Liberty Lobby

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Among the most influential ultra-right groups in the U.S. is the virulently anti-Jewish Liberty Lobby. With its newspaper Spotlight, Liberty Lobby spreads racialism across the U.S., and serves as a bridge to the paramilitary and neo-Nazi right. The Washington Post has described Spotlight as a "newspaper containing orthodox conservative political articles interspersed with anti-Zionist tracts and classified advertisements for Ku Klux Klan T-shirts, swastika-marked German coins and cassette tapes of Nazi marching songs." That description is actually mild.

Spotlight, with a readership of some 200,000, claims it is neither anti-Jewish nor pro-Nazi, but one article referred to the Waffen SS, the elite corps of ideological Nazis, as a "multinational anti-communist mass movement, which was, in fact, the largest all-volunteer army in history." The Spotlight also celebrates neo-Nazi skinheads and the apartheid government of South Africa.

Liberty Lobby, Spotlight, the International Revisionist Conference, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), Noontide Press, and IHR's Journal of Historical Review are all projects of Willis Carto, one of America's most influential racial theorists. Carto is described by the London-based anti-fascist magazine Searchlight as the "leading U.S. publisher of anti-semitic, racist and pro-Nazi material."

Carto and Liberty Lobby were influential in creating the racialist Populist Party and were primarily responsible for elevating David Duke to national attention as an electoral candidate. In the spring of 1985 the Populist Party held a major meeting in Chicago where the armed and confrontational activities of racist and anti-Jewish groups in rural America were saluted as "heroic," according to persons who attended the meeting. One group of rural farm activists from the Midwest left the meeting after complaining that too many of the attendees were obsessed with Jews. (A series of political and financial schisms has ended the direct relationship between Liberty Lobby and the Populist Party, although both groups still share many of the fundamental anti-Jewish and racist theories.) The forces around the Populist Party believe a conspiracy of rich and powerful Jews and their allies control banking, foreign policy, the CIA and the media in the United States. Like Duke, they also believe in an America controlled by white Christians of exclusively European heritage.

The pseudo-scholarly Institute for Historical Review is a "revisionist" research center and publishing house that popularizes the calumny that the historical account of the Nazi Holocaust is a Jewish hoax, an idea central to Carto's worldview. According to researcher Russ Bellant, early in his career Willis Carto produced the magazine Western Destiny, which grew out of the Nordicist Northern World and a vociferously anti-Jewish magazine called Right. Right recommended support for the American Nazi Party and was edited by E. L. Anderson who was associate editor of Western Destiny. Critics and co-workers of Carto claim E. L. Anderson was a pseudonym for Willis Carto.

Liberty Lobby staff and supporters helped stage the 1978 meeting of the World Anti-Communist League, a group that networks fascist movements around the globe. According to the Washington Post, Liberty Lobby workers distributed publications including Spotlight at the WACL meeting. A few years later, after a change of leadership and some mostly-cosmetic housecleaning to oust a few ardent Nazi groups, WACL came under the leadership of retired General John "Jack" Singlaub. Singlaub used WACL to raise money and support for the Contras, and Singlaub and WACL were implicated in the Iran-Contra hearings for having served as a cover and money laundry for the activities of Oliver North.

While the John Birch Society trumpets jingoistic patriotism laced with conspiracy theories, according to scholar Frank P. Mintz, the Liberty Lobby voices "racist and anti-Semitic beliefs in addition to conspiracism." Mintz explains:

Structurally, the Lobby was a most unusual umbrella organization catering to constituencies spanning the fringes of Neo-Nazism to the John Birch Society and the radical right. It was not truly paramilitary, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, but was more accurately an intermediary between racist paramilitary factions and the recent right.

The Liberty Lobby is thus quasi-Nazi, promoting many of the themes of fascism and racial nationalism, and certainly networking and being used by persons and groups who are neo-Nazi. The harshest critics of Liberty Lobby say that it should just be called neo-Nazi, arguing that formulations such as quasi-Nazi are academic rather than useful.

Former staffers at both the Liberty Lobby and LaRouche's group claim both outfits have cooperated closely on several projects. In the March 2, 1981 issue of its newspaper Spotlight, Liberty Lobby cynically defended the relationship this way:

It is mystifying why so many anti-communists and `conservatives' oppose the USLP [U.S. Labor Party--LaRouche's original electoral arm, ed.]. No group has done so much to confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left as they have...the USLP should be encouraged, as should all similar breakaway groups from the Left, for this is the only way that the Left can be weakened and broken.

More recently, Spotlight has distanced itself and Liberty Lobby from the LaRouchians over the issue of the LaRouchians' questionable and illegal fundraising activities.

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