WHO IS THIS LAROUCHE AND WHAT DOES HE WANT?
BY MARK EVANS
Buried in the Lyndon LaRouche/U.S. Labor Party file at the Data Center,
the off-Broadway media/research outlet on 19th Street in Oakland, is a curious
document dated January 16, 1981, in which the late Larry MacDonald, Congressman
from Georgia and John Birch Society elder, read some interesting comments
regarding LaRouche and his organization into the Congressional Record: "The
NCLC," said MacDonald, "is a closed band, but one with its own
unique twist that makes it as bizarre among political groupings as a Mobius
strip is among geometric figures." This phenomenon of the pot calling
the kettle black is typical in the factional fighting among the political
cults, not only on the Right, but across the political spectrum. The Right,
we should recognize, is not monolithic.
Depending on whom you believe, Larry MacDonald himself is alive (John Judge)
or dead (most of the media). The late Mae Brussel, researcher par excellence,
in an exposé of MacDonald and his associates published in the February
'84 Hustler, made a strong case that Larry MacDonald and KAL 007 were taken
out, not by the Russians, but by the CIA because MacDonald, whose neo-Nazi
connections had begun to surface, had become a liability to his old friend
Ronald Reagan. Be that as it may, mulling over MacDonald's evocation of
the image of the Mobius strip regarding LaRouche, I decided that the Mobius
strip is an apt geometric metaphor for the whole political spectrum.
Lyndon LaRouche, aka "Lyn Marcus" (1922-), an ex-Trotskyist (and
ex-Wall Street economic consultant, who retired in 1964 with a cool million
at the age of 42), was the economic theoretician and father confessor to
the "National Caucus of Labor Committees" (the NCLC), which originated
within the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS). The NCLC began as a neo-Marxian sect. Lyn Marcus was teaching
an admixture of Gaussian and Riemannian physics grafted onto Marx in a loft
in Greenwich Village, beginning in the Summer of 1966, under the auspices
of the Free University of New York, an entity similar to the Open Exchange
of San Francisco. Because he was witty, and by all accounts, "one of
the more entertaining speakers on the Left" at that time, Lyn Marcus
attracted a number of fairly bright, economically oriented, Greenwich Village
radicals. After a couple of summer-sessions, he sent his newly recruited
cadres uptown to Columbia University to join the SDS.
The "Labor Committees" were involved in the student strike at
Columbia in the Spring of 1968. They are mentioned in The Strawberry Statement,
James Kunan's topical work on the subject. In the fall of '68, the Labor
Committees were kicked out of the Columbia University SDS by Mark Rudd and
Bernadine Dorhn, who went on to found the Weather Underground, the wild-in-the-streets,
cultural radical Maoists. After the big split in SDS at the Chicago convention
in the summer of '69, the NCLC went back into SDS to become the inside opposition
to the Progressive Labor (PL) faction who retained the mailing lists and
the name SDS in the struggle that followed the split. The PL faction, "bow-tie
Maoists," followed Milt Rosen, who followed Chairman Mao, while the
NCLC followed "Chairman Lyn." Sometime during 1971-72, the NCLC
positioned themselves to the left of the PL, essentially by accusing them
of being the "running dog lackeys" for Rockefeller and the British
Crown, which is another whole story in itself.
Sometime during 1973, "Lyn Marcus" proposed a united front with
the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, with himself as the
head of a new "revitalized" left. After this proposal was rejected
by those formations, the NCLC, under LaRouche, proclaimed themselves to
be the true "Revolutionary Vanguard" and proceeded to physically
attack members of the CP and the SWP ("Operation Mop-up") during
the Spring of 1974. Subsequently, upon finding themselves ostracized out
of the Left and the Revolution slipping out of their grasp, the NCLC, during
1975-76, "rediscovered" the American Revolution just in time for
the Bicentennial and formed a united front with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby.
The LaRouchies were loosely allied with the Liberty Lobby throughout the
late seventies, but broke with them when Willis Carto, in the winter of
1979, embarked on his campaign of "Holocaust Revisionism," denying
that six million Jews were murdered by Hitler.
After 1976, LaRouche and his followers graduated from Marxism into being
born-again Hamiltonians when they "discovered" that all of Marx's
best ideas were supposedly lifted (without so much as an acknowledgment),
from Alexander Hamilton. Their version of how they arrived at this collective
conclusion was presented in The Civil War and the American System, by the
Afro-American LaRouchian historian, Allen Salisbury. Since the early eighties,
when they were eager Reagan-boosters, attending American Legion conventions
and glad-handing Legionnaires, the LaRouchies have done some fancy footwork
and have mellowed into "conservative" JFK-style "Democrats."
The spectacle of this whole process may indicate that the political spectrum
is not a line-segment, as is commonly believed. After all, any line segment
or strip of paper sufficiently long may be coaxed into a circle. A circle,
coming undone, may also be twisted into a Mobius strip. Therefore, the two
most appropriate descriptions of the political spectrum seem to be (1) the
merry-go-round and (2) the Mobius strip. The whole spectrum resembles a
continuum where both sides eventually become the same side or one side eventually
becomes both sides, depending on the way you look at it.
LaRouche himself and the NCLC are worth studying as a point of reference,
not only because they are prima facie evidence of the twisted nature of
the political spectrum, but also because, as a highly sophisticated intelligence
front and economic cult, they have held shifting positions over the years
on various issues. Evolving into a synthetic political cosmology, they have
developed a weltanshauung that addresses almost every subject under the
sun. The LaRouchies have identified and embraced some of the genuine high
points of Western culture, like Plato, the Golden Renaissance in Florence,
and the music of Bach and Beethoven. At the same time, the LaRouchian political
analysis represents a species of "modified limited hangout," fulfilling
the Buddhist maxim of "hiding in the open" what the ruling class
wishes to conceal.
LaRouche seems to have been assigned the role of "Joker" in the
political deck. Most of the Left consider him a fascist. The Heritage Foundation,
however, in the '80s, stated that the NCLC was a wing of the STASI (East
German Military Intelligence). The Media, owned by the very "Oligarchy
" that the LaRouchies so articulately "expose," also comes
at them screaming. Many of the various programs which the LaRouchies advocate
(such as the AIDS Quarantine, the MX Missile, Star Wars/S.D.I. and Nuclear
smokestacks as a viable energy-source) are odious to most Liberals, Progressives
and Greens. LaRouchian advocacy of these programs also is a strong indication
that the group functions as a shill for the Military -Industrial Complex.
These bizarre contradictions effectively contain the deep information that
is often hung out on the LaRouche clothesline.
Mae Brussel, who for the better part of 17 years (1971-1988) conducted a
weekly 60-minute radio program on KAZU in Pacific Grove, California, unraveling
the full ramifications of the assassination of JFK, stated off camera that
the LaRouche material is about 80% "deeply factual" (comparable
to the information found in Covert Action Quarterly ) and about 20% "rat
poison." In other words, at the core of the NCLC (as with other political
cults) probably 20 members or less actually see the "big picture,"
while 95% of the group-true-believer types, the "drones"-man tables
and phone lines, do research, write stories, and believe they are on the
side of the angels "fighting the Oligarchy." Meanwhile, a monkey
wrench gang in the editorial department determine the party line and put
a spin on the aggregate to make it unpalatable with 90% of the public.
Mae Brussel, who inspired a whole generation of researchers (sometimes known
as "Brussel Sprouts") taught her disciples to read everything
across the whole political spectrum and to sift and weigh all pieces of
information as separate elements of the collective aggregate. She taught
us to compare everything with every other thing and to work out the contradictions
between the various voices that speak conflicting things because everything
means something and nothing is without significance. If we use our heads,
we can eventually find the whole truth. Reality is the total synthesis of
all the voices, past and present, and in politics (polis being the city
or society at large), every political faction contains a certain amount
of truth as well as varying degrees of error. This is the main difference
between the followers of Mae Brussell and the followers of Chip Berlet.
Mae told us to study everything and to learn how to discern what is real
from what is not. Chip Berlet, on the other hand, whose sudden prominence
and cachet on the progressive political scene portends a dangerous tendency
which might aptly be called Neo-Mugwump or left-wing McCarthyism, implies
by innuendo that all information hanging out in right wing journals is ipso
facto false, at best tainted, and those caught reading it are de facto,
polluted. Certain people, it seems-a new class of "experts"-have
elected themselves to be the intellectual food-tasters and the watch-dogs
for the rest of us. The new shibboleth seems to be, "I am not now,
nor have I ever been a reader of politically incorrect literature or a person
who talks to politically incorrect people."
Chip Berlet and his sidekick Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and
the New American Fascism, have made careers out of their postgraduate preoccupation
of being "LaRouche watchers." To them, Lyndon LaRouche, recently
released from prison, is the Great Beast. Berlet and King's own political
trajectory, in shades of The Big Chill, led from Chairman Mao to Yippie,
to Yuppie writing for the Reader's Digest-a path parallel in its revisionism
and no less bizarre than that of the despised object of their fixated animosity,
LaRouche himself. Curiously, in the course of their careers and after debriefing
presumably dozens of former NCLC members, they have never been able to come
up with the scoop of where the LaRouche money comes from.
That's easy-the money comes from Rockefeller-at least $10 million dollars
of an original package of seed money did, to expand the NCLC, to buy telexes,
computers, and printing presses in the early seventies (probably, circa
1971). The persistent, though unsubstantiated rumor to this effect, which
oddly enough, Berlet, King, & Co. have never reported, was confirmed in
early 1973 by a high-ranking "Caucusoid" in a candid moment to
a professor of Afro-American Studies in Rochester, New York, in the privacy
of the professor's home. Robert Veenis, present at this meeting in 1973,
told me about it in 1989. I don't think it should be a secret.
Shouldn't we ask ourselves why Berlet and King maintain that "No one
knows where the money comes from"? I suggest that the reason for that
piece of disinformation is because if the identity of the financial uncle
of the LaRouchies was made known, it might give away the whole Game. People
might begin wondering who owns Doubleday (the publisher of Dennis King's
book), or why Dennis King, in the preface to his book on LaRouche, thanks
a member of William F. Buckley's Conservative Party of New York for explaining
to him the arcane and near incomprehensible mysteries of the LaRouchian
Cosmology. William F. Buckley, veteran CIA operative, is, after all, a longtime
comrade of David Rockefeller, as well as a member of the Bohemian Grove.
None of which should really surprise anyone. It's all the same cocktail
party at the top.
I suggest that LaRouche-phobia is actually something of a red herring. To
cast Lyndon LaRouche in the part of Bete-noire and stalking-horse of Fascism,
was to construct a straw man-a process in which LaRouche himself may have
played a witting role. Berlet and King may perhaps be forgiven if their
prescient sense of impending Fascism erred in prematurely identifying LaRouche
as the agent of its re-emergence (LaRouche, the former Marxist professor
in the loft in Greenwich Village, was too intellectual and too arcane to
achieve mass-appeal). However, they were not completely wrong. Sixty years
after the publication of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here, the
Bishop Prang and the Buzz Windrip of American Fascism have arrived in the
persons of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, two people who truly appeal
to the lowest common denominator.
Ironically, the LaRouchies have been warning about Gingrich-another Rockefeller
man-for years.
RESPONSE TO Mark Evans on LaRouche
Mark Evans in his essay on LaRouche accuses me of covering up
Rockefeller funding of LaRouche. Evans quotes a single hearsay source for
the Rockefeller connection who in turn received it from a second hearsay
source. I had never heard this story before; it I had, I would have checked
it out. But I would not have printed it as fact the way Evans does without
solid substantiation. I am dubious of the story because (among other things)
of the date: Evans says the conversation took place in 1973, but the LaRouche
organization never obtained large sums of money to launch an international
intelligence operation until 1976 (their spending prior to 1976 can be explained
in large part by the fact that wealthy members turned over their trust funds
to the organization). Evans fails to note that I was the one who obtained
a 1976 CIA document under FOIA in which a top aide to George Bush (then
the director) speculated in a memo to Bush on the possibility of making
use of the LaRouchians. I did not state this was the source of the sudden
influx of money to the LaRouchians, because I could not obtain any proof
(speculation in a letter about the possibility of something is not proof).
I did however reveal that the LaRouchians were given an expensive Wang computer
at the time by Wang Laboratories (an intelligence community contractor),
that a computer software company secretly controlled by LaRouche raked in
millions for the organization in the late 1970s, that the LaRouchians ran
a successful shakedown operation against Resorts International, that they
engaged in wire fraud and check kiting fraud in the 1970s, that they obtained
money from the Loews Foundation (Tisch family) in 1981 when they were running
electoral dirty tricks for NY mayor Ed Koch, that they obtained a large
donation from a friend of Jesse Helms after running dirty tricks for Helm's
1984 reelection campaign, and that they raised tens of millions of dollars
a year in the mid-1980s through credit card fraud and loan scams targeting
senior citizens. The substantiated facts about LaRouche's sources of money
are weird enough even without the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller.
--Dennis King
Mark Evans
-- North Coast HOME -- Archives
-- Electrons to the Editor