LaRouchites

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The LaRouchites believe the world is controlled by a sinister global conspiracy of evil-doers. LaRouche traces this conspiracy back to the Babylonian goddess society, and says the historical battle between good and evil is exemplified in the philosophical division between Platonic order and Aristotelian chaos. The Aristotelian conspirators are diverse: the Queen of England (" a dope pusher" ), George Bernard Shaw, Jimmy Carter (" a hundred times worse than Hitler" ), Playboy magazine, Milton Friedman, Fidel Castro, Jesuits, Masons and the AFL-CIO. A remarkable number of the sinister conspirators turn out to be Jewish.

The LaRouchites have supported foreign dictatorships such as the Marcos regime in the Philippines and the Noriega regime in Panama. LaRouche has written that history would not judge harshly those who beat homosexuals to death with baseball bats to stop the spread of AIDS.

In the early 1970's, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. took his followers from the political left and guided them into fascist politics. LaRouche's cadre roamed the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities with clubs and chains beating up trade union leaders, activists, socialists, and communists. At the time they still proclaimed themselves leftists, but the mainstream left shunned the LaRouchians. Then LaRouche began to adopt some of the economic theories of early national socialism. He thought that to make the revolution, there had to be a strong working class, and a strong working class, he figured, required full-employment. Full employment, he reasoned, would best be accomplished by developing a strong, modernized industrial base in the United States. LaRouche then concluded that development of a strong industrial sector was being hampered by the high interest rates demanded by the main sectors of finance capital in the U.S. and overseas.

LaRouche launched an unsuccessful 1976 Presidential bid when he paid cash for an hour of network television air time to warn the nation of a Soviet/Rockefeller/British plot to destroy the world using Jimmy Carter as a puppet. LaRouche's attack on the centers of finance capital during his presidential campaign drew applause from parts of the American political far right, including those forces that equated finance capital with Jewish banking families.

LaRouche's shift toward a Jewish conspiracy theory of history came shortly after the ultra-right 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-led 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 was one to miss a cue, and soon his newspaper New Solidarity was running articles with bigoted views of Jews and Jewish institutions. The shift regarding who controlled the worldwide conspiracy came at an opportune time, since Nelson Rockefeller's untimely death had left a major hole in LaRouche's theoretical bulwark.

While often hidden or coded, sometimes the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the LaRouchians stands out clearly. In the December 12, 1990 issue of New Solidarity, a letter to the editor asks why the newspaper "scarcely mention[s] the Warburg and Rothschild families, the most important International Bankers. Is it because they are of Jewish ancestry?" Editor Nancy Spannaus responds:

We do attack the Warburgs and the Rothschilds for the evil they do and did. But they are not the highest level of the international financial oligarchy. That requires looking at the Thurn und Taxis family, the British Royal Family, and so forth. These guys love to use the so-called Jews as their front men.

According to LaRouche, one and a half million Jews, not many millions, perished during the Holocaust, and they died from overwork, disease, and starvation in work camps rather than from a planned program of extermination. This denial of the Holocaust is coupled with pronouncements in LaRouchian publications such as these:

The first, and most important fact to be recognized concerning the Hitler regime, is that Adolph Hitler was put into power in Germany on orders from London. The documentation of this matter is abundant and conclusive. (1978)

America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry and labor. (1978)

We shall end the rule of irrationalist episodic majorities, of British liberal notions of `democracy.' (c. 1980)

Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of international Jewry. (1978)

Judaism is the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely molded by ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity. in short, a self-sustaining Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for Jewish culture otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim. (1973)

Sexism and homophobia are central themes of the organization's conspiracy theories. LaRouche announced that women's feelings of degradation in modern society could be traced to the physical placement of sexual organs near the anus which caused them to confuse sex with excretion. 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...."

LaRouche has propounded ideas which represent outright racism. LaRouche, for instance, targeted the Hispanic community in a November 1973 essay (published in both English and Spanish) titled "The Male Impotence of the Puerto-Rican Socialist Party." An internal memo by LaRouche asked "Can we imagine anything more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?" He described the majority of the Chinese people as "approximating the lower animal species" by manifesting a "paranoid personality....a parallel general form of fundamental distinction from actual human personalities."

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