From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Date: 25 Aug 92 21:14 PDT
Subject: LaRouchians as Fascists!
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1296500306:000:27197
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cberlet    Aug 25 21:14:00 1992


From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet>
Subject: LaRouchians as Fascists!

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

by Chip Berlet and Joel Bellman

3/10/89

A Political Research Associates
Briefing Paper

IN THREE PARTS

PART ONE

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

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

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

 Who is Lyndon LaRouche?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 From Socialist to Totalitarian Fascist

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

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

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

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

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

   Sexism and homophobia became central themes of 
the organization's theories. A September 1973 
editorial in the NCLC ideological journal 
<Campaigner> charged that "Concretely, all 
across the U.S.A., there are workers who are 
prepared to fight. They are held back, most 
immediately, by pressure from their wives. . . ." 
The problem with making the revolution, LaRouche 
apparently had concluded, was that women are 
castrating bitches. One former member left in 
disgust when she was told women's feelings of 
degradation in modern society could be traced to 
the physical placement of female sexual organs 
near the anus which caused women to confuse sex 
with excretion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

END OF PART ONE