The formation of the LYM in 1999 was meant as Larouche’s survivng legacy in his quest for “Immortality”, at the expense of the baby boomers who made up his organization. For this purpose, a purge would have to be implemented sooner or later, moving his chess pieces around. Through the previous decade at least, the published propaganda rattled on — with increaing vehemence — about the problems and failures of the Baby-boomers, and hatred of the baby-boomers was to be the focal point of the ideology implanted on thenew LYM cadre of recruits.  The published hatred of the baby-boomers was a manifestation of much the same meant internally by the organization to its adherents, and specifically related to certain individuals.

Namely Kenneth Kronberg, who ran the printing operation and was loyal to a fault to Lyndon Larouche.  Getting rid of Kronberg would be to successfully dump onto his lap all financial debts incurred with PMR’s function as Larouche’s printing press — if at first at cost of operation than later at PMR’s expense, Kronberg becoming the useful scape-goat for the death of the organization’s ability to disseminate his propaganda through the printed page.  So on that fateful morning of April 11, 2007, the Daily Briefing ran off the problems of the “Baby Boomers” who if not ready to join the “real world”, should consider “virtual suiccide”, before singling out the Printing Press as the source of the organization’s troubles.  Seeing no escape, Ken Kronberg jumped off an overpass.

In the parlance of Larouchian terminology, “the real world” means working with full fervor for Larouche’s causes in conjunction with “Immortality” (his), and “virtual suicide” is the supposed worth of your life outside the organization, the promise from the man in charge that you will suffer a nervous breakdown outside his curiously crafted sense of a “comfort zone”.

Purges have happened before, and are necessary as a means of control and means of reinvention for an organization such as Larouche’s.  In a sense, the lifeblood of this type of organization is the management of the internal crises in purporting the crises outside the world.  But this was going to linger and deepen.  I cannot say how I would imagine Larouche could pull off his feat in moving his “Youth Movement” in taking over the organization from thebaby boomers, but I find it difficult to see him picturing this purge as happening in the manner it did.

The Memorial Service for Ken Kronberg proved to be a meeting ground where former and current members renewed connections.  Bridges were built, mainly bridges which could allow some members to walk out of the organization.  Over the next year, the specter of “outside projects” for a staff at the National Level not fully committed to Larouche’s project of (self) Immortality would loom and haunt the organization and his most loyal of loyalists.  Just as important, bridges of information were built that would allow the dissemination of what can be called “The Secrets of the Elites”.

In previous years, the necessary revision of history and tightening of conduits of information could be more successfully completed.  The problem for Larouche came in the form of the Internet, and a loose network of observers with varying levels of awareness of what is going on (IE: This blog and I are quite clearly trailing on that list — I not being a former or current member or long time researcher and professional expert on this topic), but at any rate apt to disseminate the contortions and non sequiturs Larouche’s organization was set to go through in their attempt to weasle around the issues.

When Lyndon Larouche’s organization finally came around to acknowledging the problems attendent with Ken Kronberg’s suicide, two things immediately floated in the air.  First, the urging of continuing the struggle for “Immortality” as Kronberg’s supposed dying legacy.  Second, Kronberg’s suicide was stated as his biggest mistake — in the ideology of the organization’s thought process means as much as anything else, that Kronberg’s suicide was Larouche’s biggest mistake — and biggest source of consternation.

Larouche was confronted with a twin set of problems, the problems specific to the two parts of his organization with the Baby Boomers and the Youth Movement. For the Baby Boomers, particularly in the National org in Leesburg, he had to simply move the baby boomers past Kronberg.  For the Youth, he had to simply innoculate them from the controversy completely, and to the extent that he needed to address it, tell a side of the story that would effectively leave it in the laps of the Baby Boomers and the Kronbergs.

To that latter end, the organization directly addressed the issue of various websites’ focus on Larouche, the “AFA funded” FACTNet board, “John Train’s salon” in Dennis King, and a “new blog by(a) Star Trek groupie and Robert Beltran stalker”. Recharged in earnest was a a full frontal assault on computer related culture — in the form of video games and myspace — as well as a demonization of the Internet tools of wikipedia and google (which had long been bugaloboos for the Larouche organization).  In the end, the measures culminated in the edict that banished the Larouche Youth Movement from visiting the Internet — and while I cannot say I  really know what the terms of this edict are, which in addition to dropping 80 daily hits from Nick Benton’s myspace site (and for all I know, this blog) served to isolate them from the fallout from the national organization, and anything not given to them by the organization.

The problem with the National org, meanwhile, was that it was full of individuals with a clear memory and level of affection toward the recently departed Kronberg.  Necessarily, the berating Ken Kronberg took prior to his suicide would have to be pushed aside.  The best Larouche could push for with Ken Kronberg — while maintained a failure to his cause, at least a loyal foot-soldier in the cause of (his) Immortality, and in that week delayed “open letter” to the widow Molly Kronberg, he threw in a clause meant to put her on warning.  Molly Kronberg was set to be, internally speaking at least, Enemy #1.  The coup de grace came when Larouche issued his “Final Word” on the subject by pointing to her couple of hundreds of dollars in donation to presidential campaign of George W Bush.  In an act of conscience which showed Larouche the uncomfortable level of dissension within the ranks, this factoid would be left off of its designated memo, forcing Larouche to issue the notice again.  The parallel tact was another act of revisionist history: change the subject completely.  So it was that the cause of the consternation and rambling within the organization was newly minted as the history – changing webcast where Larouche exposed the BAE Scandals, the historical mission and issue that the organization was now supposed to throw itself into for the Greater Good.  Anyone overly burdened and by the schism of this history changing event was instructed to a friendly chat with the resident house psychiatrist, Gerry Healy. (sic?)

Intruding into the attempt to completely change the subject was the hovering presence of Avi Klein, doing research for a piece for the liberal political magazine The Washington Monthly.  The Larouche organization did its customary act of shutting down any line of communication from them to him, and worked their way to the proper response.  Here they went to the go-to-line, which is to suggest that Avi Klein was a Mossad Agent.  After that, it was a task of placing the article into the larger context: this was a hit job for the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” to bring down the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” having been a continuation of the “Get Larouche Task Force” of the 1980s that brought Larouche, and various associates, to prison.  It was a convoluted act of rationalization which could only be believable by delievers in Larouche, and increasingly not even to them.  One line did show the mindset of the organization in assessing what they needed to protect most of all.  Jeff Steinberg wrote that what these forces fear most of all was the implication of a growing Larouche Youth Movement that would survive and thrives past Lyndon Larouche’s demise.  Their focus was in incubating the LYM.  As an aside, the word “demise” seems a bit of a Freudian slip, Steinberg seems to be thought of as more or less planning a think tank to survive the death of Larouche, one that has no room for Lyndon Larouche.

Whatever else one can say about the proported “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” outgrowth from the 1980s plot to bring down Larouche theory, it did dove-tail back to the emerging line against Molly Kronberg.  To get to that point, you had to leave aside that the Washington Monthly’s spot on the political map is roughly that of a sort of “Clintonistas in Exile”, and put aside that Kronberg was next seen lending an interview with Chip Berlet, who wrote some articles for High Times Magazine, a fact the Larouche Organization used in fund-raising from largely conservative Republicans in the 1980s.  Larouche unveiled his next line of attack against Molly Kronberg by revising the history of the court trials and the prison sentence of the 1980s.  Whereas the old storyline focused on the role of George Herbert Walker Bush, President of the United States and former CIA Head, in supposed railroading the crew of political prisoners, the new focus of “newly revealed information” swirled around Molly Kronberg’s acts of criminality and back-stabbing (one large part coming with Molly Kronberg’s attempt to keep Larouche from testifying in her trial).

At this point, Larouche and company were well aware of the shake-out in the org and the hollowing out at the national org, and so ran ahead of the matter as much as they could by issuing internal memos warning the faithful of the back-stabbing enemies in their midst.  This shake-out would reach a crescendo in March, when Larouche let out a bellow against the “stupid manpower shortage” he was seeing amongst his leadership, and the proliferation of “Outside Projects”.  He rolled back into his long standing attack on the baby-boomers, and in a published release on his website explain “one of the things I hate about my associates”.  Reportedly, and I have no way of confirming or denying such a statement, the NEC is now comprised of six people.  Lyndon Larouche has gotten his purge, whatever good that does him.   The prime directive of the NEC at this point has to be to direct and manage the Larouche Youth Movement, getting back to the task of making them feel as though they are World Historic Figures under Larouche’s own belief that hs is the World Historic Figure, in part by creating a sense amongst the “Youth” of feeling superior to an the generation that joined in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The fight for Larouche’s immortality is one of stringing them along in training them that Conflict is more powerful than Love.

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