on Lyndon LaRouche

[Tony Tracy <tony@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Flewers wrote:

>Tony Tracy wrote: < There were rightwing wingnuts present hawking stuff
>as well -- the Lyndon Larouche supporters were out with the "New
>Federalist" and handing out copies of that fascist Lyndon's "address to
>working people" and selling his latest book in front of one of the gates
>to the stadium where the rally was held (by the way, if you haven't seen
>Chip Berlet's article on Larouche & his conspiracy-laden anti-semitic
>organization, I'd recommend checking it out at
>http://www.anti-fascism.org/cult7a-2.html -- but of course that's
>completely off topic). >
>
>I had a look at this site, it is very interesting. Larouche and his pals
>do seem like a bunch of nutters. However, the piece on them at this site
>is over 10 years old. Does anyone take them seriously these days? Do
>they have any influence now?

I'm not so sure that LaRouchites were ever taken all too seriously,
or that they had any real influence, outside of their thugish
tactics... however, even here in Vancouver, we occassionally see
these nutbars out selling copies of The New Federalist every now and
again (very occassionally on demos, but generally on street corners
downtown every now and again). His followers hold that there was a
conspiracy against him personally, which led to the charges of tax
evasion that he was convicted of well over a decade ago. Mind you,
they also hold that the Queen of England runs the world's largest
cocaine cartel and was personally responsible for the Oklahoma
bombing. Not very stable people, I would suggest.

The LaRouchites maintain a website at http://www.larouchepub.com for
their "Executive Intelligence Review" (EIR), if anyone has any real
interest in seeing for themselves the drivel that this sod writes.
They also maintain a website for LaRouche's perennial campaign for
the presidency of the US at http://www.larouchecampaign.org and there
is a bit more on his candidacy on
http://www.2000vote.com/larouche.htm -- they also seem to have a
front group in Australia ("The Electoral Council of Australia") which
maintains a website at http://www.cecaust.com.au

There was a book printed back in '90 called "Lyndon LaRouche and the
New American Fascism" (a review is available at
http://www.csj.org/pub_csj/csjbookreview/csjbkrev101lyndon.htm), and
the Nizkor folks have some stuff up on their website at
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/adl/uncommon-ground/lyndon-la
rouche.html (and an ftp directory of some of his loopier works at
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/l/larouche.lyndon).

Clara Fraser (co-founder of the Freedom Socialist Party) wrote a bit
of an essay on LaRouche which was re-printed in her book "Revolution,
She Wrote" (a compilation of essays, articles, etc. which is a nice
breasy read... I highly recommend picking it up if you haven't read
through it...). Again, the material is well over a decade old, but I
think it holds up well... I've scanned in the relevant essay (pages
231 through 236 of her book), and reproduce it below:

---

LaRouche: Sex Maniac & Demagogue

  - Clara Fraser, 1986

Something salient is missing from the reams of media exposés about
Lyndon LaRouche, the ultra-reactionary demonologist, millionaire
entrepreneur, and terrorizer of radicals, Jews, and now Democrats.

The pundits are intrigued and puzzled by his amalgam of right and
left politics, a tangled web of KKK, Freudian, encounter therapy,
Populist, Ayn Rand-like, and Marxist notions. They needn't be.

His is the prototypical face of fascism, which is classically a
hodgepodge of pseudo-theories crafted for mass appeal and calculated
to bring about the glacial-age law'n'order coveted by imperialists
and impoverished super-patriots.

As a middleclass movement designed to make the world safe for giant
capital, fascism has no theories of its own. It is by nature an
intellectual pillager, derivative and vulgarized, a patchwork of
illusion and reality, of myth and madness, of truth and absurdity.

LaRouche is not Mussolini or Hitler or Franco-but he is all of them,
in American garb and speaking the jargon of the '80s. Beneath the
jargon, the commie- and Black- and Jewbaiting essence is clearly
heard.

What caused his turnabout from Marxism? Mainstream analysts are ever
fascinated by this phenomenon, and smug in their assumption that his
was a logical jump from leftwing to rightwing "extremism." But this
kind of wild jump isn't ever logical and it isn't typical. However,
it happens.

LaRouche is not the first former Marxist to turn inside out.
Mussolini started as a revolutionary socialist. Thousands of
ex-Stalinists, of course, have become avid apostles of conservatism
and witch hunts. (Whittaker Chambers comes quickly to mind.) What is
interesting about LaRouche's metamorphosis is that he is a product of
Trotskyism, not Stalinism, and I can think of no similar apostasy of
such melodramatic proportions, although Professor James Burnham, who
became William F. Buckley's right-hand man on the National Review,
came damn close.

I know what hit Lyndon LaRouche. I was in the Socialist Workers Party
all through his 17 years of membership, from 1949 to the mid-60s.
What knocked him off his underpinnings was the good old Woman
Question. Feminism undid him, and Radical Women played a role in the
bizarre scenario.

He called himself Lynn Marcus back then. He never seemed to belong to
any SWP branch; he was a loner. He was never active, never involved
in any mass movement or internal organizational work. What he did was
write-and write and write and write, until we all wished he'd be
stricken by digital rheumatism.

Marcus wrote thick, dull, endless Internal Bulletins, which were
dutifully distributed to the membership by the obliging National
Office. (It was probably the memory of his super-prolific effusions
that eventually helped destroy the vaunted internal democracy of the
early SWP!) For years and years his eternal Bulletins appeared, on
one of two subjects: the United Front or Economics.

I never understood any of them. Neither did anybody else. Nobody ever
responded to any of them, either, but he couldn't care less. He would
appear at national conventions every two years, but he wouldn't take
the floor. I know he was there because I never recognized him and
would ask who he was; he had that kind of non-presence,
non-personality.

They said he was an economist, but nobody seemed to know where he
worked or what he did. Sometimes I would feel sorry for him and go up
and say hello; he never replied except in a mumble or a curt
rejoinder. Once I mustered the audacity to ask him to explain his
latest document. My polite interest evoked nothing but a look of
utter contempt.

I gave up on Lynn Marcus. Just one of those fringie eccentrics.

I left the SWP in 1965. He left soon afterwards with Jim Robertson
and the Spartacist League, but I heard nothing about him. Then in
1968, Students for a Democratic Society spawned a mammoth strike at
Columbia University, and who should turn out to be one of its
spokesmen but Lynn Marcusnow Lyndon LaRouche-and his group, the SDS
Labor Committee. I couldn't believe it-Lynn Marcus, a popular leader?

Soon there were LaRouche people, known as the National Caucus of
Labor Committees, all over the country, including the University of
Washington. My older son Marc was a fervent SDSer, editor of its
paper, and an editor of the University of Washington Daily, and he
was buddies with some local NCLCers. I was in Radical Women and the
FSP, and the NCLC worked harmoniously with us, because we, alone on
the Left, connected our labor background and workingclass orientation
with what was fresh and valid in New Left and campus politics.

And NCLC, virtually alone among New Lefties, respected trade
unionists. They also enjoyed observing traditional socialist holidays
like May Day and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, so we
jointly sponsored commemorations, as well as forums, fund-raisers,
and mass actions against the war and racism.

And NCLC didn't oppose our feminism. They didn't support it
either-they were neutrals.

By 1970 the women's movement was in full sail. And the male Left, new
and old, didn't like it. We were demanding,that they change their
ways and learn to share power with the second sex. They didn't want
to change.

We were denounced: we were divisive, subjective, pettybourgeois,
off-balance, off-side, unable to differentiate between "primary" and
"secondary" questions, etcetera and ad infinitum. The campus male
charismatics were particularly affronted; they secretly agreed with
Stokely Carmichael that the "proper position for women in the
struggle is prone" (except for secretarial and organizing duties).

Some of the men got pretty hot under the collar as our movement
burgeoned and theirs trembled or decomposed.

LaRouche got hot all over. Feminist radicals were competing with him!
LaRouche developed such an acute case of political sunburn that all
his Marxist skin peeled off and his quivering Napoleonic nerves were
painfully exposed to an incredulous world. LaRouche went ape.

Feminism is shit, roared New Solidarity one day. Mothers are fuckers,
the enemy, witches. Women are the Achilles heels of revolutionaries,
the cause of IMPOTENCE. Women turn men into deviants, queers, and
schlemiels.

And then in an explosion of Nietzscheanism that made Wagner look like
a matriarchist, Lynn uncorked his piéce de résistance: the Leader
must be Superman, Siegfried incarnate, and the Superman must be
served by good girlies who appreciate the honor and know how to bow
and scrape. Superman is the hope and salvation of the revolution;
woman must cast off her intrinsic sinfulness and restore VIRILITY to
her Master. And on and on like that.

A young Radical Women leader ran into the office waving this issue of
New Solidarity and crying. She had never read anything like it, and
she was frightened. "What are we going to do?"

I tried to explain. He's gone off his rocker. He's on a new road, to
Nazism. He's a misogynist, a sex-role egomaniac. You don't dump on
women and gays like that unless you've jumped the socialist ship and
clambered aboard with the pirates to preserve your puerile penile
prerogatives. The man is a menace, I said. In a few years he'll have
storm troopers to beat up on workers.

She didn't quite get it and promised to study up on fascism.

Within a year, LaRouche's old guard members were gone and his newly
recruited troopers were in the streets. We got some telephone threats
at our headquarters, Freeway Hall. Just try it, we said, out-machoing
them. They beat up Communists, and SWPers, but left us alone.
Nevertheless, they caused a casualty in our ranks; one of our leading
female comrades was married to an NCLC admirer (famous John Chambless
of the UW Philosophy Department, who organized the first Sky River
Rock Festival and became a theatrical producer for the city of
Seattle Parks Department), and she was so disoriented by his growing
hostility to us that she faded away from politics.

In 1973, LaRouche provided the following advice to the ladies: "Be a
rat! Be a sadist! If you are a woman, find a susceptible man for your
female sadism. You feel better; you are one of the rats; the rats,
therefore, may not attack you, especially the gigantic, awful rat of
a mother-image inside you!" And this man was still calling himself a
socialist.

What better illustration of the centrality of feminism to socialism:
you simply can't have one without the other.

Newsweek speculates that "a romantic setback triggered a change in
LaRouche's personality and a shift to a more authoritarian style."
Come on. Let's don't Hollywoodize, let's not trivialize and obscure a
simple law of politics: once someone starts unraveling one key thread
in the complex of programmatic embroidery the whole pattern falls
apart. Romantic, roshmantic -- it was feminist rage and dynamic
organizing that triggered Lyndon LaRouche's counter-rage and sent him
hurtling pell-mell into an ideology more compatible with his comfort
zone. (You'll notice I didn't say his glands or genes; some of my
best friends and comrades and kids are men!)

LaRouche was sorely challenged by the anti-sexist revolution and he
reacted not only wrongly, but paranoiacally. His own history and
character determined that reflex, and that obsession with
stereotypical gender behavior and with male sexual power as synonym
for the driving force of history. The fullest expression of
male-power dominance, of course, is fascism. LaRouche, like all sex
maniacs, is a clear and present political danger.

Lyndon, we hardly knew you, but we learned about you and know you
now, while others thrash about in the effort to decipher your
"mystery" and clout. For every man whose evil fantasies you express,
another man, and almost every woman is revolted by your fascism A la
mode. When push comes to shove, the women and the workers, the
ethnics and the gays, the anti-fascists and the Jews, and folks with
a decent respect for humankind will return you to your origins -- as
a loner.