I hope to avoid posting anything concerning David Goldman following this post
tap tap tap tap.
Get one matter out of the way pretty quickly: David Goldman lied in his “Confession” column about his time in the Larouche organization. He halved his time there. I am reminded of a problem I briefly had in reading a different succesful ex-member who, in his initial article in April of 2007 and then subsequent series of myspace pages (I’m not hiding who I’m referring to, but I have no interest in drawing him into anything or tapping him on the shoulders, which writing a name of the Internet is the equivalent of doing — I refer to NB, of course) — and it became clear to me that he had roughly compartmentalized lines of Independence for dates, though I don’t think the public record showed him as correct. I notice that one of the variations of the sock-puppet “Herschel Kurstofsky” expresed my same “issue” at the wikipedia entry on him, though I always took the “official” “line” on NB as expressed from “unofficial” comments left on the Internet — variations of what we see expressed about Goldman seen here:
I guess he was not allowed to screw the girls in the organization any more that must be why he left.
Ah, yes. Stay classy, Anonymous Larouche Organization Commenter. (In NB’s case, the innuendo was altered to his sexual orientation.) There is a pattern here, such that I begin to wonder if the real story of this organization is that it shouldn’t be understood in terms of any political matters whatsoever and that it’s actually an anti-sex cult. The Larouchies keep saying that the only reason people leave is because they weren’t allowed to have sex in the org, which strikes me as a good reason to leave.
IF I were a wise man I would not make a single comment on Goldman myself, and would throw up various of the more intelligent comments, conflicting though they are, and move along quietly, never dwelling on David Goldman again. But I’m nothing if not a fool, willing to say a bit more than I have any right to say.
There are a few reasons it would be relevant to point out a Larouchian past. Two do not apply here. He’s not “connected” to the org (cough cough, Dreyfuss, cough cough) and he’s not pulling a similar confidence game (Tarpley). In the case of Spengler/ Goldman, it would appear, what I’ve thought of as the “David Horowitz Effect” sparked some interest.:
(GO down to Mark In Houston) When I hear David Horowitz and people like him talk about how far left they were back in the day and how that helped push them to be so far right now, my general response is “So you were a freak then and you are a freak now. Big deal.”
It’s not a perfect fit here, and subjective enough that most anyone with a mere ideological difference of opinion can justify tossing that past up.
It’s there that I think much of this analysis is a bit unfair, skip to 6th paragraph: “of the collective madness” — shades of LaRouche’s rant against the “68ers. — and, also a pretty common trope in conservative politics, and that kind of “new recruit” who decides that their own “New Left” was an adolescent “collective madness”.
A bit closer to an explanation for an affect of “this matter” is seen posted here:
But I have to admit I was dismayed to read of the Larouche connection, which makes me wonder if Goldman is still not subject in some degree to the theory-of-everything fallacy. As interesting as I have found the many essays inspired by Rosenzweig, I have sometimes thought that they explain a little too much, not unlike the experience of talking to a LaRouchian.
Up to whomever to determine, I suppose. Back to Goldman in explaining himself, and a key point: In a caricature of the reductio ad Hitlerum, everything he didn’t like pointed to the Nazis. The economist Milton Friedman, whose students had advised the Pinochet regime in Chile, must be a fascist because LaRouche didn’t like his economics, and I coauthored a book with LaRouche in 1978 with that silly allegation.
As though wanting to provide a ready-made example for the curious, LPAC released this news article as Goldman’s article bumped around a small piece of the blogosphere!
President Obama Is Being Brainwashed by Nazi Doctors
President Barack Obama’s recent interview in the New York Times magazine of May 3, demonstrates without a doubt that he is being brainwashed by his crew of behavioral economists, led by Larry Summers, who are peddling Nazi economics against the old and the sick. […] This is nothing but Nazi economics. EIR will continue to look for any different between these Orszag-Obama policies and those of Adolf Hitler, but so far, there is no difference.
Anyway, The references to the Larouche as a “gnostic cult” (oooo… the gnostics… oooo), while easily made next to referring to it as “Maoist” in nature, seems to be framed right for this sort of traditionalist religious — the phrase “Up From Secularism” suggestive of, for the sake of Larouche, the old line about open-mindedness allowing for shoving any old crap into your head. That case made further here.
Well, not exactly. I know no Straussians — I really don’t, and this blogger does know that “Straussians” (such as they are) as well the Larouche organization believes Larouche was responsible for planting the common view of Strauss in our political discourse, doesn’t he?
But tweak the phrases a little and you’d get to the religious. Jesus Christ, and for that I suggest skip to “III” at this entry.
It is to laugh. But it is around this theme that I have my biggest problem with this essay, and suggest how weirdly manipulative it is. The line that most floored me, and I don’t know if David Goldman is sincerely pulling stuff out of his arsh for his own sake, or cynically pulling stuff out his arsh to wave at his audience to move past this issue… A comment at beliefnet post expresses this here:
Pentimento May 7, 2009 4:12 PM
Goldman’s explanation of the proportionally high numbers of Jews in classical music is just as bizarre as any LaRouche formulation IMO. He suggests that the reason for these high numbers is that secular Jews are afraid to engage with God, and so play music in order to evoke feelings of the divine. Hmm, all right. Then where does that leave devout Jewish musicians, like the opera singers Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker? What about Jewish composers? What about Jewish converts to Christianity, of whom there historically have been many in both performance and composition? What about non-Jewish classical musicians? Do they, too, turn to music because they fear the encounter with God? I dunno. It seems to me that someone ought to be editing the editor.
I would think the reason there’s a “proportionally high numbers of Jews in classical music” is the same reason there’s a proportionally high number of Jews in any intelletual or artistic endevor. By which I refer to the initial seed money propagated by the Rothschilds which built the arena of Foundations that perpetuate Jewish World Domination.
By the way, I will give Goldman one thing. He solves a wikipedia problem, if it’s of enough concern to rise to the level of “problem” and if anyone were interested in “solving” it. In the comments section for Larouche’s Views, “Will Beback” states the obvious manichean nature, and Leatherstocking (or a different name for a sock-puppet of the organization — I’d have to look it up) calls for a citation for such a claim. I was going to get around to posting this item, and end by asking “Would the next person making a brief reference to Larouche please help us out by placing “Manichean” next to the usual assortment of adjectives (fringe and so forth… also, quite increasingly and incorrectly “dead”)? Well, here we go:
In LaRouche’s Manichean view of the world, a conspiracy had suppressed the truth in the service of evil oligarchs. Starting with Aristotle, it continued through to the nominalists, the British empiricists, and that supposed pinnacle of modern evil, Bertrand Russell. The Venetian Inquisition, the British Empire, the Hapsburg family, the Rockefellers, and the Trilateral Commission all figured variously in this grand conspiracy against LaRouche’s supposed intellectual antecedents. Jewish banking families kept popping up in LaRouche’s accounts of the evil forces.
Overall, to post a different part of a comment I already posted, it’s about like this:
I’m not seeing how this is a courageous piece, however. It seems to me that it was a necessary piece, in that Goldman had been outed as a former LaRouchie and needed to explain that portion of his life for credibility reasons, and the piece otherwise reads like many Boomer ex-radical biography pieces.
With convenient omissions.
One more item linking to “Spengler” on how one can stretch this article to make any policy point they desire, go here. And a very brief celebratory dance of sorts from an “outer”.
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Hey, Revenire! HBPA is Sweeping the nation!
AND… a basic rule … whenever a poster at Wonkette posts regarding Ron Paul, someone will see fit to throw in a reference to Lyndon Larouche.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I was never Goldman’s biggest fan, to say the least, but–I can understand what a vise he finds himself in.
The one thing about his protective self-criticism piece that I find pretty tacky is that he decided he needed to “out” a bunch of other ex-Labor Committee members who have been successful in this or that endeavor.
Of course, he did chop in half the number of years he was in, but I can understand that. and I think a kind of benign amnesia overtakes many ex-
members.
What would be really useful is if Goldman decided to target Lyn’s own particular culpabilities for further reportage.
May 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Coming back to this, I’m actually a bit perplexed on why he short-changed his years. Granted, I guess he would have liked to minimize a central role in the org and one decade goes over better than two decades in that regard. But the trade-off for that is a lack of seamlessness in his narrative. He states that Larouche’s org was a flotsam that came out of the “Collective Madness” of the New Left. It would therefore make more sense to leave yourself firmly in that collective madness, and be washed away on that flotsam with it. As it were, he states that he joined in 1976, when the New Left was dead, and when the Larouche organization was shifting its political alignments around and becoming a great bullwark against Soviet Communism, and moving itself rhetorically into the “Reagan Revolution”. That latter part makes the line about his support of Reagan making a break “inevitable” not so much untrue (this is an org that just threw mud at Obama for a year, than aligned itself as a light behind Obama for, like, 3 months, and is going back to an anti-Obama stance, after all), but in need of a further clarification of what that means for an organization who voted for him twice, while making sure to maintain a place to call his vice-president akin to Hitler.
In the most cynical terms, I don’t think his audience would have cared about the extra time, and while I doubt most of them would be inclined to rummage around his past, his story makes more sense if he stuck to the truth.
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factnet posts of interest
borismaglev: ULTRAGLOW was a cosmetics company in whose stock manipulation Goldman was involved. I don’t know how and I don’t know the details, but I do know that it involved a payoff from a broker in Queens to one of the LaRouche Campaign accounts. When the FBI raided the offices in 1986, there was fear that something about this case would be discovered in the seized files and Goldman was sent to Europe to be out of reach of prosecutors. About a year later he quit. Does anybody else know the details of this case? C256? It’s significance is that this was the case that drove Goldman out of the organization. Not regrets over anti-Semitism nor better opportunities with Wanniski and Bailey.
earnest one: I had lunch with David Goldman at a Leesburg cafe in July 1985.
We discussed a wide range of issues but MY interest centered on C=256 and the equal temperament versus well-temperament dispute (confusion) that he was helping to promulgate inside and outside the ICLC.
Apparently, Jonathan Tennenbaum’s logarithmic spiral cone (a beautiful discovery, without question) was being used to help prop up the LIE that J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier was written for equal temperament.
For people unfamiliar with the technical issues, roughly speaking the intellectual content of “temperament” simply involves the question of how to tune the 12 notes in an octave; there are many ways, many methods, and both the theoretical and practical issues are non-trivial, even for experts. Moreover, the subject is fascinating beyond measure as it brings together seemingly disparate ideas from mathematics, physics, music theory, and physiology.
I now quote Goldman:
“The people behind well-temperament were the most evil people of the past 300 years”.
Of course is all depends on what meaning you ascribe to “behind” although it turns out that in this case Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., Jonathan Tennenbaum, and David Goldman were all speaking and writing out of their asses and they were well behind the learning curve required for understanding the most rudimentary elements of tuning stringed keyboard instruments.
This historical “note” is sponsored by The Acoustical Revival.
Peter Tennenbaum May 9, 2009
AND… I’m not going to post the entire “c256 post here” — a bit weary of space — but for some balance against the general concensus of “not my favorite member”: http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showpost.php?p=378899&postcount=2061
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In other news: What is this, exactly?
http://texaslarouchemovement.wordpress.com/
Also “Brownpau”, if you’re reading this: LPAC has a twitter feed.
May 10th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
As to your question about the Texas LaRouche Movement website, looks as if ole Harley (Schlanger) is base-building again. Perhaps it’s the equivalent of the links on the LYM website to “LYM locals” or whatever in Seattle, Detroit, etc.
Although I gather from the Morning Briefing that Detroit has collapsed.
May 13th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
http://wweek.com/columns/coverstory#35.27
If it all sounds laughable, you could be what Pepin calls a “red cellâ€â€”a drone who doesn’t question the world around you. Pepin and his students, on the other hand, call themselves “white cellsâ€â€”a gifted minority of one in every 15,000 people who are aware and questioning, with an insatiable desire to seek the spiritual truth. […]
Steven Hassan, a former high-ranking member of the Moonies who now helps victims get out of cults, says there are literally thousands of self-styled gurus pushing their products online. Boosted by the power of the Internet, and by our own growing dissatisfaction and loneliness as individuals, people like Pepin have found a market niche that increasingly tunnels straight to the heart of mainstream America.
“People have lost faith in a lot of existing institutions, whether it’s the Catholic Church and their pedophilic priests, or the U.S. government, or their own economic security,†Hassan says. “People are extremely vulnerable to someone who comes along and who says in a very confident voice that they know what is going on in reality, and that they can give you the window into that knowledge.†[…]
“I was looking for my purpose. I knew there was something more than just living and dying. I knew that there was a greater plan and a greater purpose,†she says. “I can only imagine what it was like studying with the Buddha. It would be something similar to that, it’s such profound information.†[…]
Pepin delivers his shtick with a mix of scientific jargon, Eastern mysticism and pop-culture references that seems designed to flatter his listeners and fan their intellectual vanity. What pours out of his mouth is a nonstop, grammatically twisted stream of loosely connected concepts, delivered in a strong New England accent. In one recording, he explains his often rambling delivery.
“I am trying to share knowledge from a dimensional state of consciousness, and slowing them down to convert into a physical format for you to understand,†he explains. “This is not an easy task.â€
After four hours of Pepin’s barrage, I was left mentally numb—a feeling one longtime student at Woodside confirmed. “Your mind just kind of goes blank after a while listening to Eric,†he said. “No one’s been able to explain it.†[…]
Pepin tells his followers there’s a battle raging across time and space between good and evil. Borrowing from Star Wars, he calls them the Force and the Dark Side.
Pepin speaks of channeling his students’ psychic energy in order to affect the outcome of that fight, especially as the year 2012 approaches, when some New Age and occult believers think the world will undergo a cataclysmic upheaval because the Mayan calendar ends on Dec. 21 that year.
April 19th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Re David Goldman, I systematically exposed his sanitizing of his past, his collapsing of 19 years in the LaRouche movement (fully documented) into a mere six years, his role as an enthusiastic anti-Semitic propagandist for LaRouche, and his attempt to sanitize LaRouche’s ideology (via the ridiculous idea that LaRouche is basically just a “gnostic”). Read it all at http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/goldman.htm
First Things magazine has done nothing to set the record straight re Goldman’s misrepresentations they published on their blog, thus putting their integrity as a leading Catholic intellectual journal behind their new associate editor. Meanwhile, Goldman has used his article on the FT blog as the basis for a Wikipedia article, thus providing himself with more cover.
John Podhoretz’s mother is on the FT editorial board, so I was gratified to see that the Podhoretz clan is beginning to get the picture on just how wacko Goldman is.
I recall that someone on Factnet (HH? BorisMaglev?) predicted that FT would soon come to regret that they had hired Goldman. It would appear that the Factnet poster was right on the money.