It’s a LaRouche House
I recall in 2000 seeing one Buchannan/ Foster sign, on the edge of PSU campus, the day before election. It looked out of place. Plenty of Gore/Lieberman signs, Nader / LaDuke signs, and the occasional Bush/Cheney sign… but this was the only Buchannan sign that I had seen all election season.
Skip to this year.
The LaRouche posters are splattered all over North Portland telephone polls. To nobody’s particular notice. The LaRouchites put them there, and they’ll fall by the wayside sooner or later.
But I did see a LaRouche sign in the window of a mid-sized pink house. And a large picture of the man… Lyndon LaRouche.
It’s overtaken, around the city, by the Kerrys, the Bushes, the Kuciniches, and the faded Deans (occasionally with Kucinich or Kerry stuck over them)… but there it is: I know where a Lyndon LaRouche supporter lives.
Feel free to knock.
May 23rd, 2004 at 8:34 am
I saw someone pulling Larouche posters down near campus. He seemed…righteously happy.
July 12th, 2004 at 1:27 pm
So to all of you out there who are active, and who know who Larouche is, I would like to say we have a problem. The problem is that Lyndon, that dirty old man, is up to his dirty old tricks again, and I don’t mean spinning ever wilder conspiracy theories, or even stealing a few bucks from the local widow (though he’s doing that too)–no I mean brainwashing kids. I fell for their rhetoric for a short time, and since I left have been writing about what I saw there. The following is part of a letter I wrote to a professor who asked me what her students could expect if they joined the “movement” (read:cult).
Do not focus on the “politics” of his organization. For all intents and purposes the political side of the organization is just a sham–it really is more of a religion than a political movement anyway–the mantra really is give me your life and I’ll give you salvation.
Your students will be having the same methods of coersion used on them at the table that is used on members in closed rooms, on your campus on their lunch breaks, Larouchies will be out there preaching:”The end is near, join the Leader and be like him, and that will save the world.” And they will tell them to drop out of college to join, they will literally be brought into group meetings where every person in the room is pressuring them to drop out. You know when they have classes? Usually what happens is maybe one or two people will be from a local campus, usually someone they met that day. That person will walk into a room of twenty or so people, not really knowing that almost everyone there is already a member. As soon as someone comes to more than 1 or 2 meetings, they are psychologically profiled by the Regional leader and then the leader will talk to everyone about that person.
Example:”Frank has mommy issues, everybody needs to tell him he needs to stop sucking off his mother’s milk.” So then as Frank hangs around more and he is brought in for conferences and meetings, everyone is nice to him, but they in their own way, will make comments about Frank being a Mama’s boy. This may be true, or it may be that Frank just has a very close relationship with his mom, he’s 18, and still just a kid. So this “campaign” makes Frank begin to question himself, it undermines his confidence in his beliefs and values, while all around him there are people constantly restating the normal line of Larouche politics; nothing is what it seems, the world is ending, drop out of school, join me..yada yada. And there may be ten of these directives given by the regional leader. All designed to make the person, basically, have a nervous breakdown in a controlled environment. They will attack his hobbies, his friends, his values, his family,and his personality traits in these secret “campaigns”, and Fred will think that people he has hardly talked to think he’s a mama’s boy(or whaever they’re attacking that week)–his insecurity will soar.
Then what happens if that person decides to drop out and join full time is the real work on their mind begins. The same type of thing goes on, but then added in is a host of other tactics–the working for 12-14 hours a day will soften him up quite a bit, and the leader will keep a very close eye in the very early stages. After a few days of work the leader might lean in and say “hey you guys should all do something tonight, take Frank over to so-n-so’s house and read poetry. Frank will be up until 3 am, get up a few hours later and go back to arguing at a card table shrine for Larouche with everyone who walks by, all this time reinforcing what he has “learned” by taking the position for 12 hours a day. Frank will be plied with Larouche books to read from every side. Then something will come up that Frank has a problem with. He’s organizing at at a table one day and his partner, someone who’s been around for years, breaks someone down in the street who begins crying. Fred thinks it was cruel, so he goes to talk to the regional leader(the boss at each office). Now, all this time the leader has played “good cop”.
“Umm, Steve?” says Frank, “I saw Alex make someone cry at the college today, he was yelling at this kid about how he can’t understand Larouche because he’s a homosexual, and when the kid said no, Alex just kept poking him with it until the kid broke down and sarted crying.”
From out of nowhere the bad cop shows up.
“So do you need to go suck off your mother’s tit some more is that what this is about Frank? Alex has been off his momma’s tit for ten years now and he’s mastered Riemann’s geometry, have you?”
“Uhhh..no.”
“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? You’re too busy thinking about Mommy’s tits and Daddy’s dick to be a potent organizer?”
And this may go on for a half an hour. Mind you that Frank has just moved in to an apartment with 4 other Larouchies, he has just dropped out of school, and probably alienated most of his friends, and his parents, who all argued against him joining the Larouche Youth Cult. The leader will use every bit of personal information he has gathered about Frank in order for him to have a real breakdown. Frank, who now has nowhere to go, but has made a few “friends’ in the LYC, finally gives in. He sees that Alex was right for breaking down that kid, because that kid is evil, and Frank realizes that he is too. Frank realizes that he hasn’t worked hard enough for humanity to criticize Alex, and so he confesses to Steve.
“I’m sorry Steve, you’re right, I’ve been dependant on my mom forever, and she was turning me in to some crazy brainwashed consumer, I mean geez, she was sending me to college to learn about computers, like Larouche says that’s not even real. I guess she’s just like every other boomer.”
After he does so he feels a little better and stops crying, and his pulse slows down.
Steve says,”Well good. What I think you need to do is read Lyn’s book “The Reason Why Everyone in the World is Insane But Me”, and you should get Alex to help you on some geometry. Are you still into painting?”
“Yes, Sir, I like to paint at night sometimes still, it eases my mind.”
“You should focus on something else…try reading Lyn’ s book “They’re All Out to Get Me, I Swear”. Ok well, good talking to you.”
And Frank walks out feeling a little closer to Steve, and Steve has shown Frank that he is able to instill terror in him at any moment. This makes Frank unconsciously more pliant, he won’t raise another questoin like that for a month. But he will raise a question. And now Frank hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 5 weeks, and he is becoming slightly malnourished as his pay has dropped from 300 a week to 100 a week because of a “mass leaflet mobilization” [and Lyn is going to travel Europe for a while, and he needs the nice table at the restauraunt]. The pay will continue to decrease.
Frank tells Steve he has to ask him about something again. Steve tells him to come to his office at 5. At 5 Frank walks in, and a Security Squad member is in the office also, the S.S. member stands in front of the door, and this time the yelling is more severe, and the psychological profile, having been honed, allows the leader to play Frank like a piano. Frank is a blubbering mess in twenty minutes. Frank’s brain which has initiated fight or flight, tells him to get up and walk out. He tries to do so, and the SS member begins working on him (verbally)while blocking the door, the two of them work on him until he sits back down, and takes his medicine.
It’s called “Beyond Psychoanalysis” a method devised by Lyndon Larouche in the late seventies in a series of papers (and subsequently taught to members after they are in for 6 months or so and have gone through the process–at least Scientologists are upfront about their psychobabble!)
Recently a young man, Jeremiah Duggan, committed suicide while at a Larouche conference, the clues to this case are found in the words of Lyndon himself:
From Beyond Pschoanalysis:
“The program [Beyond Psyche]is safely undertaken in the NCLC, where it could not be so with laymen, since the LCer has a self-conscious identity in the world, which the ordinary laymen lacks. Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse”
Well I guess NCLC (National Committe of Labor Caucuses) needs to be updated to ICLC (International CLC)–Jeremiah safely undertook his Beyond Psychoanalysis in Germany.
I ask you all not to treat LHL as just a kook, he’s a dangerous kook, and our society, as free as it should remain has given this monster far too much rope (or maybe not enough).