRouche for his part has denied these accusations, asserting that those who accuse him are part of the oligarchic conspiracy to rule the world.

The truth about LaRouche's attitude to the Jews is not easy to determine. Indeed it is likely that there is no single truth, since many of LaRouche's statements on this as on other subjects have been obscure and contradictory. From the early 1970s LaRouche regularly used the word "Zionist" as a term of abuse. The use of "Zionist" as a code word for "Jew" is a common practice among anti-Semitic groups (see for example [1] and [2]). In the 1970s also, LaRouche developed connections with the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby, a leading extreme right group, both well-known for anti-Semitism. The use of "Zionist" as a code word for "Jew" is particularly noticeable in the 1978 publication by the LaRouche organisation entitled Zionism is not Judaism.

In NCLC publications during the 1970s the Jews were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" controlled the U.S. government and the United Nations: not far short of the "Zionist Occupied Government" rhetoric of neo-Nazi organisations. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk."

In The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), LaRouche (under the pen name L. Marcus) said that "Jewish culture... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." In an editorial in New Solidarity in 1978 he wrote: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."

LaRouche has also been regularly accused of Holocaust denial, widely seen as a hallmark of anti-Semitism. In 1978 LaRouche described the Holocaust as mostly "mythical," and his German second wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, dismissed it as a "swindle." These references are sourced in Dennis King's book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. In 1981 LaRouche said that "only" 1.5 million Jews died during World War II, and that their deaths were not the result of a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis. This statement is also sourced by Dennis King. In January 1981 LaRouche's New Solidarity International Press Service issued a statement titled "LaRouche Reaffirms '1.5 millions' Analysis". LaRouche and his followers have sought to discredit King's book since its publication in 1989, but the authenticity of the quotations attributed to LaRouche above has not been successfully challenged.

In recent years, however, LaRouche appears to have modified his views on these subjects - without of course conceding that he has done so. In a 1999 LaRouche published an article called "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In this article he several times refers to "the Jew," a usage typical of anti-Semites and one which he must have known is offensive to Jews.

Nevertheless, in the course of a discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, LaRouche acknowledges the contribution made by Jews to European civilization. He says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." The article contains several other statements in similar vein. There is even a word of praise for Walther Rathenau, an archetypal Jewish business figure of the kind so savagely denounced by LaRouche throughout his career.

In this article also LaRouche acknowledges that the Holocaust is not mostly mythological or a Zionist swindle. He says: "We can not allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." He explicity states that "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews," a direct repudiation of his 1981 statement that only 1.5 million died and those not as a result of a deliberate plan of extermination. This article can be seen as a significant (if unacknowledged) retreat by LaRouche from his statements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Criminal conviction

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

The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. Like most cults, the LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also operates more sophisticated telemarketing groups, soliciting donations by phone, usually under the guise of various patriotic front organisations to conceal the real source of the phone calls. More seriously, however, LaRouche was accused of fraudently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people, sometimes giving completely misleading explanations for the loan ("funding the Strategic Defense Initiative" or "finding a cure for AIDS"). The funds thus raised were then directed into a maze of dummy companies so as to avoid both taxation and attempts to recover the "loans."

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

The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983. The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.

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

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

See also

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

External links

• Ideological odyssey: from old left to new right by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Some officials find intelligence network "useful" by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Loudoun Newcomer Lives On Heavily Guarded Estate by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Group makes political inroads by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• Some are out to kill me, LaRouche says by John Mintz 1985 (Washington Post)
• LaRouche convicted of mail fraud By Caryle Murphy 1988 (Washington Post)
• Elderly seek refunds from LaRouche By Alison Howard 1990 (Washington Post)
• LaRouche paroled after five years in prison By Peter Pae and Leef Smith 1994 (Washington Post)
• Lyndon LaRouche 2004 Presidential campaign
• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag ~ Chip Berlet
• Executive Intelligence Review: LaRouche Publications
• Lyndon LaRouche's Long Campaign (Newsday article on LaRouche's record of eight consecutive Presidential campaigns)
• Larouche Exposed - Pasadena City College
• World LaRouche Youth Movement
• Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Review) ~ book by Dennis King
• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue ~ Chip Berlet
• Lyndon LaRouche - Disinfopedia article
• Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents ~ Chip Berlet (Temple Of The Screaming Electron website)
• 'He's a Bad Guy, But We Can't Say Why'
• Anti-LaRouche article from the Australian paper, The Age ~ from the website of Rick Ross
• Hey, You Liars, Who Is Lyndon LaRouche, Really?
• A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler