Part One.
Recently I noted that somebody had posted this site to a link on where that then-plagued by LaRouchite commenters can get some information about Lyndon LaRouche. It was a bit galling. I make an unlikely source. I mock it and try to move on. But the problem is that if I’m to be referenced as a source of LaRouche, I may as well have more material on him than what I’d tend to otherwise — a wisecrack smirk followed by a devastating comment from a former member of his cult (taken by a college journalist as my words). If this is linked in that way, I might as well have actual INFORMATION to be used and considered. Thus… welcome to a long series of posts that detail the career of one Lyndon H Larouche, Jr.
Lyndon H LaRouche, Jr. was born to a family of Quakers. They were arch-conservative Quakers who accused their fellow-church-goers of being Bolsehviks. LaRouche, Sr. wrote a rambling tract berating them for a variety of crimes, including failure to react positively to an anti-Jewish speech. Thus, they were kicked out of the congregation. This is according to a review of the book New American Fascism.
LaRouche, Jr. started out a consientous objector during World War II — a biographical bit of information he mentioned when he suited it attracting radical Leftists and would start to leave out when he sought to attract right-wingers (and had his followers hold up signs mocking Jane Fonda). If you know your World War II conscientous objector history, you know they were pretty well rounded up and placed in work camps. It was here that he bunked with a Trotskyite who imparted radical politics onto him. And thus was born “Lyn Marcus”, who after the war joined the Socialist Workers Party.
In the late 1970s, LaRouche would revise the reason that he was a member of a Communist party. The government had wanted him to infiltrate the group, you see. He, being a noble citizen, you see, refused. But he joined to see for himself what was up and what was that all. It is a feeble excuse for someone wanting to distance himself from his past in attempting to appeal to a different segment of the population, and if believed would fall short of explaining all subsequent events in his life, but LaRouche probably believes it.
LaRouche eventually joined the army, and worked as a medical corpsman in India. He attended college, and quit soon thereafter because he believed himself better than his teachers — he was “one of those prodigies”. I can compare this to emails I’ve received telling me LaRouchites are in throe urging college students to quit — he is imparting on them a sense of intellectual superiority onto his would-be recruits.
The most important part of his conventional career path was his employment in computer programming and systems designing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is the language of the computer industry, circa 1960, quickly outdated though it may be, that infects his literature and serves as one of a few factors that make them unreadable. If you’ve ever actually read one of his pamphlets, you are made of headier stuff than I. It is also this training that shadows his “programming” — or “counter-programming” that the “conspirators” had committed (heh heh).
LaRouche was kicked out of the Socialist Workers’ Party for trying to organize a radical shism with well known British schimatic Gerald Healy. Do not ask me what that means, but it doesn’t seem to bode well for a constructive future. It was then that LaRouche started teaching Marxist economics at the Free School of New York, which was the genesis of the cult to come.
I have every reason to believe that LaRouche’s group had as much to do with the SDS as he has now with the Democratic Party, despite media reports suggesting a close lineage. Here is a 1970 antecedent that suggests that, contrary to largely held thought in 1970s reporting on LaRouche (or “Lyn Marcus”) that it was not really “noble at first” until things just started to go haywire.
As a graduate student and lecturer at the City College of New York in 1970, I was an advisor to a new undergraduate group, Students for Environmental Salvage. This was at the time of intense awareness of conservation and pollution issues on compuses in New York City and elsewhere, that led to the first Earth Day. Students in the group were deeply and genuinely concerned about endangered species, oil spills, pesticides, solid waste disposal — in short, the whole range of problems that still haunt us today.
Attendance at the first few meetings was veery high (up to 100 or more) and enthusiastic until, at the third or fourth meeting, one student shouted his way into leadership and into narrowing the agenda to one issue: rolling back the subway fare! This student later proved to be the spokesman of a small group of LaRouche disciples, members of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
Rolling back the recently raised subway fare was a progressive cause and certainly had an environmental aspect, since public mass transit pollutes less than other alternatives. But all other concerns were ridiculed and labeled “neo-Malthusian.†Subsequent meetings were more and more poorly attended, as the LaRouche people forced themselves into a major role in planning the college’s Earth Day activities.
Cirty College’s first “environmental teach-in†(4-16-70) became a strange forum of speeches and workshops dominated by LaRouche himself (under his Lyn Marcus alias) and his supporters, who peddled their moronic anti-environmental views to a few bewildered students. The college’s participation in Earth Day, six days later, was sparse and disorganized.
What Lyndon LaRouche had done, I realized in shock and disgust, was to sabotage very effectively the student environmental movement at City College, the quintessential urban public institution of higher learning in America.
– George Dale, Armank NY, 7-16-89
Nonetheless, it appears his “Labor Committee” gained some measure of respectibility during a Columbia University Strike, and he either worked in tandem with SDS or parasitically to take credit and lead followers into its corridor, attracted to the strike first, then the World Revolution that it shared in common with SDS, and on to… to… to…
Okay. Cue 1974 New York Times article:
In mid 1972 Miss Schnitzer and Mr. Marcus parted. Early members say that she had served as a target of his wrath at meetings, providing a semblence of debate about theories. After she left, they said, Mr. Marcus increasingly insisted on one man rule, calling dissenters CIA agents or accusing them of having “mother problems”.
Now. First of all, if you go back into my Larouche archives, you will find that “mother problem” idea is still imrinted on LaRouchites as a means of psychological warfare with would-be recruits. Second of all, looking from the outside in it has to be different from how it looks from the inside, visa vie level of controls and the nature of the ideas being sprouted.
Next time: How to wreck a college’s Environmental Movement, Operation Mop-Up, the media discovers something funky, and whatever else I get to.