THE HOSTILE FANTASY WORLD OF LYNDON LAROUCHE

Discussion paper (circa 1985) by a former LaRouche follower

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NOTE: This document contains important insights about the history of the LaRouche organization--especially regarding the years 1977-79, when America's largest and wealthiest political cult made its decisive transition from the far left to the far right. As originally written, the paper was intended only for circulation to a small number of journalists and former LaRouche followers. It was logically organized and its analysis was powerful, but it clearly needed some editing if it were to obtain the attention it deserved from a less specialized readership. I have thus taken the liberty of revising the text stylistically and adding explanations regarding some of the persons and events mentioned which the average reader might not be familiar with. I have also rephrased certain statements about the 1977 Wiesbaden "assassination" scare to reflect what has become known about that curious incident in more recent years.--D.K..

In 1974 Lyndon LaRouche published a two-part theoretical essay called "The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach" in the The Campaigner, the theoretical organ of his National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). In that essay he included a lengthy footnote outlining his views on Judaism. LaRouche stated that his own understanding of Judaism had its origins in his "analysis of the evolution from Egyptian-Mesopotamian 'hydraulic' into Hellenic culture."

LaRouche was here referring to research he claimed to have conducted in the late 1950's, while still in the Socialist Workers Party (a Trotskyist organization), on the origins of caste and communal societies--a project he supposedly undertook to further his understanding of, among other things, the nature of Communist China. (Thus LaRouche placed the word "hydraulic" in quotes--an obvious reference to the work of Marxist scholar Karl A. Wittvogel regarding the impact of vast irrigation technologies on Chinese history and culture.) Yet LaRouche's particular fascination with Egypt and Mesopotamia has much deeper roots than a simple interest in understanding the People's Republic of China. In a 1982 manuscript LaRouche freely discussed the early religious origins of his fascination with Mesopotamia:

I must confess an orientation to historical philology prompted during childhood by my environment of Bible-thumping evangelical Quakerism, a Scottish-American grandfather, the Reverend George Weir of Ohio, who was variously directly and indirectly responsible for starting an enduring interest in Mesopotamian archeology. This interest led me, during the 1950's, to what I considered more or less conclusive proof that the original language of Sumer must have been interconnected with the pre-Vedic languages of the dark-skinned populations of India. Much of my own work in economics was premised earlier in efforts to reconstruct images of the rise and fall of Mesopotamian civilization.

In short LaRouche argues that Babylonian society was itself moulded by "dark-skinned" peoples whose culture was "pre-Vedic," or non-Aryan, and that his interest in Mesopotamia was fueled by his "Bible-thumping" grandfather (on his mother's side), George Weir. It is with this background in mind that we quote from LaRouche's discussion of Judaism in the 1974 "Feuerbach" article:

Although A.D. Judaism is an outgrowth of the development of Christianity (e.g., the first such rabbi, Philo of Alexandria) there was a preceding Hebrew faith of sorts, elements of which were syncretically assimilated in the successive phases of manufacture of post-Philo Judaism. The earlier, Hebrew doctrine is itself a syncretic hodge-podge of chiefly Mesopotamian legends. Rabbi Ezra, the author of the fictional personality of Moses, is exemplary of the circumstances and content of Hebrew doctrine--a creation of Achaemenid protection and edict. Ezra's Persian version of Hebrewism was, in turn, significantly influenced by an earlier, pre-Pentateuch version created in conformity with Babylonian edicts....From Ezra onwards, and even before, Hebrewism was an assimilationist doctrine developed to provide special juridical status (and ideological self-image) for a caste of merchant-usurers within a pre-capitalist society.

In other words, Judaism is not a real religion but an ideological cover for the practice of usury. LaRouche continues:

Judaism is not a true religion, but only a half-religion, a curious appendage and sub-species of Christianity....Judaism is the ideological abstraction of the secular life of Christianity's Jew, the Roman merchant-usurer who had not yet evolved to the state of Papal enlightenment, a half-Christian, who had not developed a Christian conscience, etc. Judaism is the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely modeled by ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity. In short, a self-subsisting Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for "Jewish culture" otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim.

The NCLC leadership recognized that LaRouche's attack on Judaism and his glorification of a special "Christian conscience, etc." (which Jews supposedly lack) might upset some members of the organization. An editorial statement was appended to the above-quoted footnote stating that "[c]ontrary systematic views on this special subject will be entertained for review by the editors." Yet LaRouche's scurrilous assertions went entirely unchallenged in NCLC publications.In his 1975 book Dialectical Economics (p. 434), LaRouche returned to the idea of special parasitical castes in another footnote. Only this time, instead of focusing only on the Jews of Babylon and Rome, he attempted to draw parallels with the history of the Soviet Union and with his own experiences within the American Trotskyist movement:

In the socialist movement, the problem of defining a social category or caste was raised by the development of the Soviet bureaucracy. This led to Trotsky's formulation, in which the Soviet bureaucracy was likened to a trade-union bureaucracy elevated to state power. The second approach, that emphasized by the author, uses the cases of commune societies (e.g. Mesopotamian city-states) in which the priest-caste emerged as a distinct social formation without acquiring "property rights" to the means of production....Such explorations have determined that caste is a distinct social category, distinct from class.

By the late 1970's LaRouche's ugly footnote on Judaism in the "Feuerbach" essay would expand into a full-blown anti-Semitic dementia. And by the mid-1980's his early obscure references to the "caste" nature of the Soviet bureaucracy would reappear in a more elaborate form as his "Third Rome" thesis regarding a supposed clique of Russian Orthodox priests that had somehow seized power in the Kremlin, abandoned Marxism and secretly transformed the USSR into a new Babylon intent on world conquest.

Rockefellers bad, Rothschilds worse

As LaRouche's 1974 footnote first revealed, his anti-Semitism revolves around the belief that Judaism is not a "true" religion but a hoax belief system aimed at justifying usury. In subsequent years he focused his wrath on the Rothschild family. As early as August 31, 1976 (when the NCLC was already publicly defending Klansman/Nazi Roy Frankhouser while at the same time forging links to the far-right Liberty Lobby), a LaRouche article attacked the Rothschilds as "mercantilists," not capitalists, claiming that the Jewish banking family had backed Hitler and that "more Jews died because of Rothschild policy than any other single cause over the last 100 years."

This article triggered a series in the NCLC's weekly newspaper, New Solidarity (hereafter, "NS"), by Chris White, an NCLC member whom LaRouche had accused two years earlier of being a CIA "Manchurian candidate" assassin (LaRouche later dropped the accusation, and White remained a fervent follower). One of the White articles, "The Six Million: Rothschilds Against the Jews" (9/28/76 NS), is particularly interesting given that LaRouche himself (beginning with an 8/22/78 NS article) would publicly and repeatedly back the neo-Nazi line that "only" 1.5 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.

LaRouche's public embrace of virulent anti-Semitism (in which he not only denounced the Rothschilds per se but the Jews as a whole) evolved under very unusual circumstances. LaRouche's August 31, 1976 attack on the Rothschilds had portrayed them as allies of the NCLC's then archenemy, the Rockefeller family. Yet by 1977 the NCLC began flirting with the idea that financial forces in London were trying to distance themselves from U.S. financial power. Thus LaRouche could write (in the 2/4/77 NS) an article commending British Labor Party Prime Minister James Callaghan for supposedly opposing the Rockefellers.

In addition, an NS 4/29/77 article by LaRouche praised the left-wing Mapam party in Israel and boasted of the NCLC chairman's alleged meetings in 1975 with former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban. This piece was a response to attacks by B'nai B'rith on the NCLC as anti-Semitic and pro-Arab. However the NCLC line in early 1977 was to support the Mapam party while claiming that radical right-wing elements in Israel, such as the Begin group, enjoyed backing from the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.

Yet the NCLC was in something of a state of confusion over the real relations of the Rothschilds to the Rockefellers, and at times New Solidarity floated the idea that maybe the Rothschilds were actually moving towards an anti-Rockefeller position. Chris White (in NS 5/27/77) even argued that the City of London and the Rothschilds had joined other European financial circles to create a new, anti-dollar monetary system.

Simultaneously with such musings, however, the NCLC was increasing its ties with the radical anti-Semitic right. For example the 7/15/77 NS ran an article defending the Liberty Lobby from "harassment" by the Carter administration. NS also ran articles praising Colonel Thomas McCrary, a Liberty Lobby member and American Independent Party activist believed by the NCLC security staff to be a former CIA Deputy Director.

During this period LaRouche was living in Wiesbaden, West Germany (he spent almost two straight years there) and was developing his own interpretation of Plato as a new philosophical basis for the NCLC's political ideology.

One of LaRouche's earliest articulations of his pseudo-Platonism came in a rambling 7/26/77 article which also included bizarre observations on a variety of other subjects. For instance, LaRouche called Jimmy Carter "a Satan worshipper in the tradition of the cults of Dionysus," while boasting that he himself, unlike Carter, had been raised "under the influence of rigorous evangelical Protestantism" (i.e., the kooky Quaker splinter cult of LaRouche's parents). In this same article LaRouche also repeated his earlier charges that Judaism is a phony ("synthetic") religion created in ancient Babylon, that the first books of the Hebrew Bible were concocted in Babylon to provide a "belief system" for Palestine, and that the Persians later fabricated another version for their own imperial purposes.

This article was the first public indication of LaRouche's increased mental deterioration. Significantly, one week after the article appeared another NCLC assassination plot freak-out (similar to the one in 1974 that had focussed on Chris White) occurred in Wiesbaden: German banker Jurgen Ponto had just been slain by the left-wing Baader-Meinhoff gang, and LaRouche announced, based on information received from a murky network of far-right NCLC allies, that he, too, was on the hit list.

The exact timetable of this crucial period is worth examining in detail. On 7/29/77, NS ran a banner headline, "Britain Breaks With the Dollar," above an article praising the British financial community to the hilt. This article is especially important since it was virtually the last major pro-British piece ever to appear in NS. On 8/2/77, NS continued to hail the supposed separation of the sterling from the dollar, but then--in a major FLASH!!--the paper's readers were told that LaRouche was "a chief target" of the Baader-Meinhoff gang.

In the 8/5/77 NS, LaRouche wrote that "shortly before 5 AM" he had received "word from high-level sources in the U.S." (i.e., certain far-right elements who claimed to be close to the intelligence community) that he was on the Baader-Meinhoff assassination list. One supposed spook, an employee of counterterrorism entrepreneur Mitchell Werbell III, actually flew to Wiesbaden to guard LaRouche against the alleged threat. (This man, Larry Cooper, would later flee Wiesbaden after hearing LaRouche discuss possible ways of assassinating President Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.)

The allegations regarding a Baader-Meinhoff plot against LaRouche came at a very curious time. On 7/19/77, NS had run an important article denouncing the opening phase of CIA director Stansfield Turner's "purge" of over 800 field agents and covert operations personnel from the agency. The article attempted to give the impression that the NCLC enjoyed a relationship with some of these agents, claiming that "on November 2-3 1976 conservative circles in the U.S. close to both the military and intelligence community" (NS dubbed them "traditionalists") had established a "briefing channel" to the NCLC.

This communication channel was reported to have opened up during the same week that LaRouche went on national TV to deliver a pre-election attack on Democratic Presidential candidate Carter. Now, a year later, NS was suggesting that these same spook circles, faced with being kicked out of the CIA by the Carter administration, were working to save the life of LaRouche, their supposed ally in the fight against Carter the "Satan-worshipper." [NOTE: During the U.S. Justice Department's investigation and prosecution of LaRouche and his followers in the 1980s, it was established that the briefing channel in qwestion was mostly a hoax concocted by Frankhouser and a few far-right cronies; however, the LaRouchians did establish a relationship with the CIA independent of the hoaxers. Both the Frankhouser con and the NCLC's real intelligence community connections are described in Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, Chapters 15 and 18-22.--D.K.]

Within less than a month LaRouche began writing articles that blamed the assassination plot on "certain lower Manhattan investment house circles," as he claimed for instance in the 8/27/77 NS. (This article was a partial rewrite of an NCLC internal memo in which LaRouche had accused "predominantly Jewish investment banks in Lower Manhattan" of being out to kill him; the word "Jewish" was omitted, however, in the published article.)

LaRouche's new line was also revealed in an 8/19/77 NS article entitled "What Actually Is Fascism?" in which he stated that the Nazis were "imposed on Germany" in the 1930's by London and New York interests but not by "German industrialists." Indeed, LaRouche wrote that the "majority of the Nazi supporters were not fascists, but nationalists." These assertions appeared to be triggered, at least in part, by LaRouche's belief in the threat against his life. In the 8/5/77 NS, he had claimed that the "assassination plot" targeting him was a reaction to his role as the intellectual originator of the European break with the dollar that the British were supposedly orchestrating. But in the 8/23/77 NS, LaRouche would allege that the British, in alliance with the "lower Manhattan" banks, were conspiring to kill him!

Finally, in a NS 9/2/77 article called "Walter Mondale: British Agent," LaRouche went all out with the new line. He publicly praised the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby and its weekly newspaper The Spotlight for having "identified the conspiracy" long before the USLP. He also announced that the "affairs of the world are being run by a couple of miserable Queens" (Elizabeth of the U.K. and Juliana of the Netherlands) in league with the Warburg family and Andre Meyer, Jewish bankers who supposedly were at "the center of the most evil things being done today."

LaRouche's remarkable reversal within only two weeks of his views on the British, and his decision to attack "Jewish investment banks" while making excuses for Hitler-era "German industrialists," also included the idea of rehabilitating Nelson Rockefeller in the eyes of NCLC members. One reason for this shift regarding the organization's previous number-one bogeyman was that defense scientists Edward Teller and Stephen Possony (believed by the NCLC to be close associates of Rockefeller) had begun schmoozing with young physicists from LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation. (Possony even spoke at an FEF conference.) This encouraged LaRouche to begin sending personal letters to Nelson Rockefeller (it is not known if Rockefeller ever replied). When Rockefeller died of a heart attack in early 1979 while having sex with his mistress, the NCLC was convinced he had been murdered.

LaRouche's dramatic public swing to anti-Semitism emerged out of the "assassination" scare in Wiesbaden. But another drama was being played out at the same time. LaRouche began an affair with Helga Zepp, the head of his organization's German branch, which would result in their marriage in December 1977. The affair was carried on in secret at first, because LaRouche had a girlfriend in the USA. (When LaRouche finally decided to marry Zepp, he instructed his U.S. chief of staff to pass the news to the jilted girlfriend.)

For some months after the "assassination" scare, LaRouche lived under bunker-like conditions in Wiesbaden, rarely setting foot outside the group's offices lest some terrorist take a shot at him. LaRouche spent this period of siege further developing the NCLC's new ruling ideology based on Platonism, while repeatedly harping on his theories about the Jews, Babylon, etc.

In the 10/18/77 NS (in an article called "Newton Was a Hoax"), LaRouche wrote that monetarist tax farmers caused the fall of Babylon and that the key to the later moral recovery in the West was the rise of "Pauline Neo-Platonic Christianity." (In a 10/13/78 NS article, "The Truth About German 'Collective Guilt,'" LaRouche would praise Saint Paul for supposedly understanding that Judaism was run by Babylon.)

Soon NS was filled with articles attacking the British and the Rothschilds. (Headlines from the 12/9/77 issue include "Rothschilds, Kissinger Push for Civil War in Rhodesia" and "Mondale to Begin a Purge of U.S. Intelligence Agencies.") One day after LaRouche and Zepp were married, a LaRouche article (NS 12/30/77) argued that the current British monarchy was "genetically and morally Guelf" and that the Guelf conspiracy (a faction in medieval Italy opposed to the German Holy Roman Emperor) had been launched in the 11th century by Mathilde of Tuscany along with the "Jewish banker" Pierleone.

Yet the 11th century A.D. was not hoary enough for LaRouche. In the 6/13/78 NS, he claimed that the British monarchy (the modern incarnation of the Guelphs) was "presently commanded by an oligarchical faction historically datable" to Babylon's usurious tax farmers. Indeed, LaRouche asserted, the "continuity of that faction over the intervening millennium of Mediterranean centered civilization is unbroken to the present date." In the 7/7/78 NS, he stated that the British monarchy "is insisting on maintaining its feudal utopia with its historical alliance with usurious tax farmers speculating on the debts of nations."

In a speech to an American NCLC conference around that time, LaRouche claimed that the British planned the First World War, that "London, including the Jewish bankers of London" put Hitler into power, and that the Rothschilds and the British created anti-Semitism. LaRouche also repeated his earlier assertion that Babylonian tax farmers had created the "hoax" of the Old Testament. On 7/17/78, NS published an article by Scott Thompson, a leading member of LaRouche's security staff who was in constant contact with the radical right, charging (among other things) that Hitler was the creation largely of the Rothschilds and Warburgs, that the John Birch Society was being manipulated by a "Zionist Gestapo," that American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell had been financed by the Anti-Defamation League, and (last but not least) that Babylon had used ancient Israel to destroy Phoenicia with the prophet Ezekiel serving as an agent of Babylonian imperialism.

LaRouche continued his rhetorical bombardment of Babylon and Judaism in an 8/15/78 NS article claiming that from eighth century B.C. Babylon on, "Jewish banking families were all an integral part of the force of evil radiating from that Great Whore of Babylon." Then, in the 8/22/78 NS, LaRouche dropped his ultimate bombshell--which sent shock waves through the NCLC--when he publicly wrote, "Granted, the Nazis did not kill 6 million Jews, but they did kill upwards of a million and a half....Whether Hitler killed one and a half million Jews or more, which he did, or six million Jews which he did not, really makes little difference...." LaRouche returned to this "1.5 million" neo-Nazi line in an article in the 9/8/78 NS and again in the 12/8/78 NS.

LaRouche did not hesitate to repeat, and indeed to proclaim more strongly than ever, the allegations in his 1974 "Feuerbach" article about the superiority of a true "Christian conscience, etc." over Judaism. In a 10/13/78 NS article ("Is Jimmy Carter a Christian?"), LaRouche praised "the New Testament law against the evil order of life exemplified by the Jews of the Old Testament." And in the 12/8/78 NS article in which he also repeated the "1.5 million" claim, LaRouche wrote: "The B'nai B'rith today resurrects the tradition of the Jews who demanded the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Jews who pleaded with Nero to launch the 'holocaust' against the Christians."

From Isis to Atlantis

I have demonstrated above how LaRouche's anti-Semitism rapidly expanded in 1977-78 from an initial attack on the Rothschilds to the invoking of the neo-Nazi "1.5 million" line and the charge that the Jews who oppose LaRouche are identical to the Jews who wanted Christ killed. I have also shown how LaRouche constantly denies Judaism any valid status as a world religion.

But LaRouche also wove women and feminism into his conspiracy theory. His views on this aspect of the global plot can be seen in convoluted references to the cult of Isis in a 10/3/78 NS article. According to this article, the "ancient Babylonian cults" were not only the source of Judaism but also of Isis worship. LaRouche's hostility to the cult of Isis stemmed from his perception that Isis (as a female divinity) was derived from the "Whore of Babylon." But LaRouche also became obsessed with the idea of a vast conspiracy involving witchcraft (another female-centered belief system), which he identified with the "New Age" movement. (LaRouche once accused Prince Charles, who espouses some New Age-style beliefs, of being a warlock.)

With the cult of Isis as his latest target, LaRouche's "mother hating" sexual politics (first expressed in a series of 1973 speeches to his cadre) received a new lease on life. In the 10/13/78 NS, the NCLC chairman (who now saw himself explicitly as a new Alexander the Great as well as a new Plato) began praising ancient Egypt's Temple of Amon as a pro-Alexander, male-dominated organization at war with the evil female/Whore of Babylon-inspired Isis cult. LaRouche made his views on female divinities quite clear in a 6/19/79 NS article called "New York Times Pushes Isis Cult" in which he claimed that the male Babylonian priesthood invented the Isis cult as a tool for oligarchical manipulation of the masses in the fifth century B.C. He added:

There was never a "natural" matriarchal phase of human culture. The "old men of the tribe" have always ruled. [Matriarchy is only found in] the most degenerated forms of society....In Christian theology, God is "masculine" not because society is ruled by men but to the extent that persons governed by Reason...acquire qualities in the image of God.

LaRouche also claimed that most women are creatures of "feeling" and "intuition," while "politically equal women" are the ones (like his wife Helga) "who adopt the intellectual qualities associated with outstanding men." Given such views, LaRouche appears to have been perfectly serious when (in the 8/14/79 NS) he wrote that the Queen of England "is a worshipper of the temple of Isis and regards herself as a high priestess of Isis" and therefore that the Queen is "theologically the modern reincarnation of the whore of Babylon." In effect, LaRouche had fused anti-Semitic dementia, paranoia over witchcraft (a belief common to some Christian fundamentalists today), and hatred of women into an all-inclusive political and economic conspiracy theory that traced the plotters (like the demons in Hollywood's "Exorcism" series) back to Babylon.

LaRouche wanted, however, to extend his occult vision much deeper into the past--back to the dawn of history and even beyond. He began doing so in a public manner in a 1/26/79 NS article proclaiming the existence in antediluvian times of "a vast maritime culture called Atlantis" that supposedly had existed in the vicinity of the Azores. (The deterioration of LaRouche even in reference to himself can be seen by the fact that on p. 308 of Dialectical Economics, published in 1975, he had mocked believers in Atlantis.) In his 1/26/79 article LaRouche claimed that Atlantis was destroyed in 10,000 B.C. by the melting of the Ice Age glaciers. (This view would evolve in a new direction later on.) LaRouche also provided specific "facts" about Atlantis, and even speculated on the location of the Tower of Babel, which he suggested could be found on the ocean floor near the Azores.

According to LaRouche the sunken island of Atlantis would have a pyramid on it. He also claimed that Ulysses sailed from the Straits of Gibraltar, that the Temple of Amon represented the progressive humanist faction within the Egyptian elite, and that the "Peoples of the Sea" (ancestors of the Greeks) came down from the Rhine and Danube into the Black Sea (in other words, that the Greeks were originally Aryans). In a 2/9/79 NS article, "The New Outline of History," LaRouche expanded on these notions. His readers were told that Ulysses visited the rim of the Bermuda triangle and that the proto-Greek Peoples of the Sea really came from Heligoland in the North Sea.

Finally in the 3/23/79 NS--in a huge article called "The Truth Concerning Pre-Christian Cultures"--LaRouche declared that the historical existence of Atlantis "is very well established." He argued that the NCLC should make "common cause" with the "ancient city-builders" of Atlantis, and he again praised Egypt's priesthood of Amon, which supposedly had fought a heroic if unsuccessful battle against the sun/cow worshippers of Isis.

Intensification of Atlantis obsession

LaRouche's Atlantis doctrine marked a new stage in the evolution of his anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Through the development of his own version of Platonism (centered especially on Plato's discussion of Atlantis), the NCLC chairman projected his conspiracism into the realm of the occult--and his wife undertook the task of explaining this strange new development to the NCLC rank and file. In a 1982 speech entitled "The Lawfulness of Human Universal History" (delivered at an NCLC gathering in Wiesbaden and then published in the 11/22/82 and 11/26/82 NS), Zepp-LaRouche presented an account of the rise and fall of Atlantis that reached new heights of fantasticality.

According to Zepp-LaRouche, during the Ice Age around 11,000 B.C. the Atlanteans lived in western North Africa where Morocco is today and around the Straits of Gibraltar. Their civilization had the ability to make astronomical observations of an accuracy that would rival those of Kepler in the 17th century A.D. And the king of this progressive, maritime culture was named Uranus.

Recall that in 1979 LaRouche had attributed the fall of Atlantis to the melting process at the end of the Ice Age. But by 1982, he and his wife had developed a whole new theory of why Atlantis collapsed. In their new theory (as outlined by Helga) there arose in Atlantis a "faction fight" between good "Titans" versus evil "Olympians." The Titans developed astronomy, while the Olympians promoted astrology. Zepp-LaRouche told the Wiesbaden conference: "Whenever you see astrology, when you see your mother or your aunt or your grandfather reading a horoscope, you must immediately attack them and say, 'What Satanic rite are you following?'" (NS 11/26/82.)

Zepp-LaRouche also claimed during this speech that in the war between the two Atlantean elites the evil usurious Olympians conquered the good "city-building" Titans--and that the Olympian conspiracy launched in Atlantis continues to rule the world today. The powerful Olympians are, she said, "to the body of human society as a cancer is to the body of a human."

The Aryans and Tilak

Around this time, LaRouche also concocted the idea of a second "good" elite that had taken up the fallen banner of the Titans. These were the Aryans. LaRouche began to promote certain eccentric theories on the Arctic origins of the Aryans developed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), a founder of India's nationalist movement. Tilak's work is well known among hard-core Hitler worshippers. For example the French neo-Nazi magazine Totalite sells Tilak's work under the title Origine polaire de la tradition vedique. My guess is that LaRouche became aware of Tilak through American Nazis such as Roy Frankhouser, who was once a member of the National Renaissance Party (NRP), a jack-booted outfit that regularly advertised Tilak's writings in its paper. According to the LaRouche version of Tilak's theory, in some "interglacial" period during the Ice Ages there existed near the North Pole an "urban, maritime culture" which, as it swept south, became the Aryans. These Aryan warriors, LaRouche claimed, had succeeded in destroying "the Harappa culture, Shakti, the Harappa name for the Whore of Babylon."

Also, in a May 1982 manuscript, "Religion, Science and Statecraft: New Directions in Indo-European Comparative Philology," college dropout LaRouche claimed to have discovered, in the 1950's, "more or less conclusive proof that the original language of Sumer must have been interconnected with the pre-Vedic [non-Aryan--ed.] languages of the dark-skinned populations of India." In other words, after the Aryans overthrew the "Whore" of the supposedly matriarchal Harappa culture, she simply migrated to Babylon.

Atlantis, the Aryan North and Nazi ideology

For Hitler's Nazis, belief in Atlantis and a pure "golden age" was an important ideological fantasy. For example, Nazi cultural czar Alfred Rosenberg, in his Myth of the Twentieth Century, wrote:

Geographers tell us of a continent between North America and Europe, remnants of which we see in Greenland and Iceland. They also reveal to us that on the far side of the high northern islands (Novaya Zemlya) there exist old waterlines that lie more than one hundred meters over the present ones. This phenomenon points to the probability that the North Pole has shifted position and that there was once a much milder climate in the present Arctic region. All this together puts the ancient sagas about Atlantis in a new light. Apparently it is no longer completely out of the question that where today the waves of the Atlantic roar and mighty icebergs wander, a flourishing continent once towered over the deluge; a continent on which a creative race nurtured a great, far-reaching culture and sent its children out into the world as sea-voyagers and warriors. However even if this Atlantis hypothesis should be proved untenable, it will be necessary to accept the existence of a Nordic, prehistoric culture centre....That old despised hypothesis which stated that once, from a Northern creative point--which we will call Atlantis, even if we do not literally believe in a sunken continent of Atlantis--swarms of warriors spread out, which might explain the continuously recurring Nordic longing to conquer distant lands: this hypothesis seems probable today. These streams of Atlanteans sailed their own swan and dragon ships to the Mediterranean, to Africa, towards Kutscha in Central Asia and probably even to China; they also sailed to the southern portion of the North American continent....We find the Nordic boat with swan prow and three sheets in pre-Dynastic Egypt. Furthermore, its oarsmen were the later master race of the warrior Amorites. They [the master race] pressed towards North Africa....

While LaRouche and his wife may have been influenced to some degree by Rosenberg's Atlantis theory, I believe that LaRouche's original 1979 discussion of Atlantis was probably inspired by another book that he either read or learned about at second-hand. This is Jurgen Spanuth's Die Atlanter: Volk aus dem Bernsteinland, which retailed a number of crankish ideas that LaRouche would later adopt--including the notion that Homer's Odyssey is the record of a voyage to Mexico. Spanuth's work was published by Grabert Verlag of Tubingen, the German publisher of works by authors associated with and promoted by the Liberty Lobby and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (for example, Grabert Verlag is the German publisher of U.S. neo-Nazi ideologue Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium).

When we read in Spanuth that the Odyssey is based on a visit by Ulysses to Mexico, and when we read LaRouche's declaration (in a 1979 Campaigner article) that Ulysses "did visit the vicinity of Yucatan" (a "region putatively known to him by reputation"), and when we reflect on the fact that the NCLC was in direct touch in the late 1970s with various Atlantis enthusiasts in neo-Nazi circles, then it is not hard to think that LaRouche was cribbing from Spanuth.

Helga's "Hitler Book"

Given LaRouche's penchant for scapegoating the Jews, and the way he often presents his arguments in a coded form, it is particularly interesting (and chilling) to note Helga Zepp-LaRouche's adoption of these methods in The Hitler Book (1984). In this cleverly crafted tract, LaRouche's wife attacks Hitler as an occultist and an agent of the "Olympian oligarchy" but remains silent about certain NCLC beliefs that closely parallel those she attributes to Hitler and his inner circle. For example, she writes:

The special significance of India and Tibet for the ideology of the Thule Society and the Nazis centers around the term Thule. In northern European mythology, Thule signifies a prehistoric "golden age" which ended in a sudden catastrophe. With the mysticism of the Thule Society and the Nazis, but also in circles in Russia, England, and Scandinavia and in other European locations, the Thule mythos became the alpha and omega of all human history....

Without resorting to primary sources, the Thule myth can be approximately reconstructed as follows: In pre-historic times there existed a flourishing culture in the North Sea area [she means Heligoland--ed.]. This empire of blond, blue-eyed, racially pure Aryans was led by an aristocracy with "superhuman" cosmic powers and abilities....But then there came a natural catastrophe of cosmic proportions. The Aryan Thule Empire sank into the sea....

In the course of the [subsequent] wanderings, [the Aryans] also settled in India and Persia, the Caucasus, and parts of Russia. Along the way, however, the Aryans relinquished some of their racial purity and so lost access to the higher knowledge and supernatural capacities of the old Aryan superman aristocracy. (Zepp-LaRouche, pp. 88-89.)

As demonstrated in the previous section of this report, Zepp-LaRouche and her husband themselves dabbled in a racial mythology closely akin to the one she purports to scorn in the above passage. Could it be a mere lapse of memory that Zepp-LaRouche nowhere mentions, in The Hitler Book, LaRouche's assertion that Ulysses was descended from the "Peoples of the Sea" who in turn were originally from Heligoland, that Ulysses voyaged to Mexico, etc.? Of course LaRouche's writings (like those of Rosenberg) refer to the lost Aryan homeland as "Atlantis" rather than "Thule"--but the NCLC chairman's references to Tilak strongly suggest that he regards Atlantis and Thule as one and the same place. [For more on LaRouche and the Thulean homeland, see Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, pages 56-57.--D.K.]

Zepp-LaRouche's book also provides a striking description of the Thule Society's "inner elite," which supposedly possessed an esoteric doctrine. According to The Hitler Book, the Thule Society--and later the leading circles in Nazi Germany--thought of themselves as an exclusive cult which had reestablished a connection to the primordial wisdom of the Aryans. This knowledge and the concomitant power, however, were reserved for only the select few who submitted to racist-Gnostic rituals and cult practices. The mission of these practitioners of occult rites was to lead Germany in founding a new Thule empire, with themselves as the new superman aristocracy.

According to The Hitler Book (p. 90), this Thule-Nazi mysticism was not espoused publicly; it remained a deep secret.

Zepp-LaRouche's attempt in her 1984 book to place a certain distance between the NCLC and the Nazi elite of Hitler's day would have been more successful if the NCLC had not at the same time been engaging in flagrantly pro-Nazi activity in the political arena. For instance, the NCLC had become the strongest supporter of Nazi war criminals living in the United States. The LaRouche group's attacks on the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which tracks down Nazi war criminals, began as early as the 8/14/79 NS, and by the mid-1980's the championing of aging Nazis had become a major obsession for the NCLC. For instance, in "The Truth About the German Rocket Scientists," NS fiercely defended former Nazi scientist Arthur Rudolph against charges that he was responsible for conditions in the Dora concentration camp, and asserted that the "German rocket scientists who came to the U.S. brought with them their classical education, their appreciation of and ability to perform great music, their love of learning and their dreams."

New Solidarity also criticized, in extremely hostile language, Jews and others who pleaded with President Reagan in 1985 to cancel his scheduled Bitburg visit: "Perhaps not everyone who is screaming about President Reagan's intention to visit the German cemetery [actually an SS cemetery--ed.] in Bitburg and his hesitation to visit a concentration camp, is a Soviet agent, but that characterization isn't far off."

Conclusion

I hope I have demonstrated both the depth and the demented nature of LaRouche's obsession with Jews--an obsession that (as LaRouche himself indicates) has its origins in his childhood religious training. I also hope I have shed some light on how LaRouche's long-standing interest in such questions as the fall of Babylon inspired his work in economics. Stripped down to their essentials, LaRouche's anti-Semitism and his viewpoint on economics both center on the idea that Judaism is the unique ideological/religious justification of a merchant-usurer elite that was responsible for the destruction of Babylon and subsequent catastrophes in human history--and that continues to dominate much of the world even today.

According to LaRouche, this oligarchical elite will do anything in its power (including the triggering of massive genocide, nuclear war, etc.) to preserve its status. Indeed it will be compelled by its own worldview and perceived interests to commit unthinkable satanic evil unless it is politically and militarily overthrown. For LaRouche, such a revolution essentially will be the process by which this cancerous elite is exterminated once and for all.

These core beliefs, rooted in the peculiar ideological spin-off from Marxism that LaRouche developed in the 1960s and early 1970s, not only facilitated a smooth transition for the NCLC from leftist sect to crypto-Nazi cult, but also allowed LaRouche himself to return at last to the mental womb of his childhood--by adopting a "scientific" rationale for his parents' old-fashioned religious anti-Semitism.

If LaRouche's actions as well as his ideas are interpreted in this way, his longtime relationships with Jewish members of the NCLC (including his former live-in lover Carol Schnitzer) could be seen as akin to those of a Christian evangelist living among the wicked "heathens" he hopes to convert. For LaRouche the successful recruitment of Jews to the NCLC--and the subsequent manipulating of them to promote his sick views--would be especially gratifying (as would any success in brainwashing previously independent-minded women intellectuals into giving their life energies to his patriarchal war-cult). According to this interpretation of LaRouche's psychology, even his 1976 flirtation with the idea that the Rothschild family might be won to his policies reflected a disdain for the cultural and religious traits of Judaism that the Rothschilds supposedly represent.

There are other possibilities as well. LaRouche's anti-Semitism (so vividly outlined in the 1974 "Feuerbach" article) may have reflected an underlying paranoid tendency that gradually became hegemonic in his thinking as the NCLC's cult structure rendered him more and more isolated from real-world feedback and criticism. In light of this interpretation, the Wiesbaden "assassination" crisis could be seen as having played a special role in driving LaRouche over the brink. (This strange incident also raises the issue of outside manipulation of LaRouche's psychology by intelligence professionals and/or con artists.) Whatever the ultimate facts of LaRouche's psychopathology, however, there can be no doubt that intense anti-Semitism has played a central role in the construction of his worldview.

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