Ok, I’m putting this here because it’s about politics and religion. A little background: I went on a blind date this weekend. I’m a guy. My date’s a guy. In the middle of the date, he gets a call on his cell phone. He picks up, says something about being really busy and hangs up. Then we had the following conversation:
The Date: These people won’t leave me alone.
Me: Who was it?
The Date: Oh, I donated money to this PAC. And now they won’t stop calling me.
Me: What PAC did you donate to?
The Date: LaRouche… something?
Me: Lyndon LaRouche?
The Date: Yeah, I think that’s it.
Me: Why would you donate to a Lyndon LaRouche PAC?
The Date: Well, I read some of his stuff and I agreed with it.
Me: You think the Queen of England and the Pope are engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the US government by smugggling drugs into the country?
The Date: Well, I didn’t get that far in the reading.
Ok, needless to say, this date didn’t go well. But after I got home, I started thinking. Where exactly did I get this idea that LaRouche had a conspiracy about the Queen of England and the Pope? Does this have any basis in reality?
Secondly, something about the my date’s vibe made me think he was a scientologist (I live in Los Angeles, so I’ve had quite a few dealings with them). Is there any connection between Scientology and LaRouche? Or am I making this up?
And is LaRouche really a crackpot? Or is he some victim of a grand conspiracy?
Yeah, LaRouche thinks the English Royal Family, Henry Kissinger, and the Bush family are all in cahoots to control the American and worldwide drug trade. He does like the Pope, as far as I know, and I don’t think he has any ties to Scientology.
I first became aware of the LaRouchies in the early '80s when I was an undergrad at Georgetown University and found some of their pamphlets lying around. They were calling for a space-based missile-defense system (a couple of years before Reagan announced his SDI plan). But what struck me was the rhetoric about the abominable evil of Aristotle, Khomeini and Kissinger as against the goodness and wisdom of Plato, Beethoven and LaRouche.
LL started as a leftist radical in the '60s (he published at least one book under the pen-name “Lyn Marcus,” from Lenin and Marx). In the early '70s he founded something called the U.S. Labor Party (now defunct). But somehow, his world-view suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange. He developed a Manichean, good-vs.-evil theory of history.
On the good side: Plato, Hamilton, urbanism, industrialism, technology, “humanists,” “golden souls,” Schiller, Beethoven.
On the evil side: Aristotle, Jefferson, aristocracy, agrarianism, Bertrand Russell and other “British philosophers,” the British royal family (which runs the drug trade), that “British-backed Austrian hippie” Adolf Hitler, that “pot-puffing fop” William Buckley, Henry Kissinger, Israel.
Some critics assert that when LaRouche says “British” he really means “Jewish”. See Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism by Dennis King (Bantam Dell, 1989). Which would make him a kind of neo-Nazi, perhaps. But the Nazis always associated the Germans with goodness and agrarianism and the Jews with evil and urbanism; if LaRouche is a Nazi, he has completely inverted the Nazi value-system.
But what has always perplexed me about the LaRouche movement is that it is a movement – not just one crank turning out incomprehensible books, but a dedicated cult of followers, with what appear to be some very well-financed publications. I’ve always wondered where they get their money.
See these old threads – they cover LaRouche pretty thoroughly:
Regarding a Scientology connection – I don’t think so. Scientology is a cult, LaRouche’s political followers are a cult, but beyond that there is absolutely no common ground in their thinking.
I dabbled with LaRouche’s people in the early nineties and while some of their technological goals were interesting, I backed off quickly when I found out their views on censorship (they seemed pretty much in favour). Their conspiracy beliefs regarding the invasion of Panama (i.e. it was done to bring it back under U.S. control after Noriega starting getting uppity and Hong Kong was going to eventually return to Chinese control, putting a potential crimp in international drug money movement).
BTW, if you’ve ever seen people at airports passing out literature in favor of more nuclear power plants, they were probably LaRouchies. They have what amounts to a religious faith in the power of technology to solve all problems. I guess you could call them anti-Greens.
This caused the Democrats no end of grief. While the party couldn’t exactly tell the voters to vote for the Republican candidates, they did everythng else possible to distance themselves from Hart and Fairchild.
Am I crazy, or did the LaRouches want to build a giant land bridge over all the US, from the east to west coast?
I came across some dedicated young followers during my stint in the Kerry campaign. They were idealistic… but something was just not quite right with them. They didn’t get the campaign idea of 50%+1: they thought it was an overall goal rather than a universe/resources equation. Such people are immensely frustrating. Like the timecube guy, you gradually get the feeling that whatever you are saying to them just isn’t really being heard, that they are off in another world somewhere. I came across some more of them during the Kaine campaign in Virginia. Again, they were sort of on the fringes, claiming to be Democrats, but not really getting involved and mostly just interested in their own strange ideas.
Here’s a fun collection of LaRouche quotes, which should quickly eliminate any doubt as to whether he’s an Agent of Influence of the Raving Loon Conspiracy.
I especially like the part about the Beatles being agents of British Psychological Warfare.
Didn’t laRouche do a few years in Federal prison 9for credit card fraud)? I know he (and his gants) are barred from doing business in massachusetts-due to several cases of cc fraud. Anyway, LaRouch is sort of a garden variety whacko-his ravings about the international-jewish-drug cartel make for amusing reading. He also seems to think that Bernhard Riemann was the best mathematician of all time. My question; how do such crackpots recruit so many followers? to me, laRouche’s people were sort of brain-dead zombies, wiulling to stand on street coreners and take endless abuse-who puts up with this?
Not likely. Homosexuality is a no-no in the Happy Fun Cult (big time second dynamic violation). Cruise and/or Travolta (if you believe the rumors) might be acceptable due to their PR value but your average clam isn’t going to flaunt an alternative lifestyle for long.
As far as I know there’s no formal connection between LaRouche and ElRon, although both are snake-oil salesmen the same can be said for thousands of others throughout history.