The definitive pseudo-intellectual crank Lyndon LaRouche.
I have met his cult twice, once being browbeaten for failing to understand that the British royal family was the leading force behind the international trade in illegal drugs. Another time I encountered them mocking Barack Obama by giving him a Hitler haircut and Hitler hairdo.
I enjoy a good argument, but not with these creeps, and not with $cientology.
Ding, dong, the dean of cranks is dead!
From Wikipedia:
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019)[1] was an American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement,[2][3] whose main organization was the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He wrote on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. LaRouche was a presidential candidate in each election from 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party and seven times for the Democratic Party nomination.
LaRouche's critics have said that he had "fascistic tendencies", took positions on the far right, and created disinformation.[4]
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate".[15] As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector (CO) during World War II and joined a Civilian Public Service camp.[16] In 1944 he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant and served in India and Burma with medical units. He ultimately worked as an ordnance clerk at the end of the war. He described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life.[17] While in India he developed sympathy for the Indian Independence movement. LaRouche wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces and characterized that prospect as "revolting to most of us."[18]
He discussed Marxism in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University. He returned to Lynn in 1948 and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), adopting the name "Lyn Marcus" for his political work.[19] He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he worked as a management consultant.[20] In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a psychiatrist[citation needed] and member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.[21]
By 1961 the LaRouches were living on Central Park West in Manhattan, and LaRouche's activities were mostly focused on his career and not on the SWP. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with another SWP member, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee.[23] In 1964 he began an association with an SWP faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction which was later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.[24]
For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote that LaRouche had a "gargantuan ego", and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth." Leaving Wohlforth's group, LaRouche briefly joined the rival Spartacist League before announcing his intention to build a new "Fifth International".[22]
In 1967 LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School,[25] and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests, he organized his supporters under the name National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).[25] The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society branch—the university's main activist group—and build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty.[26][27][28][29] By 1973 the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities—including West Berlin and Stockholm—and produced what Dennis King called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity.[30][31] The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government.[32][33][34]
Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world would send information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover.[35] The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security.[36] In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.[37]
U.S. sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him offering information about the West German Green Party, and a CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed to be qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world. ... They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement.[38] According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns.[39] Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques."[40][41]
From the 1970s through to the first decade of the 21st century, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council (Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984 he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there—the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität—and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.[42]
LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University.[43] Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse."[44][45][46] Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists, on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche expert Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats.[47][48][49][50][51][52] LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and to propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them.[53] One FBI memo, recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC." (see image to left)
LaRouche's critics such as Dennis King and Antony Lerman allege that in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety.[54] According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers.[55] He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force," which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies toward impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.[56][57]
LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC.[58][59] At first the party was "preaching Marxist revolution" but by 1977 they shifted from left-wing to right-wing politics.[60] A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery alleged that LaRouche had turned the party (at that point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America) into an extreme-right, antisemitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit."[61]
The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III, an arms dealer and former member of the Office of Strategic Services, who said he had ties to the CIA. Journalists and publications the party regarded as unfriendly were harassed, and it published a list of potential assassins it saw as a threat. LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf. Party officials would decide who each member should live with, and if someone left the movement, his remaining partner was expected to live separately from him. LaRouche would question spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife because it was making him "politically impotent."[62][63][64]
LaRouche began writing in 1973 about the use of certain psychological techniques on recruits. In an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis," he wrote that a worker's persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called "little me," from which it would be possible to "rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity," according to The Washington Post.[65][66] The New York Times wrote that the first such session—which LaRouche called "ego-stripping"—involved a German member, Konstantin George, in the summer of 1973. LaRouche said that during the session he discovered that a plot to assassinate him had been implanted in George's mind.[67]
He recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973 LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S. His followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." The Times wrote, "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm, then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'." LaRouche told the newspaper White had been "reduced to an eight-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality." He said White had not been harmed and that a physician—a LaRouche movement member—had been present throughout.[67][68] White ended up telling LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.[69]
According to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement. One activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming.[15] In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing. One activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the claims.[70]
LaRouche established contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan in 1974.[71] Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace's American Independent Party, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan.[72] George Michael, in Willis Carto and the American Far Right, says that LaRouche shared with the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto an antipathy towards the Rockefeller family.[73] The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with LaRouche by saying the U.S. Labor Party had been able to "confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left."[73]
Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said that while the LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was also copious evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union. George and Wilcox say neither connection amounted to much—they assert that LaRouche was "definitely not a Soviet agent" and state that while the contact with the Liberty Lobby 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 soon pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference. According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed misgivings over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally.[74] Johnson, in Architects of Fear, similarly states that LaRouche's overtures to far right groups were pragmatic rather than sincere. A 1975 party memo spoke of uniting with these groups only to overthrow the established order, adding that once that goal had been accomplished, "eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy."[75]
Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onwards, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police on members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government, student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police, and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. Johnson says the intelligence network was made up of "obnoxious devotees commandeering WATS lines and tricking bureaucrats into giving them information."[76] By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.[77][78][79][80] The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies.[81][82] LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work.[77][83][84] Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed," an alleged CIA contact, who did not exist.[77][85]
Blum wrote, at around this time, that LaRouche's Computron Technologies Corporation included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients, that his World Composition Services had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients, and that his PMR Associates produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.[84]
Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of the United Kingdom, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad.[84] LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him.[86] According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists."[87] LaRouche later said that,
My stomach is getting upset. More at Wikipedia, and it doesn't get better.
I have met his cult twice, once being browbeaten for failing to understand that the British royal family was the leading force behind the international trade in illegal drugs. Another time I encountered them mocking Barack Obama by giving him a Hitler haircut and Hitler hairdo.
I enjoy a good argument, but not with these creeps, and not with $cientology.
Ding, dong, the dean of cranks is dead!
From Wikipedia:
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019)[1] was an American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement,[2][3] whose main organization was the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He wrote on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. LaRouche was a presidential candidate in each election from 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party and seven times for the Democratic Party nomination.
LaRouche's critics have said that he had "fascistic tendencies", took positions on the far right, and created disinformation.[4]
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate".[15] As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector (CO) during World War II and joined a Civilian Public Service camp.[16] In 1944 he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant and served in India and Burma with medical units. He ultimately worked as an ordnance clerk at the end of the war. He described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life.[17] While in India he developed sympathy for the Indian Independence movement. LaRouche wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces and characterized that prospect as "revolting to most of us."[18]
He discussed Marxism in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University. He returned to Lynn in 1948 and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), adopting the name "Lyn Marcus" for his political work.[19] He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he worked as a management consultant.[20] In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a psychiatrist[citation needed] and member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.[21]
By 1961 the LaRouches were living on Central Park West in Manhattan, and LaRouche's activities were mostly focused on his career and not on the SWP. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with another SWP member, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee.[23] In 1964 he began an association with an SWP faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction which was later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.[24]
For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote that LaRouche had a "gargantuan ego", and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth." Leaving Wohlforth's group, LaRouche briefly joined the rival Spartacist League before announcing his intention to build a new "Fifth International".[22]
In 1967 LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School,[25] and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests, he organized his supporters under the name National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).[25] The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society branch—the university's main activist group—and build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty.[26][27][28][29] By 1973 the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities—including West Berlin and Stockholm—and produced what Dennis King called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity.[30][31] The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government.[32][33][34]
Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world would send information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover.[35] The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security.[36] In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.[37]
U.S. sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him offering information about the West German Green Party, and a CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed to be qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world. ... They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement.[38] According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns.[39] Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques."[40][41]
From the 1970s through to the first decade of the 21st century, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council (Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984 he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there—the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität—and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.[42]
LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University.[43] Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse."[44][45][46] Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists, on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche expert Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats.[47][48][49][50][51][52] LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and to propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them.[53] One FBI memo, recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC." (see image to left)
LaRouche's critics such as Dennis King and Antony Lerman allege that in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety.[54] According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers.[55] He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force," which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies toward impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.[56][57]
LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC.[58][59] At first the party was "preaching Marxist revolution" but by 1977 they shifted from left-wing to right-wing politics.[60] A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery alleged that LaRouche had turned the party (at that point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America) into an extreme-right, antisemitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit."[61]
The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III, an arms dealer and former member of the Office of Strategic Services, who said he had ties to the CIA. Journalists and publications the party regarded as unfriendly were harassed, and it published a list of potential assassins it saw as a threat. LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf. Party officials would decide who each member should live with, and if someone left the movement, his remaining partner was expected to live separately from him. LaRouche would question spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife because it was making him "politically impotent."[62][63][64]
LaRouche began writing in 1973 about the use of certain psychological techniques on recruits. In an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis," he wrote that a worker's persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called "little me," from which it would be possible to "rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity," according to The Washington Post.[65][66] The New York Times wrote that the first such session—which LaRouche called "ego-stripping"—involved a German member, Konstantin George, in the summer of 1973. LaRouche said that during the session he discovered that a plot to assassinate him had been implanted in George's mind.[67]
He recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973 LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S. His followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." The Times wrote, "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm, then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'." LaRouche told the newspaper White had been "reduced to an eight-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality." He said White had not been harmed and that a physician—a LaRouche movement member—had been present throughout.[67][68] White ended up telling LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.[69]
According to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement. One activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming.[15] In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing. One activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the claims.[70]
LaRouche established contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan in 1974.[71] Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace's American Independent Party, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan.[72] George Michael, in Willis Carto and the American Far Right, says that LaRouche shared with the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto an antipathy towards the Rockefeller family.[73] The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with LaRouche by saying the U.S. Labor Party had been able to "confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left."[73]
Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said that while the LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was also copious evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union. George and Wilcox say neither connection amounted to much—they assert that LaRouche was "definitely not a Soviet agent" and state that while the contact with the Liberty Lobby 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 soon pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference. According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed misgivings over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally.[74] Johnson, in Architects of Fear, similarly states that LaRouche's overtures to far right groups were pragmatic rather than sincere. A 1975 party memo spoke of uniting with these groups only to overthrow the established order, adding that once that goal had been accomplished, "eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy."[75]
Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onwards, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police on members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government, student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police, and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. Johnson says the intelligence network was made up of "obnoxious devotees commandeering WATS lines and tricking bureaucrats into giving them information."[76] By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.[77][78][79][80] The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies.[81][82] LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work.[77][83][84] Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed," an alleged CIA contact, who did not exist.[77][85]
Blum wrote, at around this time, that LaRouche's Computron Technologies Corporation included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients, that his World Composition Services had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients, and that his PMR Associates produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.[84]
Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of the United Kingdom, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad.[84] LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into killing him.[86] According to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists."[87] LaRouche later said that,
Quote:Since late 1973, I have been repeatedly the target of serious assassination threats and my wife has been three times the target of attempted assassination. ... My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet President Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Gadaffi, Ayatollah Khomaini and the Malthusian lobby.[88]
My stomach is getting upset. More at Wikipedia, and it doesn't get better.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.