PART TWO: What LaRouche Wants

"The war in which I am presently engaged against the forces of the Whore of Babylon . . . is not a war merely for some particular policy, but a battle for that Great Design under which sovereign nations dedicated to generalized scientific and technological progress form a powerful alliance to crush the remaining power of the oligarchist faction, to rid our planet of that faction."

—LYNDON H. LAROUCHE, JR., The Power of Reason, 1979

Chapter Seven

The Grand Design

In the early 1970s LaRouche bolstered his followers' morale with fantasies of an insurrection that would soon put them in power. Select NCLC members were sent to a secret boot camp near Argyle, New York, to study riflery, the use of explosives, and small-arms tactics. One of the former instructors, Gregory Rose, said they learned "how to take this hill, that hill." They also played Capture the Flag. Members not attending the camp participated in local NCLC "militias." Former NCLC member Linda Ray recalled: "We were each handed a pole. We were told we were preparing for class warfare. We practiced marching in circles." A top LaRouche aide produced a study of Tito's World War II partisans as the prototype for LaRouche's army. Relevant intelligence was collected, such as on the troop strength and readiness of California's National Guard.

As the NCLC moved to the right, the idea arose of winning over military officers to help LaRouche achieve power. U.S. Army intelligence reports reveal that in the mid-1970s NCLC members began calling and sending suggestive memos to high-ranking officers. For instance, Ron Kokinda called the XVIII Airborne Corps commander at Fort Bragg in 1976 to warn him that a Carter victory in the presidential election would pose a threat to the Republic. Kokinda also sent a letter to General Frederick C. Weyand, the Army Chief of Staff, claiming that Carter and the Wall Street bankers were plotting to destroy the Constitution. The way to stop them, he advised, was to crush Wall Street's "command structure" and undertake a massive "economic reorganization."

NCLC security staffers sought out officers with strong political views, such as Major General John K. Singlaub, removed as commander of U.S. forces in Korea in 1977 after criticizing President Carter's defense policies. Singlaub recalls being approached when he was stationed at Fort McPherson in Georgia: "They said, 'You military people are going to be the savior of the country. . . . We want to work closely with you.' " Singlaub cut them off and denounced them in press interviews. (In a 1983 letter to this author, he compared them to the Nazis and said they were one of the most dangerous extremist groups in America.)

According to former NCLC members, the national office staff was briefed in May 1979 on how a military coup would make LaRouche dictator. The NCLC's "right-wing allies" supposedly would bring this about sometime before the 1980 election. Meanwhile in a campaign speech LaRouche called for the abolition of democracy and alluded to a plan for a march on Washington. The context suggested something like Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome.

Whatever LaRouche might tell his followers to feed their sense of self-importance, he knew he could only establish his dictatorship if a "leading strata of capitalists and governmental agencies" were willing to sponsor it. For this, a major crisis would be necessary. As the signs of such a crisis multiplied, a faction of the capitalists would begin to call for new leadership. A coalition would emerge of Midwestern industrialists, technocrats, the Teamsters union, military officers, and dissident CIA agents to win over the silent majority and isolate the nation's "liberal third." NCLC advisers would permeate the coalition and coordinate its efforts. But LaRouche cautioned his followers to let their prospective allies take the lead at first, while the NCLC built up its independent political base.

LaRouche thought he recognized the seeds of the impending crisis in the international monetary system. The Third World and Eastern Europe had run up hundreds of billions of dollars in debts to Western banks. Many debtor countries were hard-pressed to pay the interest, to say nothing of the principal, and the total debt was mounting steadily. What if just one major debtor nation decided to default? LaRouche predicted a "chain-reaction collapse" of the debt structure leading to "a depression far worse than that of the 1931-33 period." The only way out would be for "someone in a leading position in the U.S.A." to override the greed of the bankers and bring the nation "back to its senses." LaRouche's grandiose tone suggested that this "someone" would be himself.

LaRouche urged the formation of a debtors' cartel and a don't-pay strategy. His followers toured Latin America, contacting hundreds of government officials, labor leaders, and military officers. They produced dozens of research studies and propaganda tracts, and LaRouche himself wrote Operation Juarez (1982), a brilliant call to arms against the International Monetary Fund austerity programs. The small LaRouchian parties in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia gained access to high government officials. LaRouche became known in Latin America as a serious economist and political strategist. He met with Presidents Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico and Raul Alfonsin of Argentina. A delegation of his followers met with Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, in Lima. Fighting the IMF meanwhile became a continent-wide demagogic rallying cry. Tens of thousands of students marched against the IMF in Buenos Aires. Fidel Castro seized on the issue and developed his own version of Operation Juarez. But no Latin American leader was willing to take the final step—actual default as opposed to rhetorical threats— that might cut off the credit keeping their economies afloat. LaRouche wasn't discouraged, however. He still believed the catastrophe was only a few years away and that he alone would know how to save civilization. He called his long-range plan, to be implemented once he took power, the Grand Design for Humanity.

The Grand Design was based, like his plan for triggering the debt bomb, on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. LaRouche claimed that the world is dominated by a Zionist oligarchy—a cabal of international usurers—with headquarters in London. In The Power of Reason he stated that he was fighting to restore sovereignty to the United States and other key nations so they could "rid our planet" of this oligarchy, so that mankind could create the social conditions for the next step in evolution: the super race of "golden souls." LaRouche said that creating this super race was the true objective of his life.

The Grand Design is the key to all of LaRouche's multileveled efforts, including his amassing of great wealth. In working out its details, he became the first systematic thinker in the history of international fascism to deal with the state, the economy, culture, race, military strategy, and a host of tactical questions within a consistent philosophical framework. This tour de force contains genuine insights on many questions and borrows from LaRouche's major achievement in economics—his model of a totally mobilized economy. The Grand Design is embodied in a score of articles and books, including The Case of Walter Lippmann (1977). As reworked for popular consumption in various propaganda tracts, it has exerted a subterranean influence on ultra-rightists from Argentina through West Germany. Given the uniqueness of this body of ideas—the fact that they fill a void in international fascism—it is inevitable that LaRouche's ideological influence will continue for years, even if he should die tomorrow.

The Grand Design begins with a total rejection of "British liberal notions of 'democracy,' " notions which are "like a farm without a farmer, in which the chickens, sheep, cows, horses and pigs form 'constituencies.' " His own humanist republic would have "nothing to do with elections, parliaments, or such differentia," but would ruthlessly suppress all "nonrepublican" (i.e., non-LaRouchian) influences. The American people wouldn't lose anything, because our democracy is merely a façade for an already existing dictatorship of the "monetarist faction"—i.e., the oligarchy. LaRouche would replace this bad dictatorship with a good one—a "class dictatorship-in-fact" of the industrial capitalists, with labor leaders like the Teamsters as junior partners to provide a "broader social base." Within this dictatorship the interests of capital and labor would be "understood to be identical," and strikes by labor unions would not be tolerated.

But the capitalists would not actually run their own “dictatorship-in-fact.” A special elite that has mastered the "humanist" (LaRouchian) philosophy would take command. These favored few would have exclusive power to shape the laws of the new order—laws aimed at curbing the selfish tendencies of society's "less moral strata"—and they would not tolerate any "direct violation of humanist outlook and methods" even from capitalists.

To make this palatable, LaRouche adopted Big Brother's "freedom is slavery" slogan, only phrased more arcanely. Freedom has nothing to do with tolerating "violations of universal law" (i.e., of LaRouche's will). Freedom is "exactly the opposite"; it is the "abhorrence of such error." In other words, freedom is the abhorrence of freedom.

LaRouche's "freedom" would involve total control over the individual's innermost thoughts. He distinguishes between thoughts "which lead to increasing human perfection—which we call good," and thoughts "which abort progress or worse—which we call evil." His Republic would "mobilize the good within the individual citizen to rule over the evil within himself." The individual citizen would have little choice to do otherwise. The state "does not 'concede' freedom to the individual, but demands that he or she partake of it in the general interest of the state. . ." Anyone who refuses to go along "has no consciously defensible premise on which to say to his fellows: 'I have a right to live as a free man.' "

LaRouche would revise the criminal justice system to reflect this. No longer would a criminal be someone who commits criminal acts; it would be anyone who thinks criminal thoughts. Such thoughts would include putting one's own interests and those of one's family above the interests of the Republic. "Every citizen who holds the view, 'I can’t worry about society and the world; I must attend to my family responsibilities,' is exhibiting a degree of relative infantilism tending in the direction of the criminal mind," says one LaRouchian manifesto. Indeed, such a mentality not only tends toward criminality, it is criminal.

LaRouche's system of government would require immediate purges of any opposition. The police would be empowered to conduct "surgically precise preventive action." The first target would be the Jews and others who operate as agents of the London-based oligarchy, LaRouche describes the conspiracy as a four-tiered ziggurat of (from the top down) Jewish bankers on Wall Street, Jewish community leaders, Jews and pro-Jewish Gentiles in the government and media, and finally the gutter networks of Communists, environmentalists, and peaceniks. This conspiracy has kept the nation subservient to London, enabling "speculative capital" to bleed dry "industrial capital" through usury. The influence of the conspirators dates back to Benedict Arnold and is so deeply rooted that only a complete purge can restore the nation's sovereignty. As a New Solidarity editorial put it, "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby . . . from the councils of government, industry and labor.” (Note the Orwellian use of the word "Nazi.") A second editorial called for an FBI task force to "root out the cancer in the American body politic that is the so-called Zionist Lobby." The task force would include a "permanent Special Prosecutor's office." Jewish leaders would be investigated and their organizations "dismantled or registered as foreign agents." A special congressional committee would "clean out Senators and Congressmen who maintain their covert relationships with Zionist spies." Anyone who opposed this would be "branded as a traitor." The Zionist "octopus" would be "eliminated" at all costs.

Such appears to be LaRouche's program for a fascist state: dictatorship by the party elite, a purge of the "Zionists," suppression of all opposition, brainwashing-style pressure on those who refuse to internalize the party elite's ideology, denial of citizenship to subhumans, and revisions in the criminal code to make it all "legal." The Grand Design's next stage is the "total mobilization of the entire nation" in preparation for Total War.

The Nazis used the term "total mobilization" to discuss Germany's war economy, but LaRouche believes they never understood the idea. They simply looted until there was nothing left to loot, and then went under. Real total mobilization means ever-expanding scientific discovery, technological innovation, and industrial investment. And these must expand faster than the needs of the war machine.

But LaRouche certainly agreed with the Nazis that total mobilization requires a centralized, disciplined economy. Scientific and technological progress cannot be left to "British" free enterprise. LaRouche envisioned an economy dominated by a cluster of giant "brute-force" projects with his humanist elite cracking the whip. He often cited the Apollo Project and the Manhattan Project, but his chief model seemed to be Hitler's Peenemünde rocket center, where the V-2 rockets were developed that then were manufactured by slave laborers at underground plants. The cost of such projects would be offset by the "spin-offs"—new civilian-sector products, cheap new sources of energy like fusion power, and miraculous gains in productivity. These in turn would produce more resources for the military economy.

The key to the ever-expanding military potential would be the "creative powers of the mind," mobilized via fanaticism to serve the Grand Design. To encourage such creative powers—especially the ability to invent and master advanced military technologies—the educational system would be completely transformed. Children would be taught NCLC "humanism" as well as "classical German" doctrines. They would also be taught the "hypothesis of the higher hypothesis," LaRouche's own method of insight (one thinks about how one thinks while one thinks). As many children as possible would be transformed into Wernher von Braun-type geniuses. Thus the rate of innovation in science and technology would accelerate through the roof, and the speedy adoption of the most useful innovations would be guaranteed by the educational machine churning out millions of engineers and skilled technicians—the high-tech force to operate weapons systems of ever-increasing complexity. The young scientists, engineers, and technicians would be Spartan-type "soldier-citizens," led by "engineer-officers," thoroughly dedicated to the mobilization process. They would be the cutting edge of armed forces vastly expanded through Universal Military Training (not just the draft) into an invincible "pyramid of maximum in-depth war-fighting capabilities."

Of course, there is one thing missing from this Star Wars fascism. The soldier-citizens wouldn't be Germans. But they would memorize Schiller's poetry, listen to Beethoven night and day, and master classical German philosophy as well as emulating the V-2 scientists. Even today, NCLC publications suggest they revere their Teutonic heritage and the alleged critical role played by Germany (not England) in founding the real America—and hence regard America as having special ties with Germany transcending those with any other NATO ally.

The ultimate aim of LaRouche's total mobilization would be world conquest. As LaRouche said in 1978, he would be the President who would win wars. He would lead the nation in establishing the "permanent hegemony of the Neoplatonic-humanist [LaRouchian] forces over the globe." The oligarchical "forces of evil" would be crushed everywhere, bringing the nations under "firm-handed (if loving)" rule. The "progressive liquidation" of oligarchist regimes would not end until "total victory"—the crushing of the world's "last bastion of oligarchical policy."

Just as LaRouche took issue with Hitler's version of total mobilization, so he criticized the Nazi leader's military strategy of waging a two-front war against both the West and the Soviet Union. Hitler should have mopped up the Rothschilds' headquarters, Britain, before marching east. The London blitz was not carried out boldly enough. LaRouche here makes explicit his Nazi sympathies. The war on Britain was an expression of Germany's "republican-nationalist impulse," and the enthusiasm to crush Britain was "sound." Britain was "then, as now, the enemy of continental Europe, including the German nation." Hitler was "London's most deadly enemy" (hence by implication he was Europe's hero in spite of his mistakes).

LaRouche would do things right, one stage at a time. The United States should plan first for a war against Britain, not the Soviet Union, There must be a "total elimination of Britain's worldwide political, economic, and military leverage." If it doesn't surrender it should face the use of "force" against its outpost in the Middle East—Israel—and London itself should receive the "treatment" meted out to Japan in 1945.

While crushing Britain, LaRouche would carry out the unification of other Western nations by installing "humanist" regimes in each. Nuclear blackmail would be a helpful means to this end: "The might of the United States . . . will moderate the heteronomic impulses of the erring." Once the smaller nations recognized that American policy "has a fist within it," changes of government would "spontaneously erupt around the globe" (presumably like the fascist putsches that erupted in Eastern Europe in the 1930s). LaRouche provided a rationale in terms of international law. One must distinguish, he said, between the sovereignty of nations in the abstract and the sovereignty of particular incumbent governments. To extend the principle of sovereignty from the former to the latter is "specious," he said.

With the entire West unified, purged, and totally mobilized, America would be ready to go after the "last bastion" of the enemy—the Soviet Union. This would not be a matter of a few bombs or a putsch. LaRouche believed that war between the two superpowers "cannot be less than total war," and that to win such a war one would have to hit the enemy with an atomic, bacteriological, and chemical triple punch. LaRouche called this "ABC paving" because it supposedly " 'paves' the entire front of assault to the purpose of exterminating every possible means of opposition." The attack would occur in waves: maximum-strength ABC bombardment of "all adversary logistical and political [i.e., civilian] targets out of short-term reach" would be followed by ABC tactical bombardment of front-line targets and then by rapid advance of ground forces through the ruins with continuing ABC support. The war would become a "meatgrinder," with the West hopefully emerging from each phase with a marginal gain in relative strength. Whichever side possessed greater surviving "in-depth logistical and deployable reserve capabilities" (i.e., whichever side was better at total mobilization) would win.

LaRouche conceded that the initial nuclear exchange would "eliminate between 120 and 180 million lives in the United States," and that the Soviet Union would lose "up to 30 percent of its population." He even admitted as "credible" the claim by scientists that the radioactive cesium-137 levels would "eliminate all higher animal life on earth." Although he said that such considerations do not apply when great powers "threaten the total conquest of one another," he apparently later decided that so final a solution for himself as well as the enemy was not really desirable. Shortly after writing the above, he began his intensive propaganda push for Star Wars, which some on the right see as a miracle shield that might make a first strike marginally possible.

Assuming a victory short of mutual annihilation, what should happen next? LaRouche says that the "pacification process of military occupation" must begin with wiping out the "oligarchist component" in the Soviet Union. It also must include the "creation and defense" of new cities on the occupied territory as the "chief mediators of scientific and technological progress into urban and rural life." This "citybuilding" policy should be the chief objective of the occupying force, LaRouche says.

This is nothing new. SS chief Heinrich Himmler also had a citybuilding plan for a string of Aryan cities to be built under SS sponsorship from the Ukraine to the Caucasus as strategic foci for the ruthless pacification of that vast region. Himmler glorified the medieval German king Heinrich I, who earned the title of "citybuilder" by constructing fortresses on the eastern frontier to hold back the Magyars. Himmler even regarded himself as Heinrich I's reincarnation and built a shrine to him. A photo accompanying a LaRouche article on pacification suggests that his dream is similar to Himmler's. According to the caption, it shows U.S. Army soldiers working in a vast cavern "underneath the Greenland polar ice cap." This supposedly demonstrates that GIs have "the potential to serve as an army of citybuilders." Any former SS veteran in West Germany would get the point, for the main U.S. base in Greenland is at Thule, which happens to be the name the Nazis gave to the alleged Arctic homeland of the Aryans. The name also suggests the Thule Society, the Munich occult lodge believed by many neo-Nazis to have recruited Hitler for his historic mission. And in the popular mythology that has grown up around Nazism, a team of Nazi scientists is supposed to have escaped in submarines at the end of the war to a secret UFO base under the polar ice to prepare for the eventual rise of a Fourth Reich.

In imposing the "benefits of a Republican order" on occupied countries, LaRouche sometimes cites Alexander the Great as a model conqueror. Most historians would agree that Alexander's policies were relatively benign. But the LaRouchians also have another model: Timur the Great, also known as the "Prince of Destruction," a Mongol who conquered most of Central Asia in the fourteenth century. They depict him as a "humanist," although he was a genocidal monster who probably killed more civilians than any conqueror prior to Hitler. His soldiers decapitated the entire population of Baghdad, piling up the victims' heads in a pyramid to rot in the sun.

In 1983 an NCLC drama troupe staged for the faithful a version of Tamburlaine, Christopher Marlowe's lurid Elizabethan tragedy about Timur. New Solidarity explained that the play was selected because it provided a sympathetic portrait of a hero who, like LaRouche, "makes his own rules." Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the reviewer said, is a "city-builder" who demonstrates his humanism by using conquered emperors as a footstool. As to his stern measures, the reviewer chided NCLC members for their lack of understanding: "Some get queasy when Tamburlaine skewers the Virgins of Damascus, and [some] pout heads-in-hands during speeches about piling millions of carcasses at the gates of hell. But, as long as their [sic] is a place in hell for the present-day [oligarchical] emperors; so, there must be a place in the minds of men for Marlowe's Tamburlaine."

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