Downloaded from www.zcportal.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=30
The LaRouche Connection.htm
What candidate for the
Democrat Presidential nomination--whose campaign is being underwritten by the
American taxpayers to the tune of $800,000—controls a right-wing extremist
political party in Germany? Howard Dean? John F. Kerry? Why should Americans
care? LaRouche has always been on the extreme fringe of American politics, his
theories have almost no credibility among the general population and he has
never been able to garner more than 80,000 votes in any of his many attempts at
the Presidency.
The answer is very
simple. In the aftermath of 9/11, the planning of which was done in Germany,
and the exponential rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in recent years (of which
the aborted attempt by Neo-Nazis to bomb the cornerstone laying ceremony at
Munich’s new Jewish Center is only the most prominent example), it is all too
obvious what a small band of dedicated and well-funded extremists can
accomplish.
Most Americans do not
realize that Lyndon LaRouche’s organizational apparatus and ambitions are
international in scope. Through a shell organization called the Schiller
Institute (named after the famous German poet Friedrich Schiller, the author of
the “Ode to Joy”) LaRouche has established a forum for the surreptitious
dissemination of his more hare-brained political theories within a context that
is seemingly dedicated to artistic and humanistic studies.
The Schiller Institute
is concerned with such recondite topics as the lowering of standardized tuning
for musical instruments, mathematical pedagogy and the influence of Greek
culture on the philosophy and art of the German romantics. A cursory examination
of the Institute’s house organ “Fidelio” finds articles dealing with Homer,
Henry VII, Benjamin Franklin, Leibniz, the “Four Serious Songs” of Johannes
Brahms and reviews of books, art exhibits, and musical and dramatic
performances. There are the occasional articles in which Vice President Richard
Cheney is said to be controlling the government of the United States, and by
extension, the world. And interestingly enough, there are articles such as Paul
Kreingold’s “I.L. Peretz, Father of the Yiddish Renaissance” in the Summer 2003
edition of “Fidelio.”
It all sounds so
innocent and somehow wholesome. An international organization that is dedicated
to educational outreach and fostering understanding among the peoples of the
world. Yet, the Schiller Institute and Lyndon LaRouche himself are widely
regarded by experts as part of a sophisticated and rapidly expanding network of
anti-Semitic right-wing and neo-Nazi organizations.
Lyndon LaRouche began
his political career as a supporter of the Communist Party USA and then became
affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party. In 1969 he became head of the
Labor Caucus of the Students for a Democratic Society (and was then known by
the alias of Lyn Marcus). In 1972 he formed the National Caucus of Labor
Committees. In 1973 LaRouche began “Operation Mop-Up” in which NCLC thugs
physically attacked members of the Communist Party USA and Socialist Workers
Party in order to establish LaRouche’s total control over all political parties
of the extreme Marxist left. At about this same time LaRouche founded the U.S.
Labor Party as the political arm of the NCLC and began his first contacts with
extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic political groups such as the KKK, the John
Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby. USLP political pamphlets from the period
stress that America was being controlled by a conspiracy led by Nelson
Rockefeller, the Queen of England and British Jews. In LaRouche’s paranoid view
of history, there has been a secret cabal of Jewish conspirators controlling world
history since the time of the Babylonian captivity. In his worldview the
British Empire is only one manifestation of an ancient and all-powerful “Jewish
conspiracy.” LaRouche’s organization later had close relations with the Aryan
Nation and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
Some quotations from
LaRouche’s writings are illustrative of a very different worldview from that
ostensibly espoused by the Schiller Institute. For example, in March 1978,
LaRouche wrote in an editorial entitled “A War-Winning Strategy” in his
political organ “New Solidarity” that “America must be cleansed for its
righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other
British agents from the councils of government, industry and labor.” In the
same issue LaRouche also stated, “Can one punish sheep for being sheep? The
Israelis have behaved with monstrous, worse-than-Nazi bestiality.” In December
of 1978 LaRouche stated in the same journal that “Zionism is the state of
collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of international
Jewry.”
And finally, in the
September-October 1980 of “The Campaigner” (another LaRouche political organ)
LaRouche managed to conflate the old canard about Jews being responsible for
the slave trade along with the canard that Jews were responsible for cultural
decadence and artistic modernism:
“Jazz was foisted on
black Americans by the same oligarchy which had run the U.S. slave trade, with
the help of the classically trained but immoral George Gershwin and the
Paris-New York circuit of drug-taking avant-garde artists.”
These excerpts from
LaRouche’s writings reveal him to be not an exponent of Enlightenment humanism,
but a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose aesthetic views are scarcely different
from those of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, LaRouche’s protestations against jazz are
eerily similar to the formulations used by the Nazis to ban the syncopated
“Negro-Jewish-Masonic” music of jazz as well as modernist operas such as Ernst
Krenek’s “Jonny Spielt Auf.”
The Unsolved Case of
Jeremiah Duggan
Shortly after the
start of the Iraq War, a young Jewish student from England named Jeremiah
Duggan who was studying in Paris, decided to attend what he thought was an
anti-war conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. The “anti-war” conference was
sponsored by the Schiller Institute and young Duggan had joined the
organization completely unaware of the group’s anti-Semitic history.
Duggan discovered the
Schiller Institute’s anti-Semitism while in Wiesbaden and then publicly
announced his Jewish identity. At 4:20am on March 27, 2003 Duggan called his
girlfriend Maya in Paris and told her that he was under a great deal of
pressure and wanted to go back to Paris. About an hour later Duggan called his
mother in England and told her that we was in trouble and was frightened for
his life. Less than an hour after that Duggan was knocked down by a car on
Wiesbaden’s Berliner Strasse and then immediately run over by another car that
instantly killed him.
The German police did
an investigation that was shockingly inadequate and ruled Duggan’s death to be
a suicide. The German police only questioned Schiller Institute officials and
supporters and refused to take statements from Duggan’s roommate in Germany.
Additionally, some relevant evidence disappeared from police custody.
On November 4, 2003 a
coroner’s inquest in London rejected the conclusion of the German police that
Duggan ran out into the road with “suicidal intent” and ruled that the
investigation was woefully inadequate. Currently, British authorities are
contemplating requesting German police to conduct a new investigation. Schiller
Institute spokesmen deny any culpability in Duggan’s death and the case remains
unsolved.
LaRouche and the BueSo
The German political
arm of the LaRouche movement is called the Buergerrechtsbewegung Solidaritaet
(BueSo) [Civil Rights Solidarity Movement] and is run by Helge Zepp LaRouche,
the German wife of Lyndon LaRouche. Although a minor party (it garnered only
16, 958 votes in the 2002 Bundestag elections and 6,234 votes in the 2003
Bavarian Landtag elections), the BueSo has local offices throughout Germany and
is affiliated with similarly named parties throughout Europe, Australia and
Asia. The BueSo was founded
in 1992 and was the successor political party to the Patrioten fuer Deutschland
(German Patriots Party). Like the Schiller Institute, the BueSo emphasizes its
more mainstream political agenda (a critique of globalization, opposition to
privatization of German utilities, opposition to the War in Iraq) while
couching its radical and anti-Semitic rhetoric in language that narrowly avoids
falling within the purview of Germany’s anti-Nazi and Holocaust denial laws.
For example, in the January 11, 1993 issue of BueSo party organ “Neuen
Solidaritaet” Helge Zepp LaRouche stated: “[W]e need a movement that releases
Germany finally from the control of the forces from Versailles and Yalta.” This
is almost exactly the same formulation used by Hitler who alleged that Germany
was “sold out” at the Versailles Peace Treaty Conference following the end of
World War I by the Weimar government that he claimed was controlled by Jews.
To avoid running afoul
of laws banning overt anti-Semitism, the BueSo, like other radical and
mainstream political parties in Germany, uses the euphemism “anti-Zionism” in
its political statements. Likewise, the BueSo and other LaRouche political
organizations absolve the Muslims of the Middle East from any complicity in
atrocities perpetrated against the state of Israel or the United States.
Indeed, a mainstay of LaRouche political dogma has been that Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda were not responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but that they
were planned by extremist elements within the United States military apparatus
in order to start a world war in order to provide an excuse to destroy Islam.
This plan was allegedly masterminded by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vice President
Cheney and, of course, the ever-present worldwide Jewish conspiracy that
controls the United States, Great Britain and various international agencies
such as the tri-Lateral Commission, the WTO and the Council on Foreign Affairs.
The founding of the BueSo
in the year 1992 is very significant. In the aftermath of German reunification,
neo-Nazi activity increased dramatically. Neo-Nazis participated in severe
rioting in Hoyerswerda (1991), Rostock (1992) and Magdeburg (1994), and
neo-Nazi participation in a series of murders in Moelln in 1992 greatly shocked
the nation. This led to the banning in 1992 of a number of German neo-Nazi
parties, such as the Deutsche Alternative, the Nationale Offensive and the
Nationalistische Front. While skinheads and other violent neo-Nazis were
arousing the ire of the German population, the political arms of the various
neo-Nazi organizations were having a real impact on German elections. The
neo-Nazi Republikaner Partei garnered 7.5% of the vote in the Berlin Landtag election
in 1989, 9% of the European Parliament election of 1989, 11% of the
Baden-Wuerttemberg Landtag election in 1992 and 8.3% of the Berlin Landtag
election of 1992. From 1989 to 1994 the Republikaners elected 262
representatives to 215 local and regional governments. (In Munich, the
Republikaner Johann Weinfurtner is still a member of the Stadtrat, or city
council.) Between December 1992 and June 1994 the Republikaners were linked to
14 crimes, including one death by beating.
Likewise, the Deutsche
Volksunion, a profoundly anti-Semitic party led by Munich business magnate Dr.
Gerhard Grey received 6% of the vote in the Bremen Landtag elections in 1991
and 6% of the vote in the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag elections in 1992.
Clearly, there were
significant electoral gains to be made if the splintered right-wing extremist
and neo-Nazi parties could coalesce into one unified political party. This
appears to be a goal of the BueSo. In 2002 the BueSo briefly considered joining
forces with the Free Democrat Party (FDP) in North Rhineland-Westphalia. The
FDP is a small mainstream party that often allies itself with the Christian
Democratic Union and is generally concerned with lowering taxes, encouraging
free trade and avoiding the social issues of the CDU and SPD (Social Democratic
Party). At this time the NR-W FDP was run by Jamal Karsli, a Syrian-born German
citizen, and the notorious Juergen Moellemann, the most openly anti-Semitic
mainstream politician in Germany since Adolf Hitler. The BueSo even went so far
as to publish a glowing interview with Karsli in “Neuen Solidaritaet” that
originated in Syria with Karsli accusing the Israeli military of “Nazi
methods.”
Karsli soon resigned
his membership in the FDP. Moellemann, the former Vice-Chancellor of Germany
under Helmut Kohl and an extremely popular figure who sported a Fuehrer
mustache, caused a scandal during the 2002 Bundestag elections when he mailed
millions of anti-Semitic pamphlets to registered voters. The BueSo’s dreams of
affiliation with the FDP came to end during the Summer of 2003 when Moellemann
was discovered to have hidden in foreign banks millions of Euros in bribes,
some of which may have come from Muslim organizations with ties to terrorist
organizations. Moellemann, an experienced parachutist, committed suicide by
jumping out of an airplane and slipping out of his parachute.
Causes for Concern
While it is easy to
dismiss Lyndon LaRouche and his political cronies as just another group of
crackpots, the same could have been said in 1919 of a small Bavarian political
party called the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. Through mergers with other small
parties and dynamic leadership it eventually came to be known as the NSDAP or
Nazi Party. What is particularly worrisome about LaRouche and his followers is that
on the surface they seem so reasonable. Certain aspects of their agenda seem no
more sinister than Mortimer J. Adler’s “Great Books” program.
This was part of the
appeal of Hitler. Many Germans mistakenly thought that Hitler was a man of
culture, someone who would restore the dignity and primacy of German high
culture of the 19th century. They were willing to forgive the excesses of the
Brownshirts because they felt that Hitler’s Wagnerianism was the true face of
National Socialism.
The same is true of
LaRouche. He is obviously an intelligent person and from all accounts can
discourse on any number of topics. Yet, there is also the LaRouche of
“Operation Mop-Up,” the LaRouche of a thousand and one conspiracy theories all
of which are anti-Semitic in origin. Like Hitler, LaRouche espouses a politics
based on the Fuehrer-Prinzip, a paranoid interpretation of history that is
anti-Semitic to its core, and economic fascism.
Then there is also the
problem of LaRouche’s finances. LaRouche is a millionaire who made his initial
fortune through a company that developed for the trucking industry dedicated
software for Wang computer systems. Long before Howard Dean, Lyndon LaRouche
realized the fund-raising potential of the internet. In addition to his
personal fortune, LaRouche’s fund-raising apparatus is truly international in
scope, as can be seen from just a cursory examination of the BueSo website
(www.bueso.de). And as mentioned at the beginning of this article, LaRouche
knows his way around election laws, and his campaign has just received $800,000
in tax-supported funding from the Federal Election Commission.
Although his age
(LaRouche was born in 1922) will probably prevent him from ever achieving any
close to an electoral victory, the campaign and funding apparatus that LaRouche
has created serves as a model for other right-wing extremists, anti-Semites and
neo-Nazis. LaRouche’s worldwide organization and his many ties to the extremist
and neo-Nazi underground as well as mainstream political organizations makes
him an ideal conduit for the dissemination and transfer of cash to facilitate
overt and covert political activities. And whether or not the Schiller
Institute can be shown to be complicit in the death of Jeremiah Duggan, it is a
fact that violence is not unknown among the political tools of Lyndon LaRouche.
The poet of the “Ode
to Joy” must be turning over in his grave.
|