Dec. 23: "I Was a Drone for Lyndon LaRouche," by Anonymous. "When I first joined it was the custom to give one night off a week plus Sunday, but for the last few years it was seven days a week with no pretense of providing time to foster the intellectual development of the membership."
Dec. 22: "T'was the night before Christmas and Lyndon was snoring/But no dreams of sugarplums: that would be boring..." To see what LaRouche REALLY wants for Christmas, follow this link.
Dec. 18: Ex-LaRouche follower tells how to construct a conspiracy theory about your enemies in one easy lesson. "When the party is over with a person or group, then you can use the six degrees of separation principal to show how they were part of an all-encompassing evil conspiracy since the time the first primitive humans took a baby step."
Dec. 18: "The sad tale of Jeremiah Duggan." From Muxuyou's Blog (Dec. 16, 2008): "Whereas most of us would have left the weirdly named 'Schiller Institute'...when the bizarre political diatribes began...including blaming the Iraq war on 'the Jews,' Duggan stood up and proclaimed: 'But I'm a Jew!' Wasn't there someone in the room with the remnants of a conscience who told him that he should get the fuck out of there for his own safety? Apparently not or he wouldn't have died under extremely suspicious circumstances."
Dec. 18: The children of the LaRouche cult. "It had never occurred to me the great paradox that must forever live in a LaRouchie-parented child's mind: If Lyndon LaRouche had not been in prison, they would never have been born."
Dec. 18: Leaving the LaRouche cult. "I had to 'hit bottom' with LaRouche before I could even begin to steer clear of the wreckage my life had become; unfortunately, this appears to be the only way out of a cult--just to be honest with yourself about the desperation of your own personal situation and to walk into a counseling center or police station and ask for help getting out."
Dec. 18: LaRouche admits that ego-stripping is an extremely dangerous psychological method. Here is how he puts it in Beyond Psychoanalysis (1973): "Since the analyst [psychoanalyst] is unable to offer his subject a mass-movement orientation in which to locate a new, positive social identity, if the analyst were concerned to strip away the persona, the result would be FREQUENT PSYCHOSES AND SUICIDES among the individuals so stripped of those protective illusions which hide from them the emptiness of their individual qua individual lives." (emphasis added)
But if psychoanalysts--medical doctors with years of specialized psychiatric training--do not practice such a dangerous method, why is it okay for LaRouche, who has no mental health credentials whatsoever, to employ it? LaRouche suggests that he, unlike the psychoanalysts, can offer the ego-stripped victim an alternative to psychosis and suicide, i.e., the reconstruction of his or her personality on socialist lines and as part of a mass movement.
And he states, in his usual turgid prose: "Because the activity of socialist groups is task-oriented toward attempting to explore and remove bourgeois ideology, and since the psychodynamics of ideology are only the more general form for the psychodynamics of neurosis, the intellectual preoccupations of the socialist profession properly impel the movement, however reluctantly, to converge upon much of the work of psychoanalysis in that respect."
[DK: LaRouche used pithier language to state his intent in an August 1973 speech, the transcript of which was circulated as an internal document: "I will...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. I shall not pull you back from fleeing, but rather destroy the place to which you would attempt to flee." ("The Politics of Male Impotence"; read it HERE.)]
Dec. 14: How to recruit a slave for LaRouche. A former member reveals the basic techniques: "So the mama's boy who's never done anything in his life is going to come here and say 'Alex made some homosexual kid cry and I want my mommy'...are you homosexual, Frank? Is that it? Is that why you haven't been able to raise any money out there?"
Dec. 12: "The Little Boy Who Never Was," by Michael Scott Winstead (from Factnet, 2004). An account of one of the hundreds of cases of enforced abortion in the LaRouche cult: "And they pushed her tearfully into the car, and into the clinic, and they signed her consent forms, and they had her child vacuumed out of her."
Dec. 11: Want to know why LaRouche keeps harping on the theme that Jeremiah Duggan's parents are part of a Fabian Society plot? Read here an early LaRouche attack (1976) on the venerable U.K. social-democratic intellectual circle in which he makes it crystal clear that he thinks the Fabians are a policy-connivance, dirty-tricks and intellectual contamination operation controlled by the Rothschild family--or, as he would call the latter in The Case of [the Jew] Walter Lippmann the following year, "the British (Rothschilds)." And note LaRouche's use of the term "fungus-cultures," which foreshadows his current employment of the epithet "slime-mold" to characterize the conspiracy against himself that he claims the Duggans, the Fabian Society, Tony Blair, Dick and Lynne Cheney and the "British" bankers are all part of.
Dec. 9: Anyone who's thinking of quitting the LaRouche Youth Movement should read this. Chaim, a young person who left shortly after 9-11, found that the LaRouchians were totally unable to acknowledge that he had developed real doubts and disagreements. Instead, they insisted he was just "blocking." How could they have done otherwise? To acknowledge that legitimate doubts are possible would have undermined "LaRouche's image and infallibility."
Dec. 9: LaRouche and the suicide of the Freedom Rider. In The Power of Reason, his 1979 autobiography, LaRouche describes an odd incident in the early 1960s that may shed light on how he would later respond to the suicide of Ken Kronberg and the death of Jeremiah Duggan.
LaRouche claims that he began--during a period of increasing tension with his first wife--to provide "personal counseling" to a troubled young man named Griswold, a former Freedom Rider. After a number of visits, Griswold was making progress...until, supposedly, LaRouche's wife intervened. "An intruded household scene, during which [she] carelessly included savage complaints against my 'uncompensated' help to Griswold, so profoundly disturbed him that I never heard from him again--until being informed, some months later, of his suicide." LaRouche alleges that the news of Griswold's death killed his "last strong feeling" for his marriage and helped to establish in him "a deepening ruthlessness toward any aspect of personal life which corrupted the dictate of conscience in respect to the duties of public life."
Is there a pattern here? LaRouche serves as a mentor to a younger man. When the latter commits suicide, LaRouche blames his own wife and develops a new "ruthlessness" regarding the primacy of the political over the personal. Years later, LaRouche becomes a ruthless (to say the least) mentor to another young man who, after decades of service to LaRouche, commits suicide. LaRouche blames the suicide's wife. And then there's the young man who decides he doesn't want LaRouche to be his mentor at all--he ends up dead, LaRouche claims this death was a suicide, and blames the young man's mother. Thus we have three suicides (real or alleged), three witch-women--and a completely innocent (if ruthless) Lyndon! I leave the explanation of all this to the psychiatrists, but I do have two final questions: Why did LaRouche, a college dropout with no mental health credentials, undertake to serve as a counselor to Griswold? And why did LaRouche, in later years, having earned no credentials in the interim, presume to practice the "ruthless" form of therapy known as ego-stripping on other young people, many of them possibly as troubled as Griswold had been?
Dec. 9: The LaRouche movement's view of the suicide of Arthur Koestler (1983). Anyone who wants to understand why LaRouche suggested in April 2007 that Ken Kronberg kill himself--and why LaRouche and his followers behaved in such a callous (indeed, sadistic) manner towards the Kronberg family after Ken went out and did it--will find a partial explanation here, in the sick "humor" of this editorial from LaRouche's New Solidarity, March 14, 1983.
The anonymous editorial writer, in commenting on the double suicide of the eminent Jewish author (referred to euphemistically as a "Hungarian-emigré intelligence agent for the British") and his wife Cynthia, says the "world might benefit if a selected few took the Koestlers as a heroic example." The editorialist then fantasizes about various fitting modes of suicide for Jews and non-Jews hated by the LaRouche organization: Henry Kissinger, Nancy Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Swiss banker Fritz Leutwiler, and Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei (the latter, it is suggested, should turn his body over "to the local dogfood manufacturer"). And then: "We could go further, but why should the worthwhile vast majority of the human race settle for attempts to solve its antisocial problems on a case-by-case basis? Why not get organized to settle with such characters all at once?"
Oh, and readers should note the emphasis on husband-wife suicide: first, the real-life example of the Koestlers; second, the fantasy example of the Kissingers. There's an eerie parallel here to what the LaRouchian troll "revenire" has been saying on blogs recently: that Molly Kronberg should join her husband (and Jeremiah Duggan) on the "jumper brigade." Hmmmm...I wonder if revenire's IP address can be traced back to the environs of Round Hill, Virginia...
Dec. 8: Ex-followers of LaRouche blast his insults to Jeremiah Duggan's mom and his attempts to evade any responsibility for Jeremiah's death. "What kind of a man, desperate to exculpate himself, blames a bereaved mother for her son's death--and somehow thinks that makes him look good?"
These postings from Factnet (with footnotes by D. King) also express outrage over LaRouche's attempts to block any new probe of what happened to Jeremiah. The postings are by three ex-members (and a close relative of a current longtime member) who possess in the aggregate over 50 years of experience in and around LaRouche's hostile and paranoid cult-world. If people with this depth of knowledge believe there's a strong possibility that Jeremiah was murdered, that is yet another powerful reason for supporting the call for a new investigation.
Dec. 1: Blood libel, anyone? This illustration appeared in "Rockefeller's Fascism with a Democratic Face," the book-length article that comprised the Nov.-Dec. 1974 issue of LaRouche's theoretical magazine The Campaigner. I don't know the original provenance of the drawing, but within the editorial context of the "Rockefeller" Campaigner (and given the dynamics of the LaRouche organization at the time), I think it is a clear expression of anti-Semitic paranoia--and note the hooked nose on the biggest of the four banker-vampires.
As of 1974 the LaRouche organization still employed a Marxist and "anti-fascist" rhetoric of sorts, but the main emphasis in the Rockefeller Campaigner was on attacking international financiers and speculators in a manner redolent of post-World War One fascism and national socialism. And LaRouche had already published his notorious footnotes to the "Feuerbach" Campaigner (Dec. 1973) attacking the Jews (with nary a protest from his followers) as merchant-usurers who lack a "Christian conscience" and alleging that their culture is "merely the residue left...after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim" (read here).
In addition, the May 1974 Campaigner had started the practice of labeling the British and U.S. troops who fought against Hitler as being an "SS," with the implication that the crimes of the German SS were, well, not good, but at least no worse than those of the Allies. (The cover of the May 1974 issue even depicted Hitler's great foe Winston Churchill as a 1930s Bugsy Siegel-style gangster; see here.) And the "SS"-ness of the Allied military was blamed, in part, on one of LaRouche's earliest Symbolic Evil Jews: the psychologist Kurt Lewin, a refugee from Nazism whom LaRouche depicts as having had almost demonic powers for brainwashing individuals and the masses.
Thus LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) was already well on its way to effecting the cognitive inversion of reality in which the Jews are seen as Nazis "100 times worse" than the German ones, and the latter are regarded as having been Jewish puppets (i.e., shadow Nazis who were neo-Platonic reflections of the Jewish ones) or, by their fight against the British, as objectively ANTI-NAZI (because the British, and Adolf Hitler, were supposedly under the control of Jewish oligarchs plotting to kill billions of people, not just millions). The full development of this lunacy was still a couple of years off, but the grotesque illustration of human-blood-quaffing bankers in the "Rockefeller" Campaigner shows where the NCLC was already headed.
And I should add that Daniel S. Messinger, today a developmental psychologist at the University of Miami, was absolutely right when, after interviewing ex-LaRouchians in the early 1980s as a University of Chicago graduate student, he concluded in a lengthy study that the LaRouche movement had been essentially fascist in character from the early 1970s on. Belated kudos to Messinger for thinking outside the box--and discerning the psychosocial reality beneath the rhetoric.
Dec. 1: LaRouche's fixation on damage control. After posting the NCLC chairman's 1973 statement about how ego-stripping sometimes creates "a bit of a mess to be cleaned up" (Nov. 29 item directly below), I received a tip from "eaglebeak," an ex-LaRouche follower with many sources inside the cult's headquarters in Leesburg, about Lyndon's more recent use of such terminology. It would appear that Der Abscheulicher's cynical disregard for the well-being (or even the physical survival) of his followers has remained unchanged over the decades. ⇒ Nov. 29: Was Jeremiah Duggan, to LaRouche, just "a bit of a mess to be cleaned up"? In his Beyond Psychoanalysis treatise (The Campaigner, Sept.-Oct. 1973), Der Abscheulicher reveals his disdain for the psychological crises triggered in young recruits by "ego stripping" group-confrontation sessions, and also admits that he is fully aware of the dangers involved in the use of such tactics.
In the final five-page section ("The Psychology of Mass Organizing"; excerpted here from the pamphlet version published in late 1973), LaRouche describes in detail his theory of how "bourgeois ideology" can be destroyed in the minds of both his "petty-bourgeois" intellectual cadre and his hoped-for working-class recruits through ego "stripping and rebuilding processes." Suggests that he can overcome the "neurotic bourgeois deformations of the personality of the individual cadres." Discusses, within a Marxist framework, the problem of how to use psychological confrontation to remold the personalities of "worker contacts." (Since LaRouche has long since jettisoned Marxism and now focuses on building an elitist youth movement, the reader should translate "worker contacts" circa 1973 into "youth contacts" circa 2008.)
LaRouche provides us with his first zinger on p. 51: "He [the practitioner of ego stripping] succeeds in either organizing or estranging worker-contacts on the basis of induced heteronomic rage. (Either way, the organization is thus confronted with a bit of a mess to be cleaned up.)"
[DK: I would like to be sitting in U.S. federal court (civil division) during a future trial of Lyn and Helga LaRouche for violating Jeremiah Duggan's civil rights--and listening as the Duggan family's attorney asks Lyn what a "bit of a mess to be cleaned up" means, and whether LaRouche disciple Jean Gabriel Maheo manifested an "induced heteronomic rage" towards Jeremiah in Wiesbaden, Germany during the early morning hours of March 27, 2003.] The second zinger is found on p. 52 in LaRouche's discussion of "clinical group confrontations" within his movement. He writes: "The hazard in utilizing the powerful concentrated social forces of an entire organization to effect forced [!!!] therapy ought to be more or less obvious." He describes how his movement had experimented with this methodology during a "preliminary period of several weeks of intensive sessions by member groups in the U.S.A. and Western Europe." He boasts that these sessions occurred with "an absolute minimum of instances of neurotic episodes in individual participants," but then admits in the next sentence that success had been achieved "[d]espite the disturbing, although much-reduced incidence of neurotic behaviors..."
LaRouche pays lip service to such hazards by suggesting that ego-stripping methods should be conducted only "under rigorous control of qualified leading individuals..." Nevertheless, he writes, "the approximation of clinical group confrontations within the limits of clear and restricted task-orientations is absolutely mandatory."
[DK: I would like to be there as the Duggans' attorney in the above-predicted civil rights suit asks LaRouche why ego-stripping of ANY sort should have been made "mandatory"? And what constitutes a "qualified" practitioner? And what training are such individuals given? And who provides the training and then makes the decision that a particular person is qualified--LaRouche himself? And what gives LaRouche--a man with only a high school education and no experience whatsoever in the mental health field--the capability to provide such training and make such decisions?]
Nov. 20: The thuggery of LaRouche's Wiesbaden gang goes way, way back. "Earnest One," a close relative of a long-time LaRouche activist, tells of his own nasty encounter with the group's recruiters at a conference in Wiesbaden in the late 1970s. Says they told him that if he didn't agree to join up they'd do serious physical harm to his relative. "I was carted off to a room where a team...kept me sleep deprived for six straight days as they conducted one of their infamous ego-stripping sessions." Earnest One draws on this experience to create a fictional scenario of how a cult recruitment process gone wrong might result in a victim such as Jeremiah Duggan dying in a "state of terror." The insights of Earnest One are offered in the course of an online debate with the most annoying LaRouche apologist one is ever likely to meet online or anywhere else. Nov. 11: Have the LaRouchians no shame? Vicious Executive Intelligence Review attack on Jeremiah Duggan's mom. The following appeared in EIR, Dec. 15, 2006: "In reviewing the ongoing smear campaign, LaRouche raised a pointed question in the light of Erica Duggan's obsessive, aggressive campaign: What did Jeremy's mother say to her son in the phone conversation which they had right before he ran out to commit suicide? It has been well documented that Jeremy was a deeply disturbed youth, who had already been treated by the Tavistock Clinic as a child, after the breakup of his parents' marriage. Erica Duggan's behavior has all the earmarks of a guilt-ridden parent, whose own neurosis is being used by those political forces wishing to harm the LaRouche movement. LaRouche asked: What ugly secret is Erica Duggan trying to cover up? What did she say to Jeremy? That is the question the media should be raising..."
Nov. 8: Parents from across the world speak out against LaRouche's exploitation of their loved ones. Detailed statements re the LaRouche Youth Movement's effect on recruits: sudden personality changes...robotic mouthing of slogans...anger and hysteria...delusional thinking...separation from family and friends...the abandonment of university studies, career goals and personal dreams to join LaRouche's all-consuming crusade against an imaginary global conspiracy. Nov. 7: A discussion among ex-followers of LaRouche: Is he responsible for Jeremiah Duggan's death? "The LAST thing you want at a [LaRouche conference] is a Jeremiah Duggan asking questions...In the crazy world of LaRouche profiling, a British Jew who knows about Tavistock and just called your group's views on Jews and Tavistock crazy is not going to be high on the friendly list." Nov. 7: "Jewish Student's Death in Germany Was Murder, Experts Say," Arutz Sheva (Israel), Nov. 2. "Although Jeremiah's blood-soaked address book was found in his pocket, his passport was not. Instead, his passport, which was also stained with his blood, was later handed to the police by Ortrum Cramer, one of LaRouche's followers....Cramer has never been asked how the passport came into her possession." Nov. 7: "Cult death student's family in court fight for new inquest," Daily Mail (London), Nov. 1. "New evidence gathered by three top forensic specialists shows the young student was savagely beaten to death with a blunt instrument. Their reports said that the damage sustained by his body could not have been caused by vehicles hitting him, and appeared to have been deliberately inflicted." Nov. 7: "Overseas fight for son's justice," Harrow Observer (London), Oct. 23. Report on Berlin conference quotes Hugo Duggan, Jeremiah's father: "Former members of [the LaRouche organization] gave powerful statements and damning accounts about the group. These people do not normally speak out...It was a very positive meeting with people coming together to make sure we are in the process of blowing this far-right organisation away and we will continue to campaign for justice." Nov. 6: "High court grants mother new inquest," Times-Series (London), Nov. 6. The wall of denial finally begins to crack! Erica Duggan's lawyers have successfully argued that the U.K. Attorney General's refusal to allow a second inquest into the death of Mrs. Duggan's son, Jeremiah, "should be amenable to review, allowing Mrs. Duggan to resubmit her case to the High Court." Mrs Duggan says: "This is the best outcome we could have wished for. The court said we had a lot of important evidence that the original post mortem missed. Hopefully the application for a new inquest will now just be a formality. We are not expecting anyone to oppose it." In other words, a new inquest will look at the forensic evidence that Jeremiah may have been beaten to death, including the fact that his passport, with his blood on it, was in the possession of the LaRouchians, not on his body, when the body was examined by the police at the putative "suicide" scene. This could finally lead to the British government putting heavy pressure on the German government to stop covering up for Lyn and Helga LaRouche and their far-right Jew-hating thugs in Wiesbaden. Nov. 6: "Inquest win for student's family," BBC News, Nov. 5. "The family of a student killed in a 'state of terror' after unwittingly attending a far-right event in Germany have come closer to a fresh inquest..." Nov. 4: A powerful analysis by "eaglebeak" of the Berlin anti-LaRouche conference. "When the LaRouche leadership seems to have something very intimate to do with the death of a loved one, and then denies it, covers it up, lies about it, and blames the dead person and the dead person's bereaved family for the death--it has the effect of creating an implacable demand for justice against LaRouche and all his epigonoi." Nov. 3: Report on the Oct. 17, 2008 Berlin anti-LaRouche conference. Parents, experts, politicians, lawyers spoke out more strongly than ever about LaRouche's psychological terror tactics, intimidation of opponents, expoitation of young people, and coded anti-Semitism. And speaker after speaker urged the German government to finally launch a serious investigation of the case of Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish university student from the U.K. who traveled to Germany for a LaRouche-sponsored event in March 2003--and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Oct. 31: "Rights leader sentenced to 15 years for incest" (Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2008). Former LaRouche Vice-Presidential running mate and civil rights activist James Bevel had raped his own underage daughter. "[The prosecution] revealed that at least four other daughters Bevel had with various women have made similar allegations against him." And: "The assault occurred in the early 1990s in Loudoun County, when Bevel was working closely with the Virginia-based organization led by...Lyndon LaRouche."
Lyndon sure knows how to pick 'em for his self-styled movement of neo-Platonic humanist golden souls. Remember how Rev. Bevel served as the public face for LaRouche's 1992 jailhouse race for the Presidency? Remember how Bevel described LaRouche as the successor to the mantle of Martin Luther King? And how Bevel served as a go-between for the alliance of LaRouche with NOI leader Louis Farrakhan? Now we see the true face of con man Bevel--a serial molester of his own daughters. (Ex-LaRouchians who were in Leesburg at the time recall that Bevel was a bizarre and dubious personality but say the cult's leadership looked the other way since Bevel was believed to be carrying out vital assignments for Lyn.) Oct. 31 (updated Nov. 5): Did the LaRouchians work to death a paraplegic in one of the cult's fundraising boiler rooms? Comments by ex-followers of LaRouche on the life and death of Andy Klein. "You cannot have a [person like Andy] in an immobile position for hours on end making phone calls and being yelled at as the potential for blood clots and bedsores begins to skyrocket." Oct. 31: Lyndon LaRouche and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad attacked George Soros as their Symbolic Evil Jew. Translation of Sept. 22, 1997 article from Corriere della Sera, Italy's most important daily newspaper, in which correspondent Stefano Cingolani writes: "Mahathir used in his argument the venom disseminated by a singular American hyperreactionary, Lyndon LaRouche, who never misses an opportunity to recycle his theory of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. This time he has accused Soros of having collaborated – although Jewish – with the Nazis who occupied Hungary, his native country. And the Malaysian press has embroidered on it."
