THE LAROUCHE YOUTH MOVEMENT: Recruiting a new generation of cadre from U.S. campuses

REPORTS ON CAMPUS ORGANIZING

"Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Restyled for the New Millenium" (pamphlet from Red Letter Press, aimed especially at left-leaning activist students)

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Dennis King: LAROUCHE WANTS INFLUENCE BEYOND THE GRAVE

LaRouche, now in his eighties, is determined that his movement survive his death and carry on his Jew-hating legacy. He has thus returned to his political roots, sending organizers onto the campuses in a big way for the first time since the 1970s to take advantage of the discontent over the Iraq war as well as the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at some colleges. And it's working: Hundreds of new cadre have been recruited in recent years through high pressure indoctrination tactics, including "ego-stripping" sessions similar to those for which LaRouche's movement was notorious in earlier decades.

Potential recruits are led to believe that the LYM is a legitimate part of the anti-war movement (and of the Democratic Party) and that LaRouche is a progressive figure in the tradition of FDR and Martin Luther King who is leading the fight against the "evil" Bush and Cheney. No one tells the potential recruits about LaRouche's past involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and apartheid South Africa's Bureau of State Security--or about his more recent involvement with Latin American military figures guilty of horrific human rights violations.

Most students who stick around to hear the full pitch accept without question the line that LaRouche's years in federal prison were the result of a giant plot to silence him politically. (In fact, he was found guilty by a jury of his peers of committing massive loan fraud that involved the theft of the life savings of senior citizens from Alaska to Florida, while over a dozen of his followers were convicted of the same crimes in separate trials. This web page will soon be providing documentation that will expose once and for all the myth that LaRouche is an innocent man railroaded into jail by political enemies.)

Once the initial indoctrination (involving according to eyewitnesses a brutal quickie brainwashing) is complete, student recruits are induced to drop out of school and work full-time for the LYM, manning propaganda tables on scores of campuses and on urban street corners, where they sell pamphlets like "Children of Satan" (described by the Wall Street Journal as basically an anti-Semitic screed). Once embarked on this life, recruits find it very difficult to break away. (One who did--Jeremiah Duggan, a student at the Sorbonne in Paris--ended up dead.) They live together in group homes and constantly watch each other for signs of wavering loyalty while having their exhausting daily work schedules regulated by LYM leaders skilled in the use of guilt-tripping and other forms of psychological manipulation.

LYM members undergo a lengthy testing period as worker bees, during which they are gradually transformed from hapless victims into shameless victimizers of still newer recruits. From such transformed personalities, who have come to regard LaRouche as infallible and his ideas as the only salvation for an otherwise doomed humanity, a new leadership is gradually being formed to replace LaRouche's aging and mostly burned-out aides left over from the early years of the movement. Will one of the younger and more aggressive leaders who come out of the LYM possess the organizational talent, intellect and inner core of hatred and rage to become an effective successor to LaRouche? Only time will tell.