Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement
[4] In the book Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, which was published in 1975 by D. C. Heath and Company under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche tried to show that numerous Marxists—ranging from the Monthly Review group to Ernest Mandel, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and the "Soviet economists"—had failed to understand and to interpret correctly Marx's writing.
According to a review by Martin Bronfenbrenner in The Journal of Political Economy, about half of the book was devoted to dialectical philosophy, "with a strong epistemological stress", with the other half devoted to discussions of economic and general history, anthropology and sociology, and actual economics, including a surprisingly large helping of business administration—Bronfenbrenner noted that LaRouche seemed to have "more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists", including a familiarity with the way speculative overcapitalization, operating at the borders of white-collar crime, creates "fictitious capitals" that later do not match their actual earning power.
[11][12] According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed conventional economics as a "withered arm of philosophy", which had taken a wrong turn toward reductionism under the influence of British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume.
[12] LaRouche's definition of reductionism was as follows: The fundamental fallacy of ordinary understanding is the delusion that the universe is reducible to simple substance, or—the more Hume-like view—that the content of human knowledge is limited to simple-substance-like, self-evident sense perceptions.
According to an article by Ivo Caizzi in Corriere della Sera, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini asked the Berlusconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007.
In his view, it forms the foundation of a conspiracy theory that rationalizes paranoid thinking, an opinion echoed by John George and Laird Wilcox in American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (1996).
[35] Writing in The New York Times in 1989, Johnson described LaRouche as "a kind of Allan Bloom gone mad" who seems to "believe the nonsense he spouts", a view of the world in which Aristotelians use "sex, drugs and rock-and-roll" and "environmentalism and quantum theory" to support wealthy oligarchs and create a civilization-destroying "new Dark Age".
They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
[44] According to this theory, London financial circles protect themselves from competition by using techniques of "controlled conflict" first developed in Venice, and LaRouche attributes many wars in recent memory to this alleged activity by the British.
[45] According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade.
"[50] A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review cited a statement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph that described LaRouche as the "publisher of a book that accuses the Queen of being the world's foremost drug dealer", characterising it as a "bit of black propaganda" and a "reference to the book Dope, Inc., ... which laid bare the role of the London-centered offshore financial institutions and allied intelligence services, in running the global drug trade, from the time of Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars against China.
[52] The Executive Intelligence Review responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to EIR reporter Jeff Steinberg's appearance on a British ITV television program about the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
[55] According to LaRouche movement member Tony Papert, an important part of this theory is the LaRouchian analysis of the ideas of Leo Strauss which borrows heavily from the writings of Shadia Drury.
[56] Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal has condemned LaRouche's views on this subject, and says that it may have influenced other commentators who subsequently published a similar analysis, such as Seymour Hersh and James Atlas in their articles for The New York Times.
Bartley quotes the assertion by LaRouche movement member Jeffrey Steinberg that a "cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" have plotted a "not-so-silent coup" using the September 11 attacks as a justification, similar to the Reichstag fire of 1933.
[58] Political science scholars Catherine and Michael Zuckert say that LaRouche's writings were the first to connect Strauss to neoconservatism and the Bush foreign policy and initiated the discussion of the topic, though the views about it changed as it percolated through to international journalism.
Even leading Republicans know Shultz to be an outright totalitarian, who has used the Bush Presidency to impose a 'Pinochet Model' of top-down dictatorship and radical free-market economics upon the United States.
LaRouche and his followers stated (incorrectly) that HIV, the AIDS virus, could be transmitted by casual contact,[65][66] citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida.
Mel Klenetsky, co-director of political operations for the Larouche-affiliated National Democratic Policy Committee and LaRouche's campaign director,[72][73] said that there must be universal testing and mandatory quarantining of HIV carriers.
In response to a survey which predicted that 72% of voters would oppose the measure, a spokesman called the poll "an obvious fraud", saying that pollsters deliberately worded questions to prejudice respondents against the initiative.
According to researcher Douglas Selvage, "a cycle of misinformation and disinformation... arose between U.S.-based conspiracy theorists—especially Lyndon LaRouche and his followers—and authors and publications espousing Moscow's preferred theses regarding AIDS.
[86] It also said that the top level organizations in the command structure of the environmental movement include the World Wildlife Fund, headed by Prince Philip, the Aspen Institute, and the Club of Rome.
[102] 21st century, which is produced by LaRouche supporters,[103] has published papers by entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, including one that urged the return of the insecticide DDT because he said it has "saved more millions of lives than any other man-made chemical".
[104] Rogelio (Roger) Maduro, an associate editor, wrote that the ban on DDT was part of a plan to reduce the population and had caused the deaths of 40 million people via a resurgence of malaria.
[126] 21st Century Science & Technology has published papers by climate change contrarians including Zbigniew Jaworowski, Nils-Axel Mörner, Hugh Ellsaesser, and Robert E. Stevenson.
A 2007 article by LaRouche science advisor Laurence Hecht suggested that the varying levels of cosmic rays, whose change is dependent on Earth's motion through the galaxy, has a larger effect on the climate than local factors such as greenhouse gases or solar and orbital cycles.
[127] Christopher Monckton was praised as the leading spokesman of the "global warming swindle" in the introduction to an Executive Intelligence Review interview with him in 2009, but he was also considered to have a relatively limited view of the cabal behind the hoax.
A motto of LaRouche's European Workers' Party is "Think like Beethoven"; movement offices typically include a piano and posters of German composers, and members are known for their choral singing at protest events, using satirical lyrics tailored to their targets.
"[146] The charge of antisemitism in the LaRouche network resurfaced in the media in 2004 in accounts of the death of a Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who had been attending a Schiller Institute event in Germany.
[36] In his 1983 book, Architects of Fear, Johnson described LaRouche's dalliances with radical groups on the right as "a marriage of convenience", and less than sincere; as evidence he cited a 1975 party memo that spoke of uniting with the right simply for the purpose of overthrowing the established order: "Once we have won this battle, eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy."
