Essays & Editorials

Student Essays

A brief narrative on the 2006-09 essays by Matthew Feldman

  2008 - 2009

• E-1 Oli Fordham

• E-2 Hannah O’Dell

• E-3 Joseph Bench

• E-4 Spencer Worley

• E-5 Hannah Bigham

• D-1 Tamsin Silver

• D-2 Harriet Notley

  2007 - 2008

• E-1 Harriet Notley

• E-2 Phil Hemming

  2006 - 2007

• E-1 Stacey Kerslake

• E-2 Hayley Cassidy

• E-3 Paula Bowles

  H.E.A.R.T Editorials

• The Protocols of the  Elders of  Zion in the 21st Century

• 365 Days with H.E.A.R.T

• Freedom of Speech "A National Treasure"

• BBC Interview with Matthew Feldman on "Holocaust Denial"

• The Holocaust in The Independent State of Croatia - Matthew Feldman

• LaRouche Group -  A threat to society?

• Lyndon Larouche, neo-fascism, coded anti-Semitism, and the ‘Jeremiah Duggan Case’

• The LaRouche Organization as an extremist movement

• "While Travelling" Holocaust poem by Sara Golding

• Holocaust Deniers & Debunkers -What are they good for?

• Debate, Debunk, or Debauch?

• A Guided Tour of the Sydney Jewish Museum

• Typical Nazis, an Unusual Friendship, & Sinister Roles

• Vienna - Can a city come to terms with its past?

• Holocaust Denial: An unavoidable Introduction

• 5 Years with H.E.A.R.T

• The bankrupt state of revisionism & debunking

• The Last "Unrighteous"

[Please note that editorials posted in this section are the sole viewpoints of the individual author and do not necessarily
represent any collective opinion of the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, or the University of Northampton]

The LaRouche Organization As An Extremist Movement

Guest Publication by

Matthew Feldman

[photos added to enhance the text]

Abstract: Duggan, LaRouche and Anti-Semitism

On 27 March 2003, Jeremiah Duggan was alleged to have committed suicide by throwing himself in front of cars. His body was found very near to the offices of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review in Hesse, Germany – from which it seems he may have been running. Shortly before his death, Erica Duggan received two interrupted phone calls, begging for rescue from Weisbaden, crying out that he was frightened for his safety.

Both Erica and Hugo Duggan, Jeremiah’s parents, immediately asked for a full investigation as a result. But instead, the German police arbitrarily decided – immediately and without any medical opinion – that this was a suicide.  They based their opinion on the words of drivers casually interviewed at the side of the road and passed down through a chain of officers, one undertaken without the investigating officer actually writing down signed formal statements from the witnesses.

For the last five years, all attempts to get a proper investigation of the full circumstances surrounding this violent death have been refused.  The case is currently on appeal in both the UK and German high courts.

In the days leading up to his death, Jeremiah told his mother that he was attending an anti-war conference in Germany between 21 and 23 March 2003 at Bad Schwalbach, where he would learn more about international politics.  Jeremiah was deceived into attending what he thought was a legitimate political gathering at the Schiller Institute, demonstrating against the Iraq War but what, in reality, turned out to be a recruiting ground for Lyndon LaRouche’s international network (hereafter the LaRouche Organization), particularly the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM, founded in 2000).

Upon denouncing the anti-Semitic conspiricism in the LaRouche movement at the Schiller Institute – as will be shown, an endemic feature of the LaRouche Organization – Jeremiah was found on a forlorn roadside, hours later, having died while ‘in a state of terror’.  This was the recorded conclusion of H.M. Coroner a fortnight later, on 8 April 2003.  Yet despite this finding, virtually no investigation of the Schiller Institute, nor the wrongful death of Jeremiah Duggan, has been undertaken to date. 

To facilitate such an overdue criminal inquiry into the incitement to racial hatred –one which may have led to the wrongful death of Jeremiah Duggan – this document will present evidence of LaRouche’s systematic anti-Semitism as it contravenes German and EU Law.

Introduction

Convicted fraudster Lyndon LaRouche was imprisoned in January 1989 with a 15-year sentence; he got probation after five. He then travelled the world despite probation orders, continuing to recruit for the LaRouche Organization on many campuses in Europe, America, Australia, while also delivering lectures in the Middle and Far East.[1] In 2003, he travelled to Germany to lecture several hundred followers and initiates, keynoting a conference in Hesse on “How to Reconstruct a Bankrupt World”. 

Jeremiah Duggan attended this conference, held in Wiesbaden, Germany.  Thus did an unsuspecting British Jew come into contact with a one of the most dangerous neo-fascists and anti-Semites in the world today, as will be detailed below.[2]

In the first instance, the LaRouche Organization has substantial influence worldwide. Its goal is to promote Lyndon LaRouche as a leader at the head of his devoted band of already-organized supporters: the National Executive Committee (or, in Europe, the European Executive Committee); a somewhat larger body, the National Committee (or European Committee), and further below that, the local steering committees.

This corporatist structure is supplemented by an intelligence division, responsible for monitoring the world’s press. Front groups in the past have included the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the U.S. Labor Party, the International Caucus of Labor Committees, the Labor Organizers Defence Fund, the Constitutional Defence Fund, the Club of Life, the Humanist Academy, the Lafayette Foundation, the National Democratic Policy Committee, the FDR PAC, the LaRouche PAC, and many others. In Europe, there is the European Labour Committee, the majority of whom work in Germany.

The LaRouche Organization also has a major publishing arm, both online and in print.  In terms of the latter, for example, the following are a few recent or ongoing publications: the New Federalist newspaper (defunct as of spring 2006) and its predecessor, New Solidarity; Nouvelle Solidarité, Neue Solidaritaet, Executive Alert Service, EIW, Executive Intelligence Review, 21st Century Science & Technology and its predecessor, Fusion; The Campaigner (now defunct) and its successor, Fidelio (also defunct), Ibykus, The New Citizen (Australia) – all run, ultimately, by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp LaRouche.

All followers and publications take their orders from the from the Leesburg, Virginia headquarters of the LaRouche Organization, including the group’s daily worldwide intelligence gleanings, reports from LaRouche and other leaders (called “Morning Briefings”), fundraising tallies and quotas, and so on.  Also part of the LaRouche Organization is the Security Division, responsible for “protecting” LaRouche from the supposedly omnipresent threat against him, and for keeping delinquent or dissident members in line. It is often alleged that Security makes it difficult to leave for anyone who questions things, and investigates anyone reported to be disaffected.

At the core of these LaRouche Organization affiliates, propaganda is a main and consistent focus of their activities. As Chip Berlet writes, this umbrella organization under LaRouche represents a kind of ‘reinvented fascism’, which also includes the global distribution of anti-Semitic literature, much of which is undertaken – shockingly, illegally and in thin disguise – in present-day Germany.[3]

Rodney Gouttman has looked into the workings of the LaRouce Organization, and has identified its role in spreading anti-Semitic doctrines. Australia’s “Gouttman Report” alleged that LaRouche’s CEC (Citizens Electoral Commission, the LaRouche Organization’s registered political party in Australia) is a sect masquerading as a political party, extending to murky links with surveillance and counter-intelligence[4] Similarly, in Germany the Büso party (the national LaRouche political party; Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität) was described in the Bundestag as a political sect in 1994. 

This is despite the fact that LaRouche gags, or tries to gag, any criticism of him by threatening litigation.  This, as much as anything else, has stymied investigation into this neo-fascist leader and his extremist organization.

The LaRouche Organization and Anti-Semitism

In one of his many articles covering Lyndon LaRouche, “Protocols to the Left, Protocols to the Right”, Chip Berlet further notes that the LaRouche Organization is the currently world’s largest distributor of literature based on ‘coded anti-Semitism rooted in the false allegation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.[5] Furthermore, evidence of systematic incitement to hatred against the British and against worldwide Jewry in LaRouche publications, which first came to prominence in the 1970’s, continues unfettered to this day.

While some have dismissed LaRouche’s ideas as too absurd or outlandish to be taken seriously, this document will marshal evidence showing that this is part of a deliberate smokescreen, one masking the age-old global conspiracy of the “bad Jews” trying to take over the world.  Many others have noted this thrust to LaRouchite ideology, such as Dr Paul Gardner, Chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia, who wrote to an Australian Member for Foreign Affairs, The Hon. Alexander Downer MP, on 24 December 2003 asserting that the ‘LaRouche organisation spreads anti-Semitic propaganda throughout the world and in many place acts like a cult group which attempts to indoctrinate young people with its ideology. They are accused of propagating incitement to hatred towards the Jews, the British and the Anti-Defamation League. Coupled with this they stand accused of using sinister secretive methods of recruitment.’[6]

An understanding of how such convoluted conspiracy theories, obscure terminology, innuendo, and codes woven into selective readings of European cultural history is therefore critical to grasping the ulterior agenda of the LaRouche Organization.  Just such a veiled intent must itself be seen against the continuing background the activities and methods of the LaRouche Organization, which is notably similar to “cults”, or New Religious Movements, worldwide: destructive to family life, to the individual, and perpetually at the margins of domestic law. 

Yet in the case of LaRouche and his varied publications and institutions throughout Europe – of which the Schiller Institute appears as only the most flagrantly illegal arm – documentation shows that this ‘coded anti-Semitism’ incites violence and hatred in reality, making the LaRouche Organization a particularly malicious group. 

In the particularly case of German law – under whose primary jurisdiction falls Jeremiah Duggan’s mysterious death and the ongoing activities of the Schiller Institute – the penal code specifically outlaws racial and religious incitement to hatred, a category under which the conspiracy theories of Lyndon LaRouche fall, as clearly defined by the German Constitution: 

Section 130: Agitation of the People

     (1) Whoever, in a manner that is capable of disturbing the public peace, incites hatred against segments of the population or calls for violent arbitrary measures against them; or

     (2) Assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population, shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years.

This document demonstrates that the LaRouche Organization contravenes these two subsections of the German Penal Code. A major and readily accessible source to support such an ostensible criminal incitement – of which there has never been one single statement of denial as to the conspiracy tenets of their views – are to be found in various LaRouche publications, many of which are readily available on the internet. 

A bare handful, principally taken from 1978 and 2003 – a quarter of a century of noxious, masked anti-Semitism – is sufficient to prove the point decisively.  For what is clear from any cursory review of texts like these is evidence of continuing anti-Semitism and demonization of perceived enemies, running through both earlier and later publications. Time and again, “bad Jews” and their conspirators are advanced as the root of all evil – a familiar theme in the history of American and European anti-Semitism.

In “The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach”, Lyn Marcus (the early pen name for Lyndon LaRouche) claimed: ‘It is not necessary to give special treatment to Judaism here, since it never existed except in myth, but as a by-product of Christianity, and could not exist except as a special predicate of a Christian or Muslim culture, principally Christian. There is no autonomous “Jewish culture”, but only a special variety of (especially) Christian cultures of Christianity’.[7] 

Later in 1978 – at a period of heightened contact with the notorious anti-Semite and founder of Institute of Historical Review in the United States, Willis Carto, LaRouche wrote: ‘A self-sustaining Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for Jewish culture otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim’.  As a result, ‘Judaism is not a true religion, but only a half-religion, a curious appendage and sub–species Charlemagne keep his herd of protected Jews as “slaves of the treasure”.’ 

These quotations are taken from “Zionism is not Judaism”, the anti-Semitic tract given in the epigraph above, which continues: ‘The ADL is literally the Gestapo of British secret intelligence in the urban centre in the United States. No other “social action” complement to a religious association is so consistently, so profoundly evil.’[8]

These may not seem, at first glance, to be egregiously anti-Semitic remarks, but they are part of a consistent – if systematically veiled – pattern of anti-Semitic conspiricism espoused by the LaRouche Organization.  It is frequently mixed with a coded form of Holocaust denial, which is itself a microcosm of the sanitized language which is deliberately employed across the gamut of LaRouche publications:  

The Czarist Okhrana's Protocols of Zion include a hard kernel of truth which no mere Swiss court decision could legislate out of existence. The fallacy of the Protocols of Zion is that it attributes the alleged conspiracy to Jews generally, to Judaism. A corrected version of The Protocols would stipulate that the evil oaths cited were actually the practices of variously a Paris branch of B'nai B'rith [….][9]

Going even further than this endorsement of a crude anti-Semitic forgery over a century old, LaRouche also claims that traditional understandings of the Holocaust are ‘hoaxes’: 

The impassioned sophistry which the Zionist demagogue offers to all foolish enough to be impressed with such hoaxes is the “holocaust” thesis: that the culmination of the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust proves that Zionism is so essential to ‘Jewish survival’ that any sort of criminal activity is justified against anti-Zionists in memory of the ‘six million.’ This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive “appropriate technology” for the employment of “inferior races”, a small fraction of the tens of millions of others, especially Slavs, who were murdered in the same way that Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn and others of his ilk propose to revive today.

A quarter century on, specific evidence from the 21-23 March 2003 Bad Schwalbach Conference, entitled “LaRouche Youth Movement: A Second American Revolution”, demonstrates the well-worn pattern of this incitement to hatred against Jews; in this case, as disseminated by the Schiller Institute. Entailed here are a variety of speeches given at the Schiller Institute conference, as well as “Morning Briefings” and lecture notes found in Jeremiah Duggan’s bag. 

Further evidence will be selected from LaRouche Press statements, publication and public interviews in addition to studies carried out by ex-members, political analysts and others. This provides first hand evidence of how the Schiller Institute, in particular, seems explicitly in violation of the German Penal code.

For instance, the lecture notes found in Jeremiah’s Duggan’s personal possessions at the time of his death reveals that the 2003 Bad Schwalbach conference set out the following ideas: 

There is a pernicious group—the evil oligarchs (the Jews)—who are attempting to impose fascist imperialism and world domination through nuclear war. 

This evil group is fomenting nuclear world war and bringing the world to the brink of destruction.

Below this, Jeremiah’s chart features Leo Strauss in the centre of a circle and an arrow with the words ‘Jewish’ pointing to Strauss’ name. It is annotated: ‘Jewish leads to Fascism—leads to Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld’. Jeremiah also made notes while listening to Lyndon LaRouche’s opening address, “Physical Geometry as Strategy”; Jeremiah scribbled down notes about how Kennedy was ‘not killed by Oswald’ but by a ‘special warfare Section’ of the State apparatus that ‘does this sort of thing’.[10] 

As will be shown, LaRouche’s remarks also mention nebulous ‘forces behind’, ‘group of forces’,  ‘slime mould’ or ‘some people’ woven into statements – actually claiming it is, in fact, both the British and the Jews who are responsible for the world’s ills. In another technique familiar to neo-fascists – that of calling one’s own opponents fascists and Nazis. British agents and their Jewish lackeys are accused of spreading a redefined fascism in order to exercise ostensible world domination in the contemporary world.

In LaRouchite ideology, an evil oligarchy (identified as a Jewish-British conspiracy put forward by a number of early and mid 20th century American racists, most prominently ‘Cincinnatus’ and Francis Parker Yockey) lies at the root of the world’s problems: it is this needing to be ruthlessly eradicated by LaRouche’s devoted followers. The way in which this view was expressed in the past, in comparison with statements the Bad Schwalbach Conference, is instructive.  On 21 March 1978, LaRouche stated in his publication New Solidarity: 

At this late hour each delay brings us closer to holocaust. 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 labour. [President] Carter must be forced to carry out this task by the public emergence of a Labour Party lobby. Competent and committed to save this world that Britain has once again brought to the brink of destruction. War against Kissinger, Brzezinski, and British oligarchical Nazis is a just war.[11] 

25 years later, consider the views of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of Lyndon and founder of the Schiller Institute in 1984.  On 22 March 2003, at the Bad Schwalbach Conference she asserted: ‘You foolish People! Don’t you see that Nemesis is about to strike?’[12] Her understanding of ‘Nemesis’ is detailed in a “Morning Briefing” released at the conference:  

There is a force deployed by the slime mould behind the government— followers of Leo Strauss, etc.—who want to create an English- speaking version of a Roman empire, a permanent fascist world empire. Lyn recounted the history of the plan, starting from [H.G.] Wells. [Bertrand] Russell proposed preventive nuclear war in 1946, and the Russell crowd dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to create a world government with nuclear terror. There is no “after the Iraq war,” Lyn said. “Either you stop it or there will be permanent war, and no civilization”.[13]

Over the years, Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly set out his apocalyptic conspiracy theories, referring to the evil force of a British oligarchy in alliance with international Jewry: 

The British monarchy is best viewed as the rallying point for an assemblage of oligarchic families, both British and Commonwealth nations, and also strata of the allied oligarchic families of Europe. These oligarchic families, together with their most trusted political servants, gather around and behind the screen of the powers and privilege of the British monarchy. Through such and related means, and through the vast networks of influence they have developed among many nations over recent centuries, these combined forces control and deploy one of the most powerful forces on earth, and the most efficiently evil force existing today.[14]

Once again, twenty-five years later, the same notions of the ‘British oligarchy’ are repeated in the “Morning Briefings” and lectures given to Jeremiah at the March 2003 conference. Thus, to return to LaRouche’s speech on “Physical Geometry as Strategy”: ‘a group of forces, based on the former head of the Bank of England, from Britain (Montagu, Norman) and his partner, of the Harriman family, and the grandfather of the present President of the United States, Prescott Bush, moved the money to refinance the Nazi Party and the pressure to bring Hitler to power on Jan. 30, 1933: This is what is happening now.’[15]

The world is thus divided into two — the enemy, characterized as implacably evil (the British monarchy and their Jewish agents) – and the putative saviors of humanity; namely, LaRouche and his unquestioning followers. Major world events, like September 11, 2001, are consequently viewed through the prism of a global conspiracy of which only LaRouche is aware.

It is the British, the Jews and their supporters who stand accused of being fascists and Nazis, of militarism and international terrorism, of enforced “brainwashing” via London’s Tavistock Clinic; and of course, of being monopolistic financiers. It is not merely that LaRouche uses special language and redefinitions to hide direct references to the Jews; in addition, he deploys Jewish “sounding” names or stereotypical Jewish references to convey his underlying message.

There is also a proliferation of obvious epithets and codes such as ‘usurer’, ‘cabalist’, ‘Venetian’, ‘locust’ or ‘Babylonian’. This may puzzle the uninitiated, but strikes an unmistakeable chord with contemporary anti-Semites. Another guise used is focusing on well-known Jewish families or individuals.  LaRouche often apportions guilt by association, such as his formulations concerning ‘Lansky’s ADL’ or ‘Lansky’s Israel’ – referring to Meyer Lansky, a member of the American mafia, a friend of notorious gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. LaRouche frequently uses Lanky’s Jewishness to make an association between Judiasm and organized crime.

Again, Chip Berlet reminds us: ‘Coded rhetoric is the key feature in this milieu’.[16] It is important to see how the process of encoding in order to scapegoat the “bad Jew” has remained an essential feature of LaRouche’s incitement to hatred. But in practice, how does this work?  Coded terms are used – for example, ‘Straussianst’, ‘Russell-Wells’, ‘Kissinger’, and more recently, the ‘Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle Chickenhawk gang’, and so on – to refer to the Jews and their alleged collaborators.

Once these codes are repeated and imprinted as representing a truly Manichean evil, such sanitized language becomes both acceptable and understood amongst initiates.[17] And these are doubtless understood as clearly hateful; such codes knowingly incite discrimination. Therefore the following – while apparently bizarre – is well understood by racists and anti-Semites the world over; and is exemplary of anti-Semitic propaganda disseminated by the Schiller Institute: ‘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’.

Furthermore, in addressing the responsibility for the Iraq war, Lyndon LaRouche answered at Bad Schwalbach: ‘Israel is a hand grenade being thrown at the Arab world. So Israel is not behind this. George Bush hasn’t got the brains to be behind it. Who’s behind it? The people I referred to in January 2001: The independent central banking system crowd, the slime-mold. The financier interests.’[18]  As Dennis King reaffirms in his vital biography, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism: ‘These statements have a serious meaning to anti-Semites and neo-Nazis [….] They are eccentric only to those who have not studied the history of modern anti-Semitism, in which the theme of Jewish-British race mixing and Jewish domination of the British Empire looms large.’[19]

One favourite hate target, perhaps second only to Henry Kissinger, is Leo Strauss.  Both are symbolic of “bad Jews”. On 25 March 2003, while Jeremiah Duggan was at the Schiller Institute conference, LaRouche released a Press Release entitled “War, Hitler and Cheney”: ‘The Nazi-like doctrine adopted by the Bush administration—merely the lackeys of the circles of influence emanating from Leo Strauss are hell bent on war and destruction along Nazi lines and what faces the world is “virtually endless world war” unless stopped.’ LaRouche clearly blames Leo Strauss for the growth of Nazism and Hitler’s rise to power: 

All too obviously, the leading war-makers inside the Bush Administration today are mere lackeys, nasty pimps like the Leporello of Mozart’s famous opera [Don Giovanni—ed.]. These real-life Leporellos such as the politically pimpish Wolfowitz and Ashcroft, were spawned, chiefly, by Chicago University [University of Chicago—ed.] and associated circles of a prominent fascist ideologue, the late Professor Leo Strauss. This Strauss was a follower of the Carl Schmitt who crafted the law under which Hitler became dictator of Germany; so are Strauss’s ardent followers inside the Bush Administration today. This fascist, Strauss, who created Wolfowitz, was imported to the U.S. from the Germany of Carl Schmitt and Hitler-midwife Hjalmar Schacht [….][20] 

In a nutshell, Leo Strauss is held indirectly responsible for the horrors of the Third Reich, as LaRouche again insisted in 2001: ‘Who put Hitler into power? Wasn’t Germans. It was ordered from London and New York. For why? For geopolitical reasons. To get Germany to go into a second war, and destroy itself in destroying the Soviet Union. That’s why it happened.’[21] Allegedly once in America, Leo Strauss influenced rich Jews, British agents, and politicians, including, of course, the “neo-conservatives”:  

That new Reichstag Fire of which I warned in that January 2001 address, actually came, less than nine months later, on Sept.11, 2001. Like Hitler’s Reichstag fire of 1933, the Sept. 11, 2001 attack was exploited by Vice President Dick Cheney and such followers of the Nazi-like Professor Leo Strauss as Attorney-General John Ashcroft, to unleash an attempted step-wise, fascist takeover of the U.S.A. from within. That incident of Sept.11, 2001 was then used to unleash a campaign of international world-wide warfare, warfare modelled on Athens’ tragic folly of the Peloponnesian war, and on such Classically fascist precedents as those of the Roman Caesars, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.

Thus, the ideology of that thieving, imperial outlook of Cheney and his fascist Chicken-hawks, now combines the nuclear ‘preventive war’ dogmas of Bertrand Russell with the imported Nietzschean mode of fascist ideology of Germany’s Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss.

As LaRouche concluded at the Bad Schwalbach conference: ‘Predominant control over the Bush Administration has been secured, until now, by a Cheney-led fusion of the combination of Chicago University’s [sic] imported fascist–that Professor Leo Strauss—with Wells’ and Russell’s goal of world government through Hitler-like, preventive nuclear war’.[22] Thus, as LaRouche put it a year later, Leo Strauss was responsible for America “Marching down the road toward self-inflicted hell”.[23]

Amongst a number of “symbolic” Jewish targets, Strauss is accused by LaRouche of supporting Hitler’s rise to power, of having been involved in Sept.11th, and of promoting the warfare in the Middle East.  As is usual in such rhetoric, these events transpire through intrigue and conspiracy; for example via the Anti-Defamation League, which LaRouche recently stated was ‘one of the chief apologists for the Nazi atrocities of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the utopian lunatics in the Israeli Defence Forces’.[24] Through innuendo and, in particular, metonymy LaRouchite propaganda blames Jews for every problem facing the world. 

Zionism, of course, and Israel generally, remain favorite targets of the LaRouche Organization.  As Dennis King maintains, ‘in LaRouchian propaganda Zionism is the chief international tool of the British, and Zionists are usually British agents. Since most Jews are Zionists, the implication is that most Jews must be British agents.”[25] Through recourse to the neo-fascist tactic of inversion – that is, calling one’s enemies “Nazis” – in an interview on WOL Radio’s “Reynolds Rap” in April 20, 2002, LaRouche described Israeli policies thus: ‘They want to get rid of the Palestinian people, the way the Nazis wanted to get the Jews out of Warsaw.’[26] Note that LaRouche could not bring himself to say that the Nazis wanted ‘to get rid of” the Jews – he could only say that the Nazis ‘wanted to get the Jews out of Warsaw’. However, he has no such problem attributing genocidal impulses to the Israelis.

One final quotation illustrating this extreme anti-Zionism (itself another mask for LaRouche’s coded anti-Semitism) came in response to a question asked of LaRouche at a recent conference: 

The Likud police—especially the military policy of the IDF now, the policies of Sharon, and the incipient policies proposed by Netanyahu—are Nazi, then you get the truth of the situation, and you now then can from that standpoint, have the framework in which to judge the behavior of these Palestinians.  Now many of them, I think, are wrong. But they are like the Jewish fighters, in the Warsaw Ghetto against the full weight of the Nazi machine commanded by Stroop. And, there’s no difference.

The American Jew has to face the fact. Now, here’s the problem; there’s another problem, which I think the questioner refers to; which is not mentioned, but should be mentioned. See, there are two reactions on the question of condemning the crimes of the present Israeli, Nazi government, against the people of Palestine. One objection is to calling them “Nazis”. But they are! So why not call them by the right name?” “Well, they can’t be Nazis, because they’re Jewish.” Come on: Cut it out! How many people are followers, in Israel today, are followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who once offered to support the Hitler government of Germany, if Hitler would give up anti-Semitism. And, whose policies are indistinguishable—including those of his Betar—from Nazi policies.

What do you think the Israelis were, of the Betar, in particular—including the Menachem Begin who often bragged about having blown up the King David Hotel, with the British Governor there, sitting in the bathtub, when the bombs went off? Menachem Begin was a terrorist! The Likud is a terrorist organization.

It is just such masked anti-Semitism that was pushed on Jeremiah Duggan at the Schiller Institute in Weisbaden, Germany. As will now be described, this process is accompanied by fear-mongering, intimidation, and emotional blackmail.

Fear-Mongering and Psychological Coercion

Fear-mongering has been an important feature of LaRouche’s political and personal behavior since the start of LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1968. The LaRouche Organization is effectively run along military lines, with LaRouche stating that his goal is to train 2,000 leaders to rule the world. These “leaders” must be answerable only to him. His aim is to search ruthlessly for a loyal band of devotees, who will put in place forms of government which follow “Natural Law”—as determined by LaRouche—and with LaRouche as de facto world leader.  Similar ideas of grandeur led LaRouche to unsuccessfully run for President of the United States no less than 8 times.  But with real leadership only exercised over those already in LaRouche’s grasp, testimony by ex-members stresses that this extends to a form of dictatorial control akin more to a “cult” than a political movement.[27]  Yet this agenda was already set out in “The Politics of Male Impotence” from 1973: 

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 where 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.[28]   

Another LaRouche title from 1973, the notorious Beyond Psychoanalysis, describes the process of peeling away all false assumptions and how, in some cases, it can go wrong and result in a violent emotional collapse with a ‘mess to clear up’ afterwards. This shows that the LaRouche officials seem well-aware of the emotional strain placed upon individuals can be brutal and destructive.  Some, like the well-known story of Kenneth Kronberg, were driven to suicide; others, like Michael White, were effectively ‘ego-stripped’ by the LaRouche Organization – a process described by many ex-members as tantamount to psychological torture.[29]

LaRouchite methods of mass recruiting employ psychological techniques that can only be described as highly coercive. Here too LaRouche provides the way, having often written about how it is first necessary to ‘terrorize’ the victim into regarding the entire world as a police-controlled environment. Second, the victim must come to believe that ‘the whole world is falling apart and then take upon himself the blame.’ This idea, as here expounded in The Campaigner, suggests that unless the individual is freed from their corrupted view of the world through LaRouche’s guidance, they are personally responsible and indeed complicit.[30]

This process almost invariably starts with repeated, intensive emotional pressure. For example, at the Bad Schwalbach conference on 24 March 2003, Helga Zepp-LaRouche started the day by claiming: 

I feel sick. Mass murder is being committed and the whole world is watching. What would Schiller say? Don’t you see that Nemesis is about to strike? The crime will come back to haunt you. There is a higher lawfulness in the universe which will assert itself. This is a war of aggression which may trigger a global war. The implementation of the doctrine of preventive war means the end of international law. It could plunge the world into a dark age.[31] 

The next day, this “millenarian”, or chiliastic, view was accompanied by its Manichean opposite, a totalizing and utopian solution to all global problems, undertaken by a group of people who know how to create a renaissance, who want to be geniuses, not that everyone should become a famous Einstein, but in the potentiality of human thinking, that is what we have with the youth movement. And Lyn as the US President would be able to fix the world [….] Someone can save the world, it is us. Make the sublime, the beautiful soul, your daily practice. Make a holy, solemn commitment to save the world. Then you will be free. 

As with the views of the LaRouche Organization generally, this ‘palingenetic’ dualism is another hallmark of fascist and neo-fascist ideology.[32]  But also, such emotional coercion dictates that those not giving themselves over the revolutionary cause ‘become complicit in the evil work done by those leaders’.[33]

Since the founding of the LaRouche Youth Movement in 2000, the LaRouche message has been directed especially at students. Elodie Viennot, a leader of the LaRouche Youth Movement in France, also addressed the Schiller Institute during the Bad Schwalbach conference. She informed all participants that there would be no stopping a world catastrophe unless they were willing to put their lives on the line: ‘Remember that youth in previous eras gave their lives and blood for these, and their lives and blood did not go to waste.

I have a great faith in youth. I call upon youth here to make a pledge, that we are the soldiers of a new world’. As a result, she asserted: ‘There is no after this.’[34] This psychological incitement, alongside a dualistic worldview demonizing selected enemies, can thus easily become not only sinister, but threatening. 

Much of this view derives directly from LaRouche’s own rejection of students’ capacity to either think individually or use independent judgement – with academia, of course, representing a counter-productive force in this process.  In short, LaRouche must teach them how to think.[35] Even governments and law enforcement officers connive in committing assassinations and intrigues; the message is simple: “trust no one”. In attempting to discredit normal support networks (family, friends, schools, and so on), LaRouche clearly employs emotional manipulation to foster a fear that there is no hope to save the world – unless members unconditionally follow his direction and leadership.[36]

Returning to his keynote speech to opening the March 2003 Bad Schwalbach conference, LaRouche noted that ‘independent thinking is not independent thinking—something is controlling the way we think so that we are caused to do things that lead to the destruction of civilization.’ Students were told that they were surrounded by a society actively feeding them misinformation and lies, especially through their institutions of learning: ‘Our culture became corrupt [….] Universities today are barely recognizable as institutions of learning. In our schools we don’t educate people any more […] we’ve become morally decadent”.[37] 

Part and parcel of this universal propaganda directed at students – which only allegiance to LaRouche, naturally, can dispel – Jeremiah Duggan, a student at the British Institute in Paris, noted with respect to his own undergraduate course: ‘Linguistics = Brainwashing’.[38]

Contemporary Dangers posed by the LaRouche Organization

The LaRouche Organization is run as a military-style operation demanding total commitment, which typically includes separation from one’s family.[39]  This, too, is a global phenomenon.  Thus B’nai B’rith in Australia presented the views of a senior member of the LaRouche Organization after undergoing an ‘ego-stripping’ session: ‘They inquired into my relationship with my mother. That was pretty much standard procedure. It was an interrogation.

The whole aim was to create a new person, making your past totally irrelevant and giving you a new personality. No matter what you said it was your mother’s fault. It was pretty hideous stuff. Many people broke down and cried.’[40] After 18 years as a LaRouchite, Aglaja Beyes-Corleis described the process of psychological subjugation in a memoir which asserts: ‘It should never be forgotten that the cadre of LaRouche’s organization are victims of a destructive cult.’  Prospective Jewish members, she recalls, were especially targeted for harassment.[41] In like fashion, witness testimonies describe the methods of subjugation applied to Jeremiah Duggan at the cadre school in Wiesbaden in 2003.[42]

Fundraising is an obsessive, daily routine. People are contacted directly on the streets, in meetings and conferences, on the telephone, by pamphlet drops – meaning that the Schiller Institute in Germany is one of the many important centres for the spreading of masked anti-Semitism throughout the world. Funds are raised by producing intelligence reports for businesses and industries, as well as through what amounts to indentured servitude for young members. 

This led to uncontrolled fundraising – a process whereby the LaRouche organization raised tens of millions in loans – with the U.S. government estimating that the organization failed to repay at least $34 million of those loans; LaRouche was consequently convicted of fraud.

Another cult-like manifestation of the LaRouche Organization entails demonizing enemies in systematic smear campaigns.  These can be directed against influential – typically Jewish – figures (such as Henry Kissinger and Leo Strauss), or against those viewed by LaRouche as a potential threat.  Regarding the latter, “The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons” focuses on the British Foreign Minister Baroness Symons, who heard the Duggan family’s appeal to investigate the death of their son in 2003. 

In consequence, Baroness Symons was attacked in print after meeting with the Duggan parents.[43] Still later, in 2006 LaRouche decided to attack the Jeremiah’s family as well; for example, in a briefing of 6 December entitled “What did his mother say that drove him to suicide?”, concludes with the (leading) question: ‘What is this guilty woman trying to cover up?’ Further articles produced by the LaRouche Organization further defame Jeremiah Duggan and his family, of which a few titles give an accurate representation of this sensationalist  and conspiratorial form of slander:

“British Press and Officials Caught lying in Duggan Affair”; “Media Locust do Dirty Work for Cheney, Gore and Blair”; “London Friends of Cheney Behind New Slander Against LaRouche”; “Blair War Clique Runs Anti-LaRouche Slander Drive”; and “German Officials Denounce British Fabrications around Duggan Case”. Indeed, throughout its entire existence, the LaRouche Organization has used intimidation and even violence in order to boost LaRouche’s position amongst his followers, on the one hand; while on the other, intimidating his “enemies” into silence.

[44] Examples here include “Operation Mop Up”; incidents concerning the German Green Party and in particular Petra Kelly, as well as extensive smear campaigns against Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, and others.[45]

A final, lengthy quotation tying together many of these themes – combining anti-Semitism, the defamation of a Holocaust survivor and classic neo-fascist tactics by LaRouche – is, like so much LaRouchite extremism, readily available:

In Israel today, a Nazi-like form of fascist tyranny is centered in the currently ruling, Bonapartist consulate of the ruling circles of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). In the background, we find that the corrupting influence of existentialism, as spread back into Israel by the arguments of Martin Buber, has been the corrosive, anti-Mendelssohn sickness, which made possible a widespread abandonment of everything precious which the Mendelssohn-led reform and the Yiddish Renaissance had contributed to European civilization at large.

Today, any American Jew who wishes to know what Nazism was, and who supports the present rampage of Sharon and the IDF directorate, need but stand before the mirror, and look into his own hate-filled, enraged eyes. Take the case of wild-eyed Congressman Tom Lantos, for example.

All among those of us who understand the strategic implications of the role currently assigned to those Israeli Ceasars, know with certainty, as martyred Prime Minister Rabin knew, that the end result of what Sharon and his IDF masters are doing, will be the obliteration of Israel, with the construction of the Third Temple on the site of al-Haram al-Sharif as its crematorium, its "Masada." Is the Washington Post, for example, supporting Israel? Does one describe a man who throws a hand grenade as a supporter of that hand grenade? If Israel's Nazis did not exist, the haters of Judaism would probably have had to have created them.

The easiest way to destroy a selected victim, is to induce him to destroy himself.[46]

Since 1984, Wiesbaden’s Schiller Institute has been a focus for the activities of the LaRouche Organization’s European arm.  Over the 25 years since, German authorities have consistently turned a blind eye to the activities of the LaRouche network; even following the suspicious death of Jeremiah Duggan, they have refused to investigate either LaRouche or the Schiller Institute. Moreover, the speeches given at the Bad Schwalbach conference by Lyndon LaRouche maintain that there are forces behind the governments of Britain, America, and Israel – the same forces that put Hitler in power, assassinated Kennedy and Rabin, planned the Reichstag fire, and September the 11th, is perpetuating genocide, and intends nuclear war. It is also not difficult to see that, according to LaRouche’s doctrine, that the evil forces behind these acts of destruction are also Jewish.

Jonathan Tennenbaum, a lecturer from the Schiller Institute, told the Duggan parents that their students were expected to completely change their identities and reject everything that they had learnt. He explained that could be very distressing, for they would have to grapple with the notion that ‘Bush is the new Hitler’. Mr Tennebaum is alleged to have claimed: ‘ I remember Jeremiah very well. He did a very brave thing.

When he heard others saying how the Iraq war was caused by the Jews and in fact people saying that the Jews were responsible for all the evils in the whole world, Jeremiah spoke out in front of all the others declaring that he was a Jew’. Of course, in any normal setting, Jeremiah would not have had to speak out, nor would people have been saying that Jews were responsible for all the evils of the world. But Mr Tennenbaum did not seem aware of this.  Indeed, Jeremiah was not known to have ever publicly asserted his Jewishness in such a way.[47] 

To find oneself in this position in contemporary Germany is appalling. For any individual to visit Germany with the belief they were attending a political peace conference, but were instead confronted with virulent anti-Semitism raises serious concerns about public safety for all Jews visiting Germany. But more importantly, it underscores the danger and extremist nature of the LaRouche Organization and its neo-fascist leader, Lyndon LaRouche. 

Conclusion

The Gouttman Report in Australia serves to emphasize the danger of the LaRouche Organization as a threat to the democratic process in nation-states. In addition to its “cultish” nature, there also is overwhelming evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of the LaRouche Organization, as principally distributed in Europe by the Schiller Institute. Infringement of laws against incitement to hatred appears to have taken place, and indeed appears to continue to take place in Wiesbaden. One must ask: why has this network, with its history of anti-Semitism and terror tactics, been allowed to operate unchallenged for so long? 

Today, the world looks to Germany to abide by public statements that they will, first, take action against anti-Semitism and against any organization spreading dangerous extremism; and second, will uphold a Penal Code outlawing criminal acts and organizations engaging in destructive or criminal activities. Germany has a special responsibility to show the rest of the world where it stands on the issue of anti-Semitism and extremist movements. In view of Jeremiah Duggan’s sudden and violent death, it is time to critically scrutinize the activities of the LaRouche Organization and its main European arm, the Schiller Institute, with an eye to an investigation of their collective illegality, which includes incitement to hatred and Holocaust denial. 

-Dr Matthew Feldman

Senior Lecturer in History

Editor, Compass: Political Religions (www.religion-compass.com)

Erica Duggan photo courtesy BBC.com

Copyright: 2008 Matthew Feldman   H.E.A.R.T