You are citing a Larouchite tract, in the first place....
SI: StockTalk: Coffee Shop : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
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To:flatsville who wrote (40730)
From: Neocon Friday, Sep 29, 2000 2:00 PM
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The LaRouche Movement: American 'fascism' or something else?
The LaRouche movement is a clever organization: clever because it operates several independent divisions that are hard to connect with each other. The Schiller Institute, the Fusion Energy Forum, the Executive Intelligence Review, the Campaign to Explore Human Rights Violations in the U.S. (whose main interests seem to be the rights of Larouchians), Bread for the World, the Human Life Committee, the New Federalist, and 21st Century Science & Technology magazine are all part of the LaRouche organization. Currently, LaRouche is also connected to the "Productive Triangle Program" (the 'Paris-Berlin-Vienna' axis) promoted by the International Progress Organization (IPO) in Central Europe, intended to promote economic development. Lyndon H. LaRouche has run (as a Democrat, no less) for president several times; in 1992 he is running from a jail cell, with the Rev. James Bevel (a SCLC founder and associate of Rev. King) as his vice presidential running mate. One might note, incidentally, that several LaRouchians do hold various offices around the country, and many LaRouchian groups have sprung up in Europe.
LaRouche is one of those political trippers that has managed to take the bend all the way around from the Far Left to the Far Right, without breaking his neck. In the 60s and 70s, he was "Lyn Marcus," head of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, an ultra-doctrinaire Marxist group with some strange disciplinary practices. Even back in the late 70s he was warning of impending financial crisis and cultural ruin. Today, Lyn(don) is a big promoter of the Strategic Defense Initiative, an implacable foe of world communism, a big supporter of a united Germany, and a borderline anti-Semite, who has attacked a whole bunch of Jews - particularly Roy Cohn, Henry Kissinger, and the heads of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith - by saying they are really "Zionists," i.e. a particularly wicked bunch of Jews... anyone remember the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? (One might note that LaRouche has, on several occasions, attacked the Nazi-hunting branch of the Department of Justice (the OSI) as "witch hunters persecuting upright German citizens," some of those upright citizens being V2 rocket engineers smuggled into this country through Project Paperclip.) It is clear that his trip into the Far Right has left him with some discredited Far Left ideas.
LaRouche's main thesis is that the 'Anglo-American cabal,' which involves George Bush, the English monarchy, and some other ingredients, has decided to undertake a programme of genocidal IMF/World Bank-financed de-industrialization to deplete the population of the Third World. The cabal's plan includes "narcotrafficking"; environmental policies to prevent those countries from developing economically; 'Malthusian' population policies which incorporate birth control, abortion, and allowing disease and hunger free rein; profiteering through 'neo-colonial' resource control; the "lab-created" AIDs virus; and promotion of 'antifamily' ideals such as feminism, homosexuality, Satanism, and "the sex-drugs-rock and roll counterculture." This conspiracy theory, needless to say, is a grab bag of far right and far left nut worries. LaRouche believes that only massive industrial projects - nuclear power, huge irrigation canals dug with atomic bombs (!) in the Middle East, and similar high-tech developments - can free the Third World from the sinister grasp of the oligarchs' cabal.
LaRouche has other windmills to tilt his lance at. For one thing, he wants to move toward a "Hamiltonian" economic model, which is neither laissez-faire nor communist. (Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson argued over the future economic shape of America. Jefferson saw a land of small, dispersed planters, farmers, and "Virginia gentlemen." Hamilton thought America would develop through a strong Central Bank which financed industrial development and fostered growth of urban centres, not rural farmers. Hamilton was right on one score - "Jeffersonian" democracy meant slavery for another 100 years.) In his "Science of Christian Economy," LaRouche blames a lot of modern problems on usury, the lending of money at excessive interest. LaRouche also blames much of our 'cultural' breakdown on a move away from classicism in the arts - particularly the well-honed musical scale, Schiller's great poetry, and Renaissance naturalism in painting. Ever the Neo-Platonist, LaRouche lambasts the "Aristotelian" thinking which he sees behind our legal and other institutions. LaRouche's plan to 'reclassicize' our lives includes a whole new way of envisioning diplomacy, citizenship, nationhood, and philosophy.
"Multiculturalists" will find little sympathy from LaRouche. He refuses to see anything of philosophic or scientific value produced outside of the West, and has condemned those groups who refuse to celebrate the Quincentennary of that great Renaissance man, Christopher Colombus. "Political correctness" in the schools, he says, is just a way to reduce educational standards and destroy the classical canon of learning promoted, for example, by the German universities. Those who want to preserve traditional cultures, says LaRouche, really want to deprive them of the benefits from Western science, industry, and technology. The multiculturalists' attempt, says LaRouche, is all part of the scheme to fragment knowledge, so that the West cannot achieve the all-inclusive Tree of Knowledge, encompassing all arts and sciences, envisioned by Ramon Lull and other Christian wisemen. It is all part of the Anglo-American need to divide the world and prevent it from unifying itself on the principles of natural law, Christian economy, and Platonic wisdom. Multiculturalism, like Aristotelian sophist-logic, is another conspiracy against human reason.
Already deeply into philosophy at a young age, LaRouche became convinced that many of the problems of the world revolved around the debates between empiricism and rationalism. The British empiricists, like Hume, Locke, and Mill, practiced a radical skepticism toward human reason and the a priori truths of mathematics and logic, felt LaRouche. LaRouche disliked the ways in which they tried to build human knowledge, ethics, justice, and institutions from a posteori observation, induction, experience, and the senses. After all, wrote LaRouche, those things are slippery and tend to deceive: they are "Aristotelian," and lead to hedonism and individualism. Much better to build our world from the glorious and timeless Ideas of Truth, Beauty, and Life, as the "Golden Renaissance" Neo-Platonists did. LaRouche's hatred of that "evil man," Bertrand Russell, largely derives from Russell's empiricist philosophy and moral skepticism. As LaRouche sees it, the British empiricists laid the philosophical groundwork for the British Empire's world domination through mercantilism, colonialism, irrationalism, and, of course, the drug trade.
LaRouche feels that there are only two types of ways of viewing human beings. Either one holds the (Renaissance) belief that one is a divinely created soul, with the divine gift of reason, or the (Enlightenment) belief that one is only a beast who must be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchs. There is no compromise possible. The oligarchs promote the belief that creativity is the product of sexual sublimation or perversion or getting in touch with the Dionysian/irrational unconscious through their puppets like Freud and Jung, says LaRouche, so that people will not learn from Schiller and others that creativity comes from divine reason and proportion. Science should be guided by Platonic ideals, feels LaRouche, but it has become the tool of Aristotelian sophistry which tries to convince us (through evolution, etc.) that man is really nothing special. The oligarchs understand the psychology of the mob, and Pavlovs' dogs, and know the fascistic means to get us to do what they want. Hitler was just an experiment for the Anglo-American cabal, a means to test their hypothesis that people are really sheep and will follow a strong, willful, forceful leader.
Even paranoids have enemies, and clearly LaRouche has a few. But he has a bad habit of making all kinds of obscure accusations toward both his real and perceived 'enemies.' Members of the "Get LaRouche Task Force" (what a commission!) are libelled in all kinds of ways. The Cult Awareness Network (CAN) is accused of promoting perversion, drug use, and moral laxity. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is said to be peddling dope in South America and financing the "Zionist lobby" in the U.S. Other groups are accused of belonging to homosexual-pedophile rings, promoting Satanism to our youth, or serving the interests of the 'cabal.' LaRouche has a bad habit: when he's out "to get" somebody: he can be relentless, and he has harassed Henry Kissinger (not in my fan club, needless to say) for more than twelve years, resulting in at least one lawsuit. "Railroaded" for bilking old ladies out of their money, LaRouche continues to try and tie all the government prosecutors to various nefarious conspiracies.
LaRouche has ties to many civil-rights groups in the U.S. - or at least factions that agree with his thesis that abortion and birth control are means to "depopulate" the nonwhite races of America. He has recently lambasted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and opposed the U.S. war in the Persian Gulf. He has also blasted Bush and Clinton for supporting the death penalty, which he says is racist (quite true.) (But it might be pointed out that other civil rights concerns, like workplace discrimination and affirmative action, aren't really touched on by his policies.) But Leftists, especially those like me who are Jewish, like the counterculture, and are of a "Green" bent, should be wary of the LaRouchites. LaRouche's forces like to make controversial pronouncements which they can't possibly prove, but they know will attract attention. Such tirades as "Environmentalism kills, Nuclear power saves lives" were posted on our campus, and at a nearby black college, "The Kuwaiti royal family owns black slaves." (Perhaps that's true, if unfortunate, but the royal family is not very large, certainly nothing compared to the number of Saudi slaveholders.)
LaRouche's people were willing to enter into cynical, opportunistic alliance with the Coalition to End U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, but it was not for the reasons that other anti-military intervention groups did. Like Pat Buchanan, he saw it as a "Zionist" war, not a war fought ideologically by the U.S. to end its "Vietnam syndrome." Hardly the anti-militarist or pacifist, LaRouche believes military support should be given to the Croats against the 'communist' Serbs of Yugoslavia. LaRouche certainly would have nothing to do with groups like Greenpeace, who, after all, are out to do nothing but deprive the Third World of needed chemicals, technologies, and drugs. LaRouche's hatred of Bush seems to be connected with something other than politics - despite his outsider image, LaRouche's support of Star Wars/SDI curried him favor at the Reagan White House, as did his tough anti-Evil Empire rhetoric concerning the Soviet Union. Of late, playing against the "Eastern Establishment," LaRouche has tried to place Bush smack dab in the middle of those Rockefeller type international financiers, largely due to his connections to the oil business.
Recently, Lyndon LaRouche released his 1992 Presidential platform, declaring once again his intent to run from a jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia. Much of his "economic recovery" program focuses on high-tech, mega-industrial projects (the so-called 'Great Projects'): including a controversial plan formulated by the Parsons Engineering Company (the North American Water and Power Alliance - NAWAPA) in the 1960s to desalinate water using nuclear energy, to deal with the water shortages of the western part of America. Other such projects include a Mag-Lev rail line (not a bad idea, and one is already in place in Japan) in the U.S.; a series of railways, canals, dams, cascades, and reservoirs for China (an idea once considered by Sun Yat-Sen); "water control programs" for India, Africa, the Middle East, South America (which LaRouche always calls "Ibero-America."), and Scandinavia; and a second Panama canal, dug by nuclear bombs. These plans are supposed to reindustrialize the world, 'modernize' the Third World, end the oligarchic control of the Anglo-American finance cabal, and put people back to work.
LaRouche also plans to 'refederalize' the Federal Reserve: putting control of credit and interest under government (therby making the Reserve into the kind of 'national bank' envisioned by Hamilton), and also getting us back to the principles of 'physical economy' by returning to the gold standard. On the issue of health care, LaRouche proposes a 'crash program' of building more hospitals, new initiatives to find cures for AIDs and cancers, and regulating the health insurance companies. And on the issue of energy policy, LaRouche sees a need to build more nuclear fission plants, with the hope of moving toward nuclear fusion based on magnetohydrodynamic (MDHG) prototypes. Strangely, there are few environmentalists who oppose fusion, but they are concerned over why LaRouche sees more fission plants as a necessary step to develop fusion, when he has no great project to get rid of the radioactive waste produced. LaRouche is also interested in the exploration of space, which he sees as the new "Columbian Enterprise."
Besides the importance of fixing well-tempered proportions in the musical scale, the 'plastic arts', and literature, LaRouche sees a need to 'reclassicize' science by returning to Nicholas of Cusa's ideal of all science as a project of the creative powers of the soul. He thinks that the reason why science has ignored such things as cold fusion and accepted concepts like Darwinian evolution is due to its division of the body from the soul, and its unwillingness to see people as anything but machines or beasts. In the area of technology policy, LaRouche feels environmentalists and others want to force us all to return to primitivism and a new Dark Age. The real reasons for those programs, says LaRouche, are obvious. They opposed new pesticides and preservatives to make us more subject to famine and disease; they opposed nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams to rob us of the energy resources for industrialization; they oppose CFCs and other chemicals in industrial production to de-industrialize America; and their population control programs are really Malthusian, racist, and designed to preserve the dominance of the finance cabal. For LaRouche, words like 'appropriate' technology and 'sustainable' living mean primitive, barbaric, and a lower quality of life, and that means genocide, especially of the poorer peoples of the planet and the lower classes.
Like any good paranoid, LaRouche has more than a mere political conspiracy theory. He has a cosmology which involves a Manichaen view of history that stretches back more than a thousand years. Two forces - the light force, representing human progress, has had to fight the dark force, which always tries to set people back. The origins of the dark force, the so-called oligarchs, lie in pre-Biblical times with the civilization of Babylon. Diocletian, the Roman Emperor who supposedly outlawed the use of labor-saving devices, belongs to the dark side rogues' gallery of LaRouche. That dark force, through relativism, permissiveness, and the devaluing of standards, is behind the moral, spiritual, and economic morass that controls the globe. The chief agents of that dark force, says LaRouche, seem to be British Freemasons, who are the current force behind modern Zionism and the State of Israel. They created the oligarchic British Empire and today pull the strings of the 'Anglo-American' establishment. From John Dee to Aleister Crowley, a succession of British magi have pulled the strings behind the scenes, starting Opium Wars in one place and working to advance British imperialism in another.
"Dope, Inc.", the Anti-Defamation League, the Cult Awareness Network, "Kissinger, Inc.," the Trilateral Commission, the International Bankers (Bretton-Woods, Harrimans, Rothschilds, and Rockefellers), the IMF/World Bank, the "Greenie Nazis" (environmentalists, conservationists, animal-rightists, etc.), the figures promoting the 'drugs-sex-rock' counterculture, the 'Satanists' trying to promote neo-pagan, anti-Christian religions, and others all are playing on the oligarchs' team. Swamping reason, progress, truth, beauty, the Christian-Platonic ideal, and the human altruistic spirit, the oligarchs will not be satisfied until we are in a New Dark Age and they are running the show. Like any good conspiratorialist, LaRouche sees no accidents in history. There are two stage managers to this grand piece of theatre, and everybody is playing for one side or the other. People who appear to have different interests - say, the IMF and environmentalists - are really just putting on a show, because they have the same goals. Either you're part of LaRouche'e solution, or you're part of the problem. And when you're part of the problem, LaRouche has the solution: force. To deal with drugs, LaRouche is ready to use paramilitary solutions, including siccing tanks on "Crack, Inc.," which, I guess, means inner-city neighborhoods.
In that sense, LaRouche is really dangerous, and does represent a potential brand of American fascism. While those on the Left may see eye-to-eye on some of his warnings - in particular, some of the anti-Third World policies of the Shadow Government, which often border on the genocidal - they should be wary of anyone wanting to (by government decree!) establish canonicity in the arts and sciences and other realms of human knowledge. That, in short, is most surely totalitarianism! LaRouche is dead on about some things - the elitist, anti-popular roots of American conservationism; the eugenic history behind a lot of American population policy; the use of drugs to 'divide and conquer' America's inner cities and the role of the CIA in bringing them there; and the 'deindustrialization' (read: loot and steal productive industry) program of the leveraged-buyout/ S & L swindlers. But in his Manichaen worldview, he fails to see some of the positive interests behind the pro-choice, Green, appropriate-technology, or consumer-safety constituencies.
It is possible that in any realm there are front groups really serving established interests. Some of the big environmental groups are on the take from big industry, but others are working to purify the water and soil of the Third World from industrial pathogens; some Left groups may be FBI-COINTELPRO provacateurs or infiltators, but surely not all are; some groups behind American population-control policy have a racist agenda, but others just want people in the Third World to enjoy reproductive freedom; and some groups behind drug legalization may have sinister motives, but others want to try different solutions to solve America's drug addiction problem. Just because the Nazis were behind the euthanasia program in Germany to liquidate the handicapped and mentally ill does not mean that people who support 'living wills' or the 'right to die' are Nazis. Yet this is what the LaRouchians do all the time - collapse distinctions, ignore differences, compartmentalize everything into their all-or-nothing worldview. Such totalizing thought is the primary ingredient for total rule. I don't trust the LaRouchians farther than I can throw them.
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