I’m not sure if this is in the right thread, and if a mod wishes to do so, I have no objection to it being moved to IMHO or the Pit.
Anyway, while reading about the 1986 assassination of Swedish PM Olof Palme, I noticed a throwaway line about a suspect being a member of “the LaRouche movement”. I thought I was pretty familiar with most Western extremist (or fringe) political groups, so I looked it up.
Turns out it’s a political and economic ideology/movement named for its founder, American economist Lyndon LaRouche. I read the LaRouche’s ADL page and various other articles that seem to suggest that LaRouche is a right-wing extremist.
Then I looked through a bunch of other articles which seem to suggest he’s a left-wing extremist.
Then I read his Wikipedia page and the movement’s Wikipedia page, which suggest he’s both.
Now I need somebody to break this down for me. Is he a Neo-Nazi? A Marxist? A libertarian? A good guy? A bad guy? A nutjob?
He runs as a Democrat, but that doesn’t make him one, any more than David Duke is a Republican. They’re both just crazy, but LaRouche is more nuts and less mainstream.
Hoo boy, these guys. They would occasionally invade the University of Washington campus while I was a student there, handing out pamphlets and spacey gazes and sitting at little tables with ridiculous slogans encouraging students to drop out of school and join their movement. They would also occasionally sneak into the electrical engineering / computer science building and leave little cards or pamphlets at every desk of numerous classrooms. All too often our first few minutes of class were spent cleaning up after them.
I did have a rather amusing encounter once with one of them who had made the mistake of standing within ten feet of a garbage can while handing out pamphlets.
I flirted with them briefly in the mid-nineties. While some of their technological goals sound nice (fusion research, east-coast high-speed rail links) they were ultimately way too squirrelly for me.
And they still set up tables near Concordia University.
Ran into them a few weeks ago at UCSF. They organize and try to infiltrate the Democratic party on a local level with varying degrees of fanatism. Some organizations get their people elected to various committees and they are all anxious to “get as much done as possible” which the more mainstream lefties who are activists see as intentional disruption. I don’t think it is intentional disruption so much as the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But my committees were infiltrated with the lazier and more sociable LaRouchies. The hard core are, hard core.
What are their core beliefs? That Lyndon LaRouche should be President of the United States. They and their hero are well versed in political and economic theory of all variety and regularly predict all kinds of disasters. Recently the banking system failed, which they claim to have predicted. I have no doubt that they have predicted this for the past 30 years because they are always predicting the end of the world due to massive fraud, etc.
What is it really about? In my opinion Lyndon LaRouche is no different than L. Ron Hubbard, Pat Robertson and that ilk. They raise money for their activities and I suppose he must live comfortably off the consulting fees or some such. The really cool thing is that he is now a very old man and because his movement is based mostly around the mystery of his personal genius, the movement will die with him and the followers will move on to supporting some new tool.
I ran into them in 2001/2002 at the campus in Maryland (UMD). At first I found them rather interesting, so I went to one meeting. There I quickly found out that they are nutjobs. Discussions are impossible, since their whole philosphy and politics is incoherent. Its all slogans and blabla, but when you ask questions and want details, they can’t answer you.
I like to argue with them about the value of gold. All the ones I know are gold bugs, and they have this strange opinion that gold has some intrinsic worth.
It’s unfair to Larouche to mention him in the same breath with Pat Robertson. It denies Larouche that semi-unique niche in the pantheon of utter craziness.
Actually, Larouche is a lot closer to David Icke, the Alien Lizard guy. Both are heavily into insane conspiracies and bigoted ravings.
Why young people still participate in Larouche’s cult is one of the mysteries of the age. Aren’t there any up-and-coming loons who deserve worship?
You’ve gotten this far along without having heard of the LaRouchies? I envy you, man. I really do. That movement’s the closest thing to a cult of personality I’ve actually encountered (rather than just heard about from historical examples). I made the mistake of picking up a discarded magazine once; the only article I managed to read was a report on a meeting where they’d gone through some painfully obscure mathematical treatise from the 1840s page by page.
Ah, Lyndon. He’s been one of my favorite CTs for years. The cool thing about him is that the message morphs from year to year, yet remains mostly consistent. All our woes can be traced to a cabal of Jewish bankers. Unseat this hegemony and we can have cheap fusion power. All this with no credentials in economics or physics. Lyndon just knows.
How Lyndon supports himself, no one knows. Nailed for credit card fraud a few years ago, he spent some time in jail. Apparently, he has picked up a financial backer who buys into the message. Where the foot soldiers come from, again, no one knows. What I notice is that it’s usually fresh faces. IOW, LaRourchers tend to be young. Then they grow up.
After seeing him in Maryland, I saw him a couple of months later here at the campus in Lyon, France. He seems to have quite a wide network. His wife is German, so there is lots of activity in Germany. This also explains his fascination with Friedrich Schiller.