"It is not necessary to wear brown shirts to be a fascist...It is not necessary to wear a swastika to be a fascist...It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist to be a fascist. It is simply necessary to be one!"--Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., July 7, 1978
Lyndon LaRouche, chairman of the cult-like National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), ran for President as a "Democrat" in the 1980 primaries. This year, a number of his followers are seeking public office, also as "Democrats," in primaries from Virginia to California. LaRouche has even concocted a new front group, the "National Democratic Policy Committee," to provide the appearance of legitimacy for these campaigns.
The LaRouchian philosophy, however, bears no resemblance whatsoever to that of the Democratic Party. The NCLC chairman's published writings and speeches on political theory, including his major book, The Case of Walter Lippmann, clearly reveal him to be a totalitarian of the Far Right--a fascist in all but name.
The proposals in these extremist theoretical works--and in articles by LaRouche’s top aides--include the replacement of democracy by a dictatorship of big business, denial of citizenship to a large percentage of Americans, and the outlawing of all modes of thinking except LaRouchian "humanism."
''Democracy," LaRouche said in a 1979 speech to his campaign stalwarts, "is like a farm without a farmer, in which the chickens, sheep, cows, horses and pigs form 'constituencies'...." The scornful image was fully in accord with previous statements in which he had described the overwhelming majority of the human race as "bestial" and less than human.
In the same speech, he urged his campaign workers to exert their utmost to bring about a LaRouche victory and "end the rule of irrationalist episodic majorities, of British liberal notions of 'democracy.'" (Note: "British" is LaRouche's code word for the Rothschilds and other London-based Jewish banking families.)
To replace democracy, LaRouche advocates a "humanist republic." What does this mean?
"The development of the term 'republic' has nothing to do with elections, parliaments, or such differentia," hints one LaRouchian article.
And elsewhere: "'Republic' is defined most efficiently by emphasizing the direct opposition between the republican and democratic forms of organization...."
The implications of this "direct opposition" are made clear when LaRouche asserts that the constitution of a republic must guarantee that the branches of government "act to prefer the republican influence and to relatively suppress the democratic or other non-republican influences."
Good vs. Bad Dictatorships
LaRouche justifies this policy by alleging that democracy, after all, is nothing but a cover for an already existing dictatorship, and claiming (in effect) that he merely wishes to replace this bad dictatorship by a good one.
"In the United States at this moment," he says, "we are mainly under the executive dictatorship of the monetarist faction...." (Note: The latter term is used in LaRouchian writings interchangeably with "British.")
This usury-dictatorship, LaRouche continues, should be replaced by "the dictatorship of an alliance of industrialists, trade-union and farmer political interests." The phrase has a populist tinge, but LaRouche makes clear (in The Case of Walter Lippmann) that he really means a dictatorship that would represent primarily the interests of the "industrialists."
"A Capitalist republic," he says, "is essentially, properly, a class dictatorship-in-fact of policy making....[It] is the dictating of those policies by representatives of the conscious interest of industrial-capitalist development as a whole, in which the interests of the labor movement are the partners and immediate broader social base of the leading role of industrial capitalists as such."
The idea that a fascist-led labor movement should provide a mass base ("a broader social base") for a pro-business dictatorship was one of the key ideas of Benito Mussolini, who also advocated a "corporative" state in which labor dissent would be suppressed via institutions based on the fiction that labor and capital have identical interests.
LaRouche implies similar ideas: "The interests of management and labor are properly understood to be identical in the final analysis." And: "The labor-versus-industry nonsense must cease, at Ieast in matters involving bearing on national policy making, national political life." These remarks would be mere platitudes if uttered by someone who believed in democracy. Coming from LaRouche, however, they should be interpreted within the context of his call for dictatorship, his bitter polemics against "pluralism," and his organization's frequent labeling of striking workers as "terrorists" and pawns of international Zionism.
Underneath the rhetoric about serving the "industrialists," however, LaRouche's real aim appears to be the imposition of his own "humanist" ideology on industrialists and workers alike.
An official manifesto of the LaRouche organization (1978) asserts: "The state must be constructed in such a fashion that only humanist influences prevail in the modification of constitutional law and prevail in effective dictatorship of principle over the shaping of ordinary positive law."
And in LaRouche's own harsher words: "What we [will] not tolerate in proper policy and law is a direct violation of humanist outlook and methods which threatens vital interests as defined from the humanist standpoint."
In arguing for this enforced quiescence, LaRouche distorts the concept of freedom in a manner reminiscent of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Toleration of violations of universal law...," the NCLC chairman writes, "is not generated as a positive expression of freedom. Exactly the opposite. Freedom, positively understood, is the abhorrence of such error."
But LaRouche would not only grant to the government the power to repress dissent. He would also authorize it to pressure the individual into thinking and behaving in a manner that serves the state:
"The society--e.g., 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....The individual does not rightly regard the 'constriction' on outlook and method of the humanist state as oppressive. For without general progress, the state...cannot afford the individual members the means for increasing their capacity and expression of freedom...."
But what would be the state's attitude to individuals who flatly refuse to become diligent humanists? LaRouche graces us with one of his typically oblique but chilling remarks: "Without freedom in the humanist sense, the individual in society has no consciously defensible premise on which to say to his fellows: 'I have a right to live as a free man....'"
To take away a person's right to live as a "free man," however, strongly implies the authority to define that person as a criminal and to prosecute him (especially since LaRouche is not in favor of a naked personal tyranny but aims at a constitutional dictatorship, a dictatorship via law).
In American criminal law today, one cannot prosecute someone for having an "incorrect" point of view or for failing to display a self-sacrificing devotion to the state. A criminal (one who may be deprived of freedom by the state) is exclusively defined as one who has committed a specific criminal act and has been convicted of it in court.
In LaRouchian doctrine, however, a criminal is defined in a radically different manner as one who thinks criminal thoughts: "The proper central principle of the criminal law," says the 1978 manifesto, "is the principled conception of the mens rea, the criminal mind."
Furthermore, the LaRouchians define criminal thoughts in an extremely broad manner, to include not just the meaning of specific criminal acts (such as their favorite bugbear, terrorism) but also a person's general attitude to society:
"In principle," the manifesto says, "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...."
And, in less ambiguous language: "The definition of the criminal mind...is the mind which defines the desires and impulses peculiar to individual or family interest as superior to the interest of the society for purposes of practice...."
Weird? Not if one accepts LaRouche's manichaean view of the world, allegedly based on "natural law," which instills in his followers a quasi-religious fanaticism to destroy the Jewish-surnamed "forces of evil" and bring humanity under the rule of the coming race of "golden souls."
As LaRouche says in The Case of Walter Lippmann, a government based on natural law would "discriminate between those directed principles of thought which lead to increasing human perfection--which we call good, and those traits of mental and social life which abort progress or worse--which we call evil. That is theology, but it is also science, and it is the only tolerable perception of the ordering principle of law. The law which does not recognize that as its governing truth is a morally imbecilic practice of law."
Given such a fanatical vision, it is only a short step to conceiving of the state as having a sacred duty to engage in out-and-out brainwashing of the general public. As LaRouche says: "The object of the republic is to mobilize the good within the individual citizen to rule over the evil within himself."
Those Who Govern Best
Such concepts are closely linked to LaRouche's "Neoplatonic" theory of leadership, which would grant authority only to an elite that has attained a transcendent level of moral perfection (as defined by LaRouche, of course). The NCLC chief touches on this theory in The Case of Walter Lippmann:
A proper republic has inevitably many features which appear to lend credence to its opponents' description of it as constitutional 'dictatorship by an elite.' It is by constitutional prescription the chosen elite...who in fact best govern. They rule by using government and law to check the heteronomic tendencies of the less moral strata, and by governing in the universal interest of the society as a whole....
In a 1979 speech, LaRouche affirmed the opposite side of elitism: its denial of equal rights for the majority of the population ("the less moral strata") who do not qualify for membership in the elite. Indeed, He would even deny them the basic right to be regarded as citizens: "The citizen of a republic is not merely any individual, nor even all adults....A citizen is a person of adequate moral and intellectual development...."
He went on to dress up this concept with images taken from Plato's dialogue The Republic, dividing society into bronze souls, silver souls, and golden souls.
The bronze souls, LaRouche said, are persons who operate on the basis of "individual biological appetites and related irrationalist impulses." In the LaRouchian republic, they would be denied citizenship, which would only be granted to silver and golden souls (defined apparently as lower and higher levels of adeptness in LaRouchian ideology).
So how many citizens does this leave? One clue is given in LaRouche's essay "A Machiavellian Solution for Israel," in which he asserts: "The human race is overall a wretched, immoral, myth-ridden mass of sheep....The necessary thing is to transform this bestial mass of ignorant sheep, which is 99 and 44/100ths percent of the human race, into a human race in fact."
LaRouche's description of the "bestial mass" is remarkably similar to his description of the noncitizen "bronze souls." One is justified in suspecting, therefore, that in the early stages of the process of racial transformation (if not later), citizenship would be restricted to only 6/100ths of one percent of the American public!
The Humanist Republic in Action
LaRouche and his followers have suggested transitional measures aiming toward the "humanist republic," such as the creation of Cabinet posts for the chiefs of the FBI and the CIA and establishing a press agency run by the CIA to provide an "alternative source of information."
But these measures are only preparations for a stronger dose of "humanism," which would include the "immediate elimination" of the "Jewish Lobby" from the councils of government, business, and labor; a "permanent Special Prosecutor" to prepare indictments of treason against Jews and other agents of the "Zionist-British organism"; and military mobilization for "total war" to establish "humanist republics" throughout the world.