Originally posted by
[email protected] 27 2004, 08:53 PM
From Politics1.com (http://www.politics1.com/dems04.htm):
Frequent candidate and purported political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, 81, is back for an eighth Presidential run in 2004. As in the past, expect him to appear on several state primary ballots. LaRouche, a college drop-out and self-described "world's leading economist," weaves a web of conspiracy theories -- cloaked in a swirl of historic truths and mistruths -- usually implicating Queen Elizabeth, British bankers, the Pope and the Jesuits, the Trilateral Commission, drug cartels, environmentalists, Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, George Bush, the CIA and FBI, Osama bin Laden, gays, Israel, the Clintons, Margaret Thatcher and many others. He started his career as a Trotskyist political organizer in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s, formed the now-defunct and ultra right-wing US Labor Party in the early 1970s after a violent break from the SWP ... before finally shifting his entire neo-fascist network into the Democratic Party by 1979. LaRouche was convicted and imprisoned for five years on felony fraud charges in the late 1980s related to the fundraising activities of his political organization -- although his supporters maintain he was a political prisoner unfairly prosecuted by vindictive federal government agents. LaRouche's old nemesis, the Anti Defamation League (ADL), has published various booklets over the years that identify LaRouche as anti-Semitic.
There's quite a bit more to the story than that, but you get the idea. The guy is a freak. He's grade A certifiable. The next time you see one of these whack jobs tell them where they can stick it.
Yeah, that quote's account of his history's not entirely accurate. They left out some steps. LaRouche left the SWP by himself, joined SDS, and pulled together a faction within it. It split when SDS generally broke up. This group (then called the National Caucus of Labor Committees) started out left-wing.
It began carrying out violent attacks on meetings of the CPUSA, saying it was an obstacle to revolution. When the SWP and other groups joined in a physical defense of the CP's right to hold meetings, the LaRoucheites then extended these attacks to the SWP. And maybe other groups, I don't know. Eventually, the LaRoucheites got tired of having the crap beaten out of them. LaRouche's group then continued a rightward drift, as you might expect to happen to a group whose main activity is beating up commies (or trying to.) It can now be described as fascist, and even more prone to insane conspiracy theories than most fascists. All this in the 70s.
There's a book called Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism by Chip Berlet, who I think is a social democrat. It's pretty decent.
BTW, the New Alliance Party, or whatever Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani are calling themselves these days, had links to the LaRoucheites during their days of violent physical attacks on the left. More recently, of course, the NAP's drifted off into alliances with Perot-ites and worse, Patrick Buchanan, the leading candidate for American fuehrer.