No Joke
Eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche may be a punchline on 'The Simpsons,' but his organization -- and the effect it has on young recruits -- is dead serious
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct20.html
(Gold9472: I'm not posting this as an endorsement.)
By April Witt
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page W12
The desperation in her son's voice jolted Erica Duggan fully awake.
"Mum, I'm in big trouble," Jeremiah, a 22-year-old college student, said into the phone quietly, as though trying not to be overheard.
It was nearly 4:30 a.m. in London. Erica Duggan, a retired teacher, had been awake even before the phone rang. Restless -- a mother's instinct, she would later say -- she'd gone down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.
It was March 27, 2003, the eighth day of the war in Iraq. Antiwar sentiment was high across Europe. Erica's idealistic son had gone to Germany to attend an antiwar protest and conference with a group called Nouvelle Solidarité. All Jeremiah told his mother about the group before he left was that its views were "extreme" and that it was affiliated with an American presidential candidate she'd never heard of, a man named Lyndon LaRouche. Now her son's phone call made it clear that something had gone wrong.
"This involves Solidarity," Erica recalls her son saying before he added: "I can't do this. I want out. It is not something I can do.''
Alarmed, she tried to assure her son that he didn't have to do anything with this group that he didn't want to. Then the line went dead. Almost immediately, Jeremiah rang back.
"I'm frightened," she remembers him saying, his voice hushed and strained.
"What is it?" his panicked mother demanded. "Tell me!"
Jeremiah seemed to be having trouble speaking. "He sounded terrified," Erica says. "Because of that I found myself saying, 'I love you.' It just came out. I thought his life was in danger.
"When I said, 'I love you,' then he said to me in a very, very loud voice, 'I want to see you NOW.' "
"Where are you?" his mother cried.
"Wiesbaden," he said.
She had difficulty making out the name of the German city, and she asked him to spell it. Erica's father, a German-born Jew, had fled Hitler's Germany. Most of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Now her only son was somewhere in Germany, and was telling her that he was in peril.
Jeremiah began spelling Wiesbaden. He wasn't halfway through the letters when the line cut off again.
Thirty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead. He lay crumpled on a roadway into town, his arms stretched out before him as if he were a boy again, reaching to catch a ball.
Jeremiah's death has propelled his parents into the political orbit of Lyndon LaRouche, a realm of plots, counterplots and apocalyptic prophesies that they hadn't known existed. Their campaign to learn the circumstances of their son's death has brought rare scrutiny to an American politician whose eight presidential campaigns have netted him two precious commodities: millions in federal matching funds and a cadre of fresh-faced recruits who, like Jeremiah Duggan, want to help save the world.
"THIS SYSTEM IS BREAKING DOWN," LaRouche says. "It is crumbling . . . The crisis is here."
LaRouche, 82, is glowering behind outsize eyeglasses. His hair is wispy on his prominent head. His shoulders stoop. Yet he still projects supreme self-assurance. It is April 30, 2004, and LaRouche is speaking at the Marriott at Metro Center in Washington. Important supporters around the globe, his staff says, are listening via the Internet. Inside a spacious meeting room, dozens of other followers sit rapt in folding chairs.
A sinister network of conspirators is about to plunge the world into a new Dark Age, LaRouche warns, but it's not too late. He can save mankind. That is why he must be elected president. "I have a better chance of being elected than you have of surviving if I'm not," LaRouche tells the assembly. "And that's a fact. It's not an exaggeration."
The octogenarian denounces President Bush as a "dummy sitting on the knee of a Vice President Cheney." Cheney "is controlled by strings from his wife, who is worse than Cheney is! She's the clever one," LaRouche continues. "He's the dumb brute who's holding the strings on the president, the marionette."
This attack is relatively mild for LaRouche. He frequently refers to the vice president as "the beast-man." His followers stage noisy sidewalk protests featuring a man wearing a Cheney mask and a medieval Crusader's get-up. Now, as LaRouche speaks, a giant photograph of Cheney snarling is projected on the wall. The audience titters at the unflattering shot.
To prevent catastrophic, perpetual, worldwide religious warfare -- the ultimate clash of civilizations -- LaRouche demands that Bush adopt the LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia. Listening to his rambling talk, it is difficult to make out just what the LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia is except that it apparently "follows precisely the guidelines of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia."
"As a matter of fact, there is going to be no solution to the crisis in Southwest Asia unless we can adopt it as my doctrine -- by name!" LaRouche says. "Because nobody else has the credibility to do what has to be done . . . If they're serious about saving the country and dealing with the problem, they would talk with me. Why don't they talk? . . . What does that mean?"
LaRouche, who lives and works behind a curtain of secrecy and security in Northern Virginia, has been asking that question for much of his public life. Always, he comes up with the same answer: People are out to get him. Powerful people -- Zionists, bankers, the British. People who control the Republican and Democratic parties and ensure his votes aren't counted. People, according to LaRouche and his followers, who have plotted to send brainwashed zombies to assassinate him.
LaRouche and his international network of organizations champion an eccentric mix of issues. They've lobbied the music world to lower the standard pitch of middle "C" to spare singers vocal strain. They've advocated quarantining AIDS patients. They want to send manned fusion-powered spacecraft to establish a permanent colony on Mars.
In three decades of failed U.S. presidential bids, LaRouche has never won more than 80,000 votes in any election cycle, never emerged as more than a fringe figure joked about in late-night television monologues and on "The Simpsons." He began running for president in 1976 -- the first year presidential elections were publicly financed. Since then he has run seven more times, and garnered $5.9 million in federal matching campaign funds. This election cycle alone he has received more than $1.4 million.
Loyal aides, some of whom have been with LaRouche since their student days protesting the Vietnam War, accuse the mainstream media of refusing to cover LaRouche. Yet they limit access to him, often delivering his message through avenues they control: LaRouche Web sites, newspapers, paid radio and television advertisements. LaRouche aides declined to let a Post Magazine reporter follow him on the campaign trail or interview him in person. LaRouche agreed to field e-mailed questions, but he answered them selectively, dismissing some as "silly" and others as "dredging into the garbage-dumps of slanders and libels against me."
LaRouche calls himself a Democrat, much to the chagrin of the Democratic National Committee. As he sought the party's nomination during this year's primaries, his supporters often disrupted Democratic events. At a Baltimore debate last fall, some candidates froze as LaRouche activists in the audience heckled them for excluding LaRouche. Al Sharpton, no stranger to the power of orchestrated confrontations, won applause when he accused the LaRouche partisans of being phony liberals. At a New Hampshire town meeting for retired general Wesley Clark, LaRouche supporters shouted and sang until security personnel hauled them away.
LaRouche, who expresses loathing for timid conformists, wears belligerence like a badge. He and his supporters accuse perceived enemies of slander, crimes, plots and perversions. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks, LaRouche says. Elements within the U.S. military launched the attacks as an attempted coup. Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz was one of the conspirators, LaRouche claims, along with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the Israeli army.
LaRouche targets usually don't bother responding to such theatrical accusations. However, a LaRouche follower once baited Kissinger so mercilessly that his wife, Nancy Kissinger, nearly throttled the woman. The Kissingers were at Newark airport in 1981, en route to Boston, where Henry was to undergo triple-bypass surgery, when a LaRouche activist shouted insults at Henry such as, "Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?"
Nancy Kissinger took the woman by the throat and asked, "Do you want to get slugged?" The woman pressed charges, but a judge acquitted Nancy of misdemeanor assault.
More than two decades later, LaRouche is still unnerving Henry Kissinger. At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last May a man approached Kissinger and invited him to meet his "nemesis" -- LaRouche, attending the dinner with representatives of his publication Executive Intelligence Review. Kissinger declined with obvious horror. LaRouche, appearing pleased with his residual power to alarm, was jovial. "Keep out of mischief," LaRouche told a reporter who witnessed the exchange, "unless you enjoy it."
LaRouche is more than a mischief-maker; he's a felon. In 1988, LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and conspiracy to hide his personal income. Prosecutors argued that aggressive LaRouche fundraisers solicited more than $30 million in loans from supporters, many elderly, with false assurances they'd be repaid. While some lenders lost their life savings, the LaRouche organization spent millions on property, a swimming pool and a horse riding ring, according to testimony.
LaRouche maintained that the convictions were engineered to silence him politically and set him up to be murdered in prison. He survived. One of his cellmates was disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, who later described LaRouche as amusing, erudite and convinced their cell was bugged. "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid," Bakker wrote in his autobiography, "would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."
In 1992, LaRouche ran for president from his cell, and taxpayers helped pay his way. The Federal Election Commission reluctantly awarded him federal campaign matching funds behind bars. Under federal campaign law, candidates seeking their party's presidential nomination qualify for matching funds by raising at least $5,000 in each of 20 states. The law makes no exceptions for felons.
Now, standing in the Washington hotel meeting room, LaRouche reveals a new plot afoot to deny him his rightful position of influence. Alluding to the death of Jeremiah Duggan, which has been covered in the British media, LaRouche suggests it's a hoax concocted by Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discredit him.
"This crowd is really coming after me," LaRouche says as his followers -- many of them in their early twenties -- nod their heads sympathetically. "They're trying to run an international, fake scandal through the British press, which they're going to bring into the United States . . . Because Cheney knows that if I'm not excluded . . . Cheney would be out."
For all LaRouche's attacks on the "dummy" and the "beast-man," the Bush-Cheney administration has been good for LaRouche. The nation at war has been good for LaRouche. It has allowed him to recruit students who weren't born when he was convicted of multiple felonies. The LaRouche Youth Movement has "hundreds" of members in the United States and "perhaps a lesser number abroad," LaRouche says by e-mail.
His new acolytes believe him when he says he can stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and save the world. They also believe that he's shaping them to help rule the world. He does so, they say, not merely by educating them about politics, history and the arts, but by turning them into authentic geniuses.
"You can actually teach genius," says 21-year-old Ed Hamler, one of LaRouche's new followers.
MEGHAN ROUILLARD, 20, LEFT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY to join the LaRouche Youth Movement. "Being a patriot means doing everything in your power to change the country," she says as she and other youths mill about the Marriott lobby after the Webcast.
LaRouche is preparing them to wage a new American revolution, Matthew Ogden, 21, says. He was a music student, studying bassoon at Indiana University, when planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now, like Rouillard, he spends much of his time trying to persuade other young people to escape "the whatever generation, the culture of dullness" and become "historic individuals."
Youth movement members attend LaRouche-sponsored classes where they learn how great figures of history such as Benjamin Franklin are similar to LaRouche. "You understand how they were operating in history and, even though they are dead, now you are actually carrying on their mission," Ogden explains. Hamler left Philadelphia University, where he'd been studying graphic design, two years ago to work fulltime for LaRouche, he says. "Morally , I couldn't not join," says Hamler who grew up in what he describes as a Philadelphia ghetto.
Hamler's parents didn't object, he says, because they're poor and understand the need to change the world. Rich people whose kids quit school to join LaRouche "freak out," Hamler says, "because they are in the baby boomer fantasy."
To LaRouche followers, baby boomers are a lost cause. Ruined by the conformity of the 1950s and the nuclear bomb scares and failed idealism of the '60s, they want to hide inside the cocoon of their mindless materialism. They expect their kids to do the same. "I can't stress this enough, baby boomers are insane," Hamler says. "They say: 'Don't mess with this LaRouche guy. You can't endanger my comfort zone.' They look at their kids as objects. They look at their kids as an extension of what they can get in life. But my parents are cool, so I don't have that problem."
LaRouche, he says, challenges young people to ask the most important question: What is truth? "LaRouche and the youth movement have discovered a method where you can discover truth," Hamler says.
What's the method? "We have to double the square," Hamler says, smiling.
LaRouche followers are big on doubling the square. Outside the room where LaRouche just spoke is a signboard marked with a square and the teasing question: "Can you double this square?" As Hamler leads a reporter through trying to double the square, a small crowd gathers. Young faces light up with encouraging smiles.
"This is from Plato; don't worry," Hamler says. "Let's say you have a square with an area of one, what are your sides going to be? That's right, one times one is one. Your area is one. Now, what I'm going to need you to do is double the area of the square. Physically, how could I produce a square with the area of two?"
A square where each side is two won't do. Its area would be four. "Once you investigate things like this, what you automatically run into is what is called the paradox," Hamler says. "You run into a problem that lies outside the way you are already thinking . . . You are going to have to think outside the way you were thinking to make this discovery, to make a breakthrough."
You could draw a square where each side is the square root of two -- but that number has an infinite decimal, with numerals stretching on forever. "How can you have a finite measurement?" Hamler asks. "How can you have a discrete side?"
So the problem can't be solved?
"No, it's doable," Hamler's friend chimes in. "There is a solution. But you are coming to see for yourself right now what happens when a system of thinking is, in itself, not adequate for the creation of something that you are looking for. When that's the case, if you are not willing to change the way you are thinking about it, you are screwed."
"That's what the baby boomers are, screwed," Hamler says.
The cheerful young men clearly relish this exercise. It's an important recruiting tool on street corners and college campuses across the United States and Europe. To join forces with LaRouche -- to enter his world of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies -- you have to accept that everything you know, even the way you think, is wrong.
THE WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Jeremiah Duggan, an energetic young man with a mop of dark curls, moved to Paris to study. He carried an ambitious double course-load: French at the British Institute and English at the Sorbonne. He had a sunny personality, an international array of friends and a broad range of interests, according to his mother and friends. He wrote poetry. He relished literature, art and music -- the Beatles most of all. Jeremiah was always softhearted, the kind of person who believed every homeless person he passed on the street was his responsibility, his mother says. In Paris, spurred by world events, he paid attention to politics for the first time. He also fell in love with a French voice student.
In December 2002, he brought his girlfriend home to London to meet his family and experience their traditional Friday night Shabbat. Jeremiah's German-born grandfather lit the candles and sang kiddush. Later, Jeremiah's girlfriend and his grandfather sang a duet, an aria from "The Magic Flute." In the flickering candlelight Jeremiah looked so proud that his mother swore she would never forget the expression on his face. She hasn't. That visit was the last time she saw her son alive.
In early 2003, Jeremiah telephoned to say he'd met a LaRouche activist who wrote for a French-language LaRouche newspaper, Nouvelle Solidarité. The literature he gave Jeremiah to read in French didn't always make total sense, but Jeremiah chalked it up to his difficulty translating unfamiliar political terms, his mother says. The following March, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Jeremiah phoned home to say the LaRouche activist had invited him to Germany for an antiwar conference and protest. Busy cramming for exams, he asked his mother to search the Internet for information about LaRouche. She tried, but misspelled the name as Laroche, and found nothing to alarm her. If she had spelled the name correctly, she might have learned that LaRouche's campaign Web site champions him as "the only qualified candidate for U.S. President with a political movement representing what Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as the 'forgotten man.' " She also might have found anti-LaRouche electronic bulletin boards, where former adherents claim psychological abuse and parents of current followers seem desperate to extricate their children from the group. She could have found the Anti-Defamation League Web site, which charges that LaRouche is anti-Semitic and has ties to radical right Islamic groups. She might have stumbled across a LaRouche campaign press release, which lambastes its critics.
"They say things like LaRouche is a leader of a cult or that he is anti-Semitic, or some other vile epithet," the release says. "Don't be fooled by these rumors and lies." They originate from Gestapo-style "thought police," and the families of the financial oligarchy who "exert control over politics in the U.S., through the top-down management of 'approved' popular beliefs, and religions, just as the oligarchy of the Roman Empire administered political control through the approved pantheon of pagan gods."
But Erica didn't see any of that. Looking back at that moment, when a keystroke might have altered her son's fate, she starts to weep.
"I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS -- by taking your bedrooms away from you . . . What I shall do is expose to you the cruel act of your sexual impotence . . . I will take away from you all hope that you can flee the terrors of politics to the safety of 'personal life.' I shall do this by showing to you that your frightened personal sexual life contains for you such terrors as the outside world could never offer you. I will thus destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical. I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee."
According to Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, that is an announcement LaRouche made to his own followers in an early 1970s memo.
Becoming a faithful follower of LaRouche is like entering the Bizarro World of the Superman comic books, says Paul Kacprzak, 45, who joined LaRouche as an idealistic teenager in the 1970s and worked for him for about a decade. As long as you stay inside the movement, everything you are told makes a certain sense. But if you try to view it from the outside, he says, "it's Bizarro World."
Born in 1922, LaRouche spent a painful childhood in New England, he writes in a 1988 version of his autobiography, The Power of Reason. His parents were fundamentalist Quakers and fierce anti-communists. When other children taunted him, he writes, his father forbade him to fight back. He endured years of torment and "numerous beatings," from bullies.
He was an unsuccessful student, he recalls, because he refused to believe his teachers' accepted truths. In geometry class, for example, "I could not accept the axioms and postulates," LaRouche writes. Later, attending Northeastern University in Boston "enraged" him, he writes. His instructors "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate." So he quit.
LaRouche's mother wanted him to become a minister. Instead, he became a communist organizer. As a leader of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, LaRouche ordered a series of physical attacks on rival groups, according to King. The attacks, which King says involved beatings with metal pipes, clubs and martial arts devices known as nunchuks, took place in New York and other cities in 1973 and 1974, and became known among leftists as "Operation Mop-Up." LaRouche's autobiography maintains that he and his followers were acting in self-defense.
During this period, LaRouche wrote about psychological techniques for transforming recruits into faithful organizers. In one treatise, "Beyond Psychoanalysis," he wrote that organizers should strip recruits of their egos and reduce them to a state called "little me," in order to rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity. LaRouche opined in another manifesto, "The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party," that "Sexual impotency is generally the causal root of Left political impotency." To become politically potent, he said, leftists must confront their sexual problems, such as their fear of and desire for their sadistic mothers.
End Part I
