Saturday, February 12, 2022

Three Years after LaRouche died....

 



Above: a two-sided handbill mocking Lyndon LaRouche during his 1980 bid for the US Presidency.
Below: A 2010 interview with a LaRouche Youth Movement member. "Mike" the LYM member is allegedly now a big wheel in their San Francisco office.




The question of LaRouche haunts the memory of the man. Was he always a cultist, just waiting for his chance, as Dennis King theorized in his 1989 book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, or was he a Right-winger hiding in Left-wing clothes the whole time, or did LaRouche become unglued over time after 1968? I can't answer any of those questions, but I can point you to some reading material.....

Louis Proyect (now deceased) wrote "an assessment" of LaRouche when "Lyn Marcus" died in 2019: link.
A long quote:

Not long after his release from prison, he and his acolytes began promoting Putin as an old-school “development” oriented strongman of the kind that the USA sorely needed. If LaRouche’s shot at playing that role had misfired, he was happy to serve as John the Baptist to the Second Coming of Alexander Hamilton, his favorite founding father (as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s). This was destined to be a tripartite Messiah: Trump, Putin and Xi JinPing.

In June 2016, LaRouche proclaimed that the future of mankind will be determined by Putin’s creative interventions over the coming period. That’s even going further than Oliver Stone. The article that made this claim sounded like it could have been written by Pepe Escobar, Mike Whitney or Diana Johnstone. It was positively breathless over these developments:

  • Xi Jinping has just completed a brilliant strategic intervention into the Eastern and Central European region with visits to Serbia and Poland, bringing win-win development policies along the New Silk Road where Obama is attempting to provoke nuclear war;
  • The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is holding a Summit in Tashkent to expand the strategic and economic cooperation between Russia, China and the four Central Asian nations;
  • Indian President Modi will meet with President Xi on the sidelines of the SCO;
  • India and Pakistan will begin the process of joining the SCO at the Summit, while Iran is expected to join soon. Other nations of Southwest and Southeast Asia are SCO partners and may also join;
  • Putin will attend the SCO Summit, then proceed to Beijing for a state visit to China, to advance the two nations’ collaboration in development, space exploration, cultural exchange, and more. Plans for the Eastern Economic Forum, scheduled to take place in Vladivostok on Sept. 2-3, will be discussed. The Forum brings business and government representatives together to discuss the economic development of Russia’s Far East and the Asia-Pacific region.

As painful as it is for many on the left to come to terms with, the true goal of LaRouche’s movement was not that different from many on the left who began identifying with the Kremlin, the Chinese Communist Party, and other BRICS players in the early 2000s. This counter-hegemonic bloc solidified in the period circumscribed by the Arab Spring and Euromaidan. Articles that appeared in his movement’s press were not about recreating a Third Reich globally but only rescuing the world from Anglo-American imperialism.

If your politics begins and ends with anti-imperialism, there’s something seductive about recent vintage LaRouchism......

Proyect ran into Kevin Coogan online. Coogan was a published author (a biography of Francis Parker Yockey, the author of Imperium, came out in 1998 under the title Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey & The Postwar Fascist International and a posthumous book on Michael Goleniewski, the Polish spy defector who claimed to be a Romanov, appeared last year) and also an escapee of the early LaRouche political cult, the National Caucus on Labor Committees, which he had spent time in from 1967 to 1979. The old LaRouchePlanet website had his online books Smiling Man From an Dead Planet and his history of the early years of the NCLC, but they had a hosting upheaval. From Internet Archive here is their copy of Smiling Man, link. The new LarouchePlanet site has How It All Began here.

NCLC: Brownshirts of the Seventies (late 1975 or early 1976), a 27-page pamphlet from The Fifth Estate magazine, which runs through the generally accepted narrative of the NCLC's rise and their violent tactics. Link here.


Above: Quote from Lyndon LaRouche ("Lyn Marcus") on the cover of the NCLC pamphlet.
Below: Racist NCLC pamphlet cover against Amiri Baraka, 1973. This was over school unions in Newark, New Jersey.



Why We Left, a document from ex-LaRouche Youth Movement members in 2011: link.

The infamous Dope, Inc. (1978) that named the Queen of England as the greatest heroin dealer on the planet: link.




The new leader of the cult, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, on why the LaRouchePAC cannot be trusted and is not speaking for her dead husband, link. A Federal Election Commission .pdf of a Barbara Boyd letter to them, the woman Zepp-LaRouche says cannot be trusted, doing scutwork against LaRouche critics in 2003, link


Above: LaRouche denounces Christian Rock in 1996. Truly bleeding-edge stuff.

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We may link to more stuff at a later time.....LaRouche and LaRoucheism is an endless river of crazy nonsense. Maybe Daniel Platt will show up to rebut everything in the comments; that would be fun.