Rohatyn, the man in LaRouche's nightmares.
By Dennis King
JANUARY 2, 2008--Over the past few weeks, lyndonlarouchewatch.org has posted dozens of items (with more to come) about LaRouche's efforts going back decades to encourage death squads and military coups in certain countries--and to defend human rights violators of the worst sort against prosecution for their crimes.
The effect of these postings on LaRouche is obvious from his Dec. 20 remarks about Jewish banker Felix Rohatyn as quoted in a LaRouche PAC press release the following day entitled "Tell the Truth: Rohatyn Is a Nazi." Basically LaRouche's remarks follow a pattern that dates back to the 1970s--whenever he is accused of something reprehensible he turns around and levels the same charge at his putative enemies, with the main attack usually being on a Symbolic Evil Jew such as (at various times) Henry Kissinger, Teddy Goldsmith, Milton Friedman, or Mr. Rohatyn. Consider the following from the Dec. 21 press release:
"Look, Rohatyn is a fascist, so cut it out. Why are you bringing up his name? He supported the fascist killer Pinochet in power in Chile, along with George Shultz. He's pushing the Revolution in Military affairs, and killer mercenaries. What more do you want--the guy is a Nazi! Why is he involved in a discussion about the U.S. economy--he's a fascist!"
Hmmm....Rohatyn is a fascist? My recent postings provide extensive documentation of LaRouche's own relationships with real fascists over a 30-year period--from Col. Seineldin and the "Painted Ones" in Argentina through death squad-linked elements in Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia and Spain. Rohatyn supported the fascist killer Pinochet? I raised the same question about LaRouche himself here. Rohatyn is pushing a sinister "Revolution in Military affairs"? Read here about LaRouche's attempts to persuade military rightists throughout Latin America to seize power and rekindle civil wars against leftists. Rohatyn is supporting "killer mercenaries"? I presented documentation here regarding how the LaRouche movement encouraged the Spanish security services to hire "professional killers"--as LaRouche aide Herb Quinde called them--to kidnap and murder Basque refugees in France (an eery imitation of Latin America's infamous Operation Condor). Rohatyn is a Nazi? My website provides articles from the mainstream European media about how the Spanish death squads were composed in large part of neo-Nazis and/or utilized Nazi rhetoric (read here the BBC's report on "Operation Mengele" and here El Mundo's article that describes both LaRouche and many of the GAL mercenaries as neo-Nazis).
In contrast to these postings, LaRouche's own charges against the 79-year-old Rohatyn are purely and simply fantasy. LaRouche first made Rohatyn one of his Symbolic Evil Jews back in the 1970s, when Rohatyn was in charge of managing the New York City government's financial crisis. LaRouche predicted gloom and doom, but Rohatyn ended up restoring the city's credit rating with remarkably little pain for city residents--and without the help of any of the absurd nostrums suggested by LaRouche. LaRouche (his ego stung to the quick by the failure of anyone in authority to take seriously his advice on the city crisis) has continued over the decades to issue a steady stream of preposterous accusations against Rohatyn, presenting him as the evil James Bondtrader of a London-based plot to destroy Western civilization.
LaRouche's verbal judo tactic--diverting criticism of his own words and deeds onto scapegoats such as Rohatyn and then ratcheting up the hysteria--has often worked like a charm on his befuddled followers. When it was pointed out in the late 1970s that LaRouche was denying the Holocaust, his reply was to re-emphasize his theory that wealthy Jews helped put Hitler into power and thus were the ones really responsible for the repression of the Jews. When LaRouche was called a neo-Nazi or a fascist, he turned around and used similar labels against Henry Kissinger--the numero uno figure among the Symbolic Evil Jews who occupy the nightmarish fantasy world of LaRouche's mind. When questions were asked about LaRouche's ties to organized crime and Teamster hoodlums, he raised the decibel level on his own baseless accusations that the "Zionists" control the Mafia and the international drug trade. When LaRouche was convicted of swindling senior citizens out of millions of dollars in 1988, he tried to divert the attention of both his followers and the general public from this personal and political setback by issuing dire warnings of an impending effort by the international financial "oligarchy" to bankrupt the world economy through usury and (predictably) giant swindles.
A key element in LaRouche's diversionary strategy is to always accuse his scapegoats of something so much worse than what he himself has been accused of that he can then step forward and say: They are slandering me (or framing me) because they know I'm the only one who can stop their nefarious scheme to kill hundreds of millions, or even billions, of people around the world. In this context, LaRouche has frequently described Henry Kissinger, Felix Rohatyn and the City of London bankers--and their WASP allies/dupes in Washington--as being a "hundred times worse than Hitler." (Subtext: Even if LaRouche himself is a Hitler wannabe it doesn't matter, because the enemy is far, far worse.)
LaRouche's worse-than-Hitler chestnut was presented in a slightly toned-down form in a Dec. 19, 2007 LaRouche PAC press release here which alleged that the environmental proposals of Al Gore to stop global warming "will kill more people than Hitler." (As well as diverting attention from LaRouche's own small-time Hitlerism, such language trivializes the crimes of Hitler and thus should properly be regarded as a sly form of Holocaust denial--just as Holocaust denial itself is a sly form of the kill-'em-again program of neo-Nazis who openly wear the swastika.)
While LaRouche engages in the above elaborate efforts to divert attention from his own extremist views and misdeeds onto the imaginary--or real but wildly exaggerated--sins of others, he has rarely been willing to curb the tongue that has helped to make him the type of controversial person who needs to practice such diversions. In his Dec. 21 press release he announced that the time has come to "burn and torch" leaders of the U.S. Congress allegedly collaborating with Felix Rohatyn, who is described as a "Synarchist International agent" and "the enemy of the United States." (An ex-LaRouchian, writing on the Factnet message board last May (read here), properly identified the "Synarchists" as a euphemistic reference to Jewish bankers and compared the term to another frequently used euphemism, "Children of Satan." LaRouche himself used the two terms interchangeably in a July 2006 webcast entitled "Rohatyn as Satan"--read here the press release announcing it in which Rohatyn is described as a "Synarchist banker".)
The reference to possible violence against members of the U.S. Congress should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the LaRouche movement's style. Over the years the NCLC chairman and his lieutenants have either publicly suggested or privately explored the possibility of lynchings (of gays, Federal Reserve Board officials and Teamster reformers, among others); political assassinations (of a list of targets including Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski); and the inducing of suicide (in Kissinger and other Jews, as well as LaRouche's own followers if their zeal begins to flag).[1]
However, I never recall LaRouche focussing specifically on burnings and torchings prior to December 2007. This appears to be something new. Why fire this time? And why now?
If you go to my recent postings on LaRouche and the Spanish death squads, you will find an excerpt from a 1986 speech by Herb Quinde (LaRouche's partner in the visits to Spain three years previously to encourage the formation of such units). The Quinde speech--as published in New Solidarity--is an attack on democracy and pluralism from a clearly fascistic point of view, and ends with the remark: "it may be time to start burning witches again."
In my opinion, LaRouche's uncharacteristic use of "burn and torch" rhetoric almost 22 years later is his defiant reply to my publicizing of his and Quinde's trips to Spain, Quinde's long-forgotten public rant, and the pro-death-squad mentality among LaRouche's security staff and many of his overseas-based cadre. LaRouche is saying, in effect, in his 85-year-old mind drenched with Hitler/Al Capone/Argentine caudillo fantasies: "Ya want burnings? I'll give ya burnings!"
The documenting of LaRouche's links to horrific human rights violations and to groups such as the "Painted Ones" in Argentina clearly has increased his anxiety level. To help keep up the pressure, more information about these sinister links would be extremely useful. Ex-LaRouchians with special knowledge of these matters are urged to start posting what they know on Factnet's anti-LaRouche message board.
For further insight on LaRouche's Dec. 21 burn and torch statement, see the comments by ex-LaRouche follower "Shadok" here.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] The LaRouchians have also expressed an interest in employing violence on an apocalyptic scale. In 1978, their former newspaper New Solidarity suggested dropping an atomic bomb on London to counter the alleged Zionist-British oligarchy (read here). The LaRouche newspaper also suggested nuking Tel Aviv if the Israelis should fail to come to heel. LaRouche himself, in articles published under his own name in the late 1970s, discussed the use of ABC warfare (atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons combined) to turn Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union into a parking lot, and even speculated, according to his former science advisor Steve Bardwell, about using "cobalt bombs with fans." However, in 1987 LaRouche presented--at an EIR seminar in Munich that was supposedly attended by West German military officers and defense contractors--a more environmentally-friendly scheme. This time, he called for a crash program to develop "mass-killing" weapons using the "full range of the electromagnetic spectrum" that presumably would turn the enemy into microwave dinners rather than radioactive sludge. Through these weapons, LaRouche proclaimed, a German-American military alliance could "dominate this planet."
