Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/genufo/genufo/alien/main_archive/j_upto_r/larouche.nws.txt

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.    THE BIZARRE SAGA OF LYNDON LAROUCHE: WHY SHOULD WE CARE?


.                         by Chip Berlet

  The trial of right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche and his
top aides on charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and
obstruction of justices began this week in a Boston Federal
Court.

     The indictment last year of thirteen key LaRouche aides was
accompanied by the removal by law enforcement officials of what
appeared to be tons of financial records from LaRouche's
financial operations headquarters in suburban Virginia. The raids
were the result of a Boston grand jury probe into alleged
financial fraud which resulted in a 117-count indictment charging
wire fraud, credit card fraud and other financial irregularities.

     LaRouche himself first fled to his international
headquarters in West Germany, while the national LaRouche
political operation collapsed in a shambles. Then, last April 21,
the federal government seized the assets of three key LaRouche
front groups.

     Campaigner Publications, Caucus Distributors and the Fusion
Energy Foundation were forced into involuntary bankruptcy on the
orders of a federal judge who ruled there was a substantial
chance that the LaRouche-controlled groups would liquidate their
assets to avoid paying millions in dollars of fines. The fines
were levied for failure to provide documents subpoened as part of
an ongoing federal criminal probe of the LaRouche financial
empire. "There are multiple criminal investigations at both the
Federal and state levels," noted the judge who added "the debtors
are not trustworthy." The seizure of assets took place in
Virginia, New York, California, Texas, Michigan, New Jersey and
other locations.

     Now LaRouche has voluntariliy returned to the U.S. to stand
trial in Boston on federal charges of conspiracy to commit fraud
and obstruction of justice.

WHO IS LYNDON LAROUCHE?

     Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. is a name that became more familiar
to Americans in April of 1986 when two of his Illinois followers
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 governor, Adlai Stevenson, removed himself
from the official ticket saying he could not in good conscience
run on the same ticket with "neo-Nazis". Stevenson's startling
characterisation of the LaRouche ideology soon faded amidst the
cacophony of typically shrill Illinois election campaign
rhetoric.

     The widespread media coverage of the LaRouche network's
legal difficulties and 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 phenomena which appears more sinister than comical when
the details are sketched in with information emerging from court
records, interviews with former members, and a careful reading of
LaRouche's theoretical writings.

     They have been called crooks, con artists, a cult, obsessed
with conspiracy theories, a private intelligence army, anti-
Semitic. Some critics consider LaRouche to be America's leading
neo-Fascist.

     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.

     The truth is a complex blend of both views. Even his
sharpest critics generally agree that LaRouche himself is highly
intelligent and well-read, with an astounding ability to garnish
his conversation with historical references drawn from memory.

     The LaRouche network's glossy Fusion Magazine covers current
theoretical and practical research on lasers and fusion energy
with details not available in other similar publications,
according to several nuclear physicists quoted in published
reports. Even Reagan Administration officials have praised the
LaRouche intelligence-gathering apparatus, which forms the
backbone of the LaRouche network.

     As LaRouche's ego grew, so did his appetite for expensive
intelligence-gathering and high-tech security devices. The funds
needed to maintain LaRouche's gargantuan self-image as the
world's premiere political economist and spymaster apparently
forced his manic minions engaged in fundraising to seek extra-
legal methods of obtaining cash.

     Running their global intelligence operation takes money, and
former members report intense pressure to meet daily financial
quotas. The resulting over-zealous fundraising efforts are what
caught the attention of a Boston federal grand jury two years
ago. That grand jury recently indicted ten top LaRouche
lieutenants and raided his corporate offices searching for
documents to verify allegations of widespread credit card and
loan fraud.

     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, she and other "LaRouchies" staffing
LaRouche-controlled companies often did not receive paychecks;
the money instead being 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.

     Former members 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 and guilt are used
to control LaRouche loyalists, say former members, many of whom
call the LaRouche inner circle a "cult."


MAKINGS OF A CULT

     This cult aspect began when LaRouche propounded a macabre
"psycho-sexual" theory of politics in the early 1970's after
taking his followers out of the radical left Students for a
Democratic Society.

     This theory was used to justify dozens of incidents in 1973
when LaRouche followers wielding chains and bats physically
attacked and injured political rivals in street battles and
classroom brawls. LaRouche ordered his troops into the streets
saying "I am going to make you organizers -- by taking your
bedrooms away from you....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."

     In early 1974 LaRouche announced to the press that he had
uncovered a CIA plot to brainwash his followers into
assassinating him. LaRouche alone had the skill to develop the
"deprogramming" sessions each member was expected to undergo.

     According to Ray and other former members, LaRouche was in
fact testing his control over the flock. A "chain of
psychological terror" said two members in a resignation letter
which called the sessions an attempt to crush the will of "all
individuals who have expressed political and intellectual
opposition to the tendencies" surfacing inside the LaRouche
organization.

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

     By 1976, LaRouche had drifted 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. Ray thinks that
more recent LaRouche converts are not even aware of the group's
real history, nor of the inner circle which controls the
financial operations.

     LaRouche's parlaying of personal and political conspiracy
theories into a multi-million dollar financial empire is unique,
but paranoid political movments occur cyclically in American
history. In his, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics,"
professor Richard Hofstadter argues that in times of economic,
social or political crisis, small conspiracy-minded groups
suddenly gain a mass following. The anti-Catholic hysteria of the
1800's, the anti-immmigrant movement which lead to the Palmer
Raids in the 1920's, the Red Scare of the 1950's - all are
examples of this thesis, wrote Hofstadter.

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

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

     Not everyone shares that view. When Henry Kissinger was told
of how LaRouche operatives met with high Reagan Administration
officials in the early 1980's, told the New Republic If this is
true, it would be outrageous, stupid, and nearly unforgivable."
Dennis King, co-author of the New Republic article which examined
LaRouche's influence in scientific and intelligence circles, says
during the first Reagan term LaRouche aides managed to gain
"access to an alarming array of influential persons in
government, law enforcement, scientific research and private
industry."

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

     Russ Bellant, a long-time LaRouche watcher from Detroit
notes that in the mid-1970's LaRouche simultaneously turned to
the right and tried to link up with more respectable groups,
including for a brief period, several state Republican Party
organizations. "Some tactical political alliances with various
right-wing groups were made on the basis of LaRouche's scurrilous
disruption campaigns against mutual enemies, especially liberal
Democrats," says Bellant.

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

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

     The Illinois primary, however, raised the ante. "The
visibility that came to LaRouche after the Illinois primary lent
credibility to the investigations into his financial operations
by bringing forward scores of persons who claimed to have been
defrauded by LaRouche operations over the years," says Bellant.
Now LaRouche has lost any benefit of the doubt he may once have
enjoyed through his usually-covert mainstream political contacts.

     Incidents like the battle between LaRouchites and Henry
Kissinger and his wife who were harassed at Newark airport while
he was on his way to undergo open heart surgery hardly enhanced
the LaRouche image in the Reagan administration.

     Bellant notes with irony that indicted LaRouche aide Jeffrey
Steinberg used to meet with Reagan Administration officials at
the Old Executive Office Building in the White House compound.
Steinberg's fall from grace is so complete that government
prosecutors successfully argued that Steinberg be held
without bail fo over a month before he was released by court
order.

POLITICAL PUZZLE

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

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

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

     Richard Lobenthal, Midwest Regional Director for the Anti-
Defamation League of B'nai B'rith observes that one indicted
LaRouche security advisor, Roy Frankhouser "has been identified
as present with other white supremecists at meetings held at the
farm of Pastor Bob Miles in Michigan." Leaders of the notoriously
racist Aryan Nations have attended the same meetings.

     "Frankhouser's background and connections are myriad, he is
obviously a LaRouchite, he is a professed racist and anti-Semite
and was a close associate of neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln
Rockwell," says Lobenthal. Another ADL spokesperson, Irwin Suall,
was once sued by LaRouche for calling him a "small time Hitler."
The jury ruled against LaRouche.

WHY WORRY?

     If LaRouche is just another paranoid bigot -- a small-
time Hitler -- is there really anything to worry about? Are we
paying too much attention to him and his band of bandits? A
surprisingly broad range of LaRouche's critics say no, and think
he should be taken a bit more seriously for a variety of reasons.

     Lobenthal of ADL warns that the LaRouche organization
"Obviously should not be dismissed lightly, they are more than
just kooks. They are anti-Semitic extremists. His aspirations are

to gain legitimacy and power through, amongst other ways, the
electoral process. To snicker about LaRouche is to snicker about
any bigot or extemist who would ascend to political office and
then subvert that office for their own purposes," he says.

     In California a LaRouche-backed referendum establishing
restrictive public health policies regarding Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) demonstrates how the small LaRouche
group t4Are had a devasting effect when it found a fearful
audience for its simplistic scapegoating theories.

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

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

     Leonard Zeskind helped build a coalition of Black,
Christian, Jewish, farm advocacy and civil rights groups to
confront the spread of hate-mongering theories in the rural farm
belt. He calls the LaRouche ideology "Crank Fascism". "The
LaRouche organizers are not as active in the farm belt as they
once were, but they and other groups which promote scapegoating
conspiratorial theories have lead some farmers down a dead-end
path which offers no short-term help for individual financially-
distressed farm families and no long-term solutions to the
ongoing crisis in rural America.

     "For those farmers who may have bought into these bigoted
snake-oil theories, the effect has been harmful." Zeskind points
out the LaRouche group "has also been very disruptive in the
Black community where they exploit legitimate issues such as drug
pushing and widespread unemployment. Those of us who have to deal
with the victims of the LaRouche philosophy don't find it very
humorous at all."

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

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

     Some conservative groups have also taken strong stands
againstr LaRouche's brand of bigotry and opportunism. One staffer
a the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Think-Tank based in
Washington, D.C., called LaRouche an "intellectual Nazi" and a
Heritage Foundation report warned of LaRouche's danger to
national security as a reckless purveyor of private intelligence.

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

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

     Jonathan Levine, the Chicago-based Midwest Regional Director
of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) agrees that opportunism
and exploitation of issues is a key factor with the LaRouche
ideology. "Extremists have traditionally tried to piggyback on
substantive issues to gain legitimacy for themselves. Never mind
that the way the LaRouche candidates frame issues does not
warrant serious discussion in a political campaign, but they may
appeal to frustrated, apathetic voters nevertheless. In Illinois
there is still significant economic dislocation, this only
heightens the level of alienation some voters experience," says
Levine. He points out that an AJC-sponsored statistical analysis
of the Illinois primary results revealed low voter turnout was
more responsible than any other single factor in the LaRouche
candidate's victory.

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

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

     "In an age of ideology, in an age of totalitarianism, it
will not suffice for a political party to be indifferent to and
igorant about such a movement," said Moynihan.

     One reason many people are hesitant to categorize LaRouche
as a Fascist is the major media have been unwilling to carry the
charge, even when it is made by elected officials. Edward Kayatt,
publisher of "Our Town," a weekly community newspaper on New York
City's upper East Side, is angered by whast he sees as the
cowardice of most mainstream media on this point.

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

     "So finally, the inevitable happened; In Illinois, the
"potential destroyer" of the "evil species," as LaRouche calls
himself, lunged forward to center stage. And what does the New
York Times, pathsetter for the national media, do?

     "The News of the Week section last Sunday; LaRouche is
portrayed once again as merely an "ultraconservative."

     "The Times first section on Sunday: "LaRouche has been
accused of anti-Semitism, but has denied that, saying he is anti-
Zionist." (This is the only reference to such matters in the
article.)

     "The Times second section on Monday: an article on a major
speech by [U.S. Senator] Moynihan concerning LaRouche. The Times
can't ignore the speech, but they censor it; every time Moynihan
says neo-Nazi they change it to the musch softer term "fascist".
"(The national media has been exercising the same type of
censorship over remarks by Adlia E. Stevenson III, the Illinois
Democratic nominee for governor)."

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

     "In the late 1920s, when Adolf Hitler began his march to
power, one of the tactics was to entagle all his opponents in
libel suites. LaRouche will not march to power in America, but he
can have a serious destablizing effect on our institutions and
can create a beachhead for organized anti-Semitism. To drive him
back into political isolation, America's publishers and editors
must show some of their traditional courage and backbone."

     Lobenthal of ADL: "Any American citizen that has even a
scintilla of committment to Democracy needs to be alert to their
threat and outraged by their presence."

     Most LaRouche critics figure his days as a political leader
are numbered, but most also feel he can still do a lot of damage
by further spreading his prejudiced views. Russ Bellant sums it
up when he says LaRouche is "just a symbol of a larger problem of
authoritarianism which can be very appealing in times of crisis.
The LaRouche phenomena indicates that we need to better educate
Americans about the theories and tactics of demogogues."

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

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|    Freelancer Chip Berlet has written dozens of articles on       |
| Lyndon LaRouche over the past ten years. A paralegal investigator |
| employed by Chicago's Midwest Research, he also serves as         |
| secretary of the National Lawyers Guild Civil Liberties Committee |
| and edits its journal, The Public Eye.                            |
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