Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. stoutly denies that he is a neo-Nazi. The 58-year-old chairman of the Manhattan-based National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) claims instead to be a "neo-Platonic humanist."
But hundreds of NCLC documents written over the past five years--articles from NCLC magazines and newspapers, books by LaRouche, and unpublished inner-party reports--strongly suggest that the "humanism" of LaRouche and his followers is merely a pose.
Some of the documents were written by LaRouche, others were written under his tutelage and are signed by his subordinates or else are unsigned. None has ever been repudiated by LaRouche or by the organization.
Either openly or via the use of code words, esoteric jargon and elliptical arguments, the documents communicate to a careful reader the key elements of a neo-Nazi ideology:
a theory of cultural/biological racism which divides humanity into superior and inferior peoples or strata with the Jews singled out as an especially evil, subhuman group;
a theory of history which blames the nation's and the world's ills on a predominantly Jewish international conspiracy;
advocacy of massive government repression against Jews, including threats of violent physical repression;
advocacy of aggressive militarism and nationalism aimed at world conquest to root out the Jewish-led conspiracy and reorganize the world under the rule of superior peoples and elites;
advocacy of a totalitarian state of a fascist rather than communist character (although with plenty of admiration for communism as a system which gets things done);
advocacy of a Nazi-style leadership principle; i.e., the domination of party and state by a charismatic warrior who is regarded as infallible and is endowed with unlimited personal authority;
expressions of solidarity (albeit in elliptical language) with the traditions and deeds of Nazi Germany and with the Aryan race-history concocted prior to World War Two by Nazi theoreticians such as Alfred Rosenberg.
In the weeks ahead, Our Town will give examples of each of these elements in NCLC writings. We begin this week by examining a detailed plan for a purge of America's Jews which appeared as an unsigned editorial in NCLC's biweekly newspaper New Solidarity, Sept. 5, 1978.
The editorial, entitled "Register the Zionist Lobby as Foreign Agents!" uses both the term "Zionist Lobby" and the term "Jewish Lobby" to refer to Americans who support Israel (a category which most observers would agree includes the overwhelming majority of American Jews). The term Jewish Lobby is placed in special quotes, thus softening the impact, but readers should be aware that other NCLC statements during the same period used the term in a similar context without quotes. For instance, a March 1978 editorial said that America must be "cleansed" by the immediate removal of all representatives of the "Jewish Lobby" from the "councils of government, industry, and labor." And a third editorial used the headline, "For Peace in the Mideast, Dump the Jewish Lobby!" accusing the targeted groups and individuals of, among other things, "nauseating Jewish hypocrisy."
The Sept. 5, 1978 editorial--the fully developed statement of the purge plan--begins:
The U.S. Congress, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the relevant state and local police agencies must establish a Task Force with wide-ranging investigative and subpoena power to root out the cancer in the American body politic that is the so-called Zionist Lobby.
According to the editorial, the "entire Zionist apparatus in the United States exists as an unchecked threat to national security" with "illegal and subversive primary links" to various elements in an international conspiracy, including the Israeli and "British" secret services. (Our Town readers will recall our Sept. 2, 1979 article explaining how NCLC uses "British" as its code word for a secretive group of bankers in London, mostly Jewish, who allegedly control the international Jewish community and use it to exploit the world.)
The American wing of the conspiracy, says the editorial, has a high command which includes "the New York investment banks like Lazard Freres, Lehman Brothers, Kuhn Loeb, and the Rothschild- and Warburg-allied forces." The reader should note that all of these names (the only top names given) are Jewish, and most of them are traditional targets of anti-Semitic propaganda.
The editorial then lists a string of second-level Jewish and non-Jewish public figures said to fall into two basic categories: the Zionist "intelligence agent per se" and "the more dangerous agent of influence."
"Literally thousands of operatives for the Zionist Lobby," the editorial proclaims, "have penetrated the halls of Congress, the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, and American business and labor organizations to gather information which is then transmitted up the chain of command to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the Maltese Order." (The latter is a reference to the Knights of Malta, a philanthropic order which NCLC believes is in cahoots with the Rothschild family and other "British oligarchs.")
The editorial also alludes to a racial basis for the Zionist Lobby's activities:"These agents gather information and intelligence on U.S. national security policy, corporate policy, and financial policy for transmission to the enemy. Their loyalties lie not with the United States but with the Zionist British organism." [Italics added--ed.]
In response to this alleged enemy organism, the editorial urges a decisive counterattack: "The Zionist octopus must be eliminated. Leaders of the 'Jewish Lobby' must be investigated and their various organizations dismantled or registered as foreign agents."
A list of the member organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations ("the so-called Jewish Lobby") is then provided, with the demand that they "be stripped of their foreign connections and cleaned up."
Of course, the implementation of such goals would require extraordinary law enforcement powers, and New Solidarity is not bashful about proposing (1) a "permanent Special Prosecutor's office" which would prepare a "series of major indictments"; and (2) a special Congressional committee which would "clean out Senators and Congressmen who maintain their covert relationships with Zionist spies."
But the editorial shifts its emphasis in the next paragraph, suddenly professing a measure of sympathy for the average Jew, who is depicted as being an unfortunate captive of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and other "British" organizations:
"A large majority of American Jews would eagerly abandon the ADL, the storm troopers of the Zionist movement, if they were not physically and psychologically terrorized by the ADL," the editorial asserts.
The dubious nature of this concern for "the Jewish majority" is shown not only by the inherent absurdity of the charges against the ADL, but also by a statement in the same paragraph that apparently attributes a tainted mentality to the Jewish majority:
"The very meaning of American freedom," the editorial says, "is for Jews to be freed from the ghetto mentality, and to integrate themselves as a community into the responsibilities of being citizens of the republic." The strong implication is that most Jews, at present, are not responsible citizens.
The editorial as a whole leaves a reader with the impression that the only way Jews in a LaRouche-led America could avoid suspicion and/or repression would be by abandoning their support for Israel and their identification with the Jewish cultural heritage (misnamed the "ghetto mentality"). Indeed the editorial clearly states: "Anyone professing Zionist loyalties is by definition incapable of being loyal to the interests of the United States. He is, by definition, a national security risk."
As to non-Zionists, either Jewish or gentile, they would apparently face a similar official disapproval if they failed to go along with the LaRouche regime's extreme brand of anti-Zionism. This message is indicated in the final section of the editorial after a summary of NCLC's Mideast policy: "Whoever [our italics--ed.] opposes this policy must be branded as a traitor...the Zionist Lobby must be crushed."