[1] This is a reference to LaRouche's "ego-stripping" indoctrination tactics of the early 1970s, which were based on ideas set forth in "Beyond Psychoanalysis" (not "Beyond Psychology"), a LaRouche article published in the November 1973 Campaigner.
[2] Operation Mop Up was a 1973 campaign of physical assaults by LaRouche's NCLC on members of rival leftist groups, especially the Communist Party USA. It involved breaking up meetings in a manner apparently inspired by LaRouche's reading of the chapter in Mein Kampf in which Hitler describes how his stormtroopers broke up leftwing meetings in Germany in the early 1920s. The Mop Up campaign also included street ambushes of individual CP leaders. For the detailed account in Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, click here.
[3] Not only did LaRouche attempt to recruit gang youth to do violence against his rivals on the Marxist left but he also sent his mostly white NCLC cadre into battle against Amiri Baraka's followers in Newark, N.J. (where the LaRouchians had no base of support) and against the Mau Mau group in Boston. In the latter case, the middle-class LaRouchians, armed with guns, ambushed the Mau Mau and thoroughly routed them. It was the LaRouche organization's luck that neither of the targeted groups was composed of especially dangerous street-gang elements (Baraka, the well-known poet and playwright, was attempting to do grassroots community organizing in Newark, not build a gang). If the victimized groups had been of a different type, several LaRouchians would almost certainly have ended up dead. And for what? So LaRouche could impress Ku Klux Klan leader Bob Miles and Newark white-ethnic demagogue Anthony Imperiale? For more details on RYM and the fights with black nationalists, click here.
[4] It was not the "prudence" of the Outlaws street gang so much as the prompt action of Detective Jack Finnegan of the New York City police intelligence division that led to the collapse of RYM. Many former and present LaRouchians owe Finnegan a great debt. He may have saved lives--and he certainly forestalled crimes that would have resulted in stiff prison sentences for the perpetrators. This is the same Finnegan who indirectly set in motion the NBC-TV "First Camera" show in 1984 that resulted in the severance of the Reagan administration's ties to LaRouche.
[5] Jeremiah Duggan was a Jewish college student from the U.K. who died under mysterious circumstances while attending a Schiller Institute Conference and LaRouche Jugend Bewegung (LaRouche Youth Movement) cadre school in Wiesbaden, Germany, in March 2003. He spoke out against the anti-Semitism he was hearing and revealed he was Jewish. The Wiesbaden police maintain that he committed suicide, but forensic experts hired by the Duggan family assert that the bruises on the body are not consistent with being struck by a car (the police's story) but suggest he had been brutally beaten. The German police have never offered an explanation of why his passport, which was in the possession of the LaRouche organization rather than on Jeremiah's person at the time of his purported suicide, had blood on it which DNA testing (done in the UK for the Duggans) has revealed was Jeremiah's. The German police also have never explained why they destroyed Jeremiah's clothing--key forensic evidence--shortly after his death. Click here for the Duggan family's website.
[6] For full coverage of the circumstances surrounding the Kronberg suicide--and of its aftermath--go to the menu here.
[7] Schlanger and Rubinstein are longtime LaRouche cadre who rule over the hapless LYM recruits in Los Angeles. Rubinstein is known as one of the most ruthless fundraising quota-enforcers in the entire LaRouche organization. Schlanger and Rubinstein are believed to be part of the effort of LaRouchians, operating under anonymous user names, to censor Wikipedia articles on LaRouche--several of these user names have been traced back to the same location in Los Angeles and have been banned from Wikipedia on grounds that they are "sock puppets" for previously banned user names.
[8] In the late 1970s, I requested the CIA's files on the LaRouche organization under the Freedom of Information Act. I eventually received, among other things, a translation of a 1975 article (click here) from a Swedish newspaper detailing how the LaRouche organization's local branch had been stalking the country's prime minister, Olof Palme. The LaRouchians would continue to stalk him and to circulate massive quantities of hate literature targeting him for over a decade. In 1986, Palme was assassinated on a Stockholm street by a lone gunman. An unstable member of LaRouche's organization was the first suspect arrested--and anti-Palme literature was found in his apartment. He was later released for lack of evidence, although his story kept shifting and he never came up with a solid alibi. Another individual was tried and acquitted. The LaRouche associate, Viktor Gunnarsson, moved to North Carolina where he was murdered in 1993, supposedly as a result of his involvement in a love triangle. According to witness statements collected by an investigator working for the man convicted of Gunnarsson's murder, the Swede had bragged to American friends about having killed Palme. The Palme assassination has never been solved, but Gunnarsson remains near the top of the suspect list and was named as the assassin in a book by Borje Wingren, a former Swedish police inspector who worked the case and was blocked by his superiors from aggressively investigating Gunnarsson.
[9] Although the targets of Mop Up did not counterattack in the sense of trying to break up meetings of LaRouche's NCLC, they did begin to vigorously defend their own meetings. Joint defense squads of Trotskyists and CP members gave as good as they got in some encounters, and the Trotskyists scored a clear victory over the NCLC during a Detroit melee. When police in several cities arrested NCLC members on assault charges, and other members began to call in sick whenever a Mop Up attack was scheduled, LaRouche declared "victory" and terminated the campaign.
[10] LaRouche announced that a follower of his named Chris White had been tortured and brainwashed by the CIA--to turn him into a "Manchurian candidate" assassin who would kill LaRouche on the utterance of a "trigger word." This led to weeks of hysteria in the LaRouche organization. For a detailed account, click here (and then click here for the full text of one of the LaRouche speeches that whipped up the hysteria). The psychological motives driving LaRouche during this key incident in the organization's history are dealt with in the posting above by "larouchtruth" and in a prior Factnet thread (see edited version here).
[11] "Sancho" does not mean that intellectuals in the organization have ceased to be intellectuals, but rather that the young people being recruited today appear to be less well educated or intellectually inclined than those LaRouche attracted in the late 1960s, when opposition to the Vietnam War caused many of the "best and brightest" to adopt extremist positions they would never have otherwise adopted. Today there is no selective recruiting of an "elite"--the LaRouche Youth Movement will find a place for any young person who proves susceptible to quickie "brainwashing" (a type of indoctrination that would not have worked with most of LaRouche's original recruits, whose transformation into cult followers occurred only through incremental steps).
A corollary to the observation that recent young recruits seem less "intellectual" is that they also appear to be less stable emotionally. Although those recruited in the early years would end up manifesting the same irrational political behavior as today's LYMers, the former joined in most cases on the basis of ideology rather than because they were seeking some kind of group self-medication for personal problems. Over half quit over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, with many going out fighting rather than just slinking away. My perception of the many ex-members I have met or whose careers I have followed through the media or mutual acquaintances is that after leaving LaRouche they mostly led stable lives, keeping their marriages intact (in an unusual percentage of cases), finishing their educations and enjoying successful careers. By contrast, the LYMers of today, according to various anecdotal reports, appear to include a much higher percentage of disturbed individuals who are attracted to the movement because of personal dissatisfactions rooted in bipolar disorder, learning disabilities, anger issues, etc., and/or who are susceptible because of their personal isolation. This is one reason why some ex-LaRouchians and other observers expect the LYM to turn to violence before long--either at LaRouche's instigation or in the period of organizational turmoil following his death.
[12] Ex-LaRouchians are probably sick of hearing me talk about LaRouche's semantic tricks. So they can take the pill from another doctor here. Or better yet, from George Orwell himself.
[13] I discuss this LaRouche press release in detail here. My interpretation is that LaRouche is reacting to the articles I've been posting about his and Herb Quinde's role in setting up Spain's GAL death squads in 1983 and about the LaRouche movement's involvement with sinister rightist military figures in Latin America over the past 30 years (click here for the menu of these postings).
