"It was okay for his wife Helga to fly her dogs to and fro, and feed them steak...but it was regarded as indolent opulence to waste money and food on a baby."
In connection with discussing the LaRouche organization's determination to abort the children of its members, several specifics shed a little more light on the thought processes behind it all, and the results.
1. The "PMR Lifestyle"
When Lyn got out of prison in January 1994, he was in a state of uncontrollable rage against the membership of the LaRouche organization--a state of rage that has continued, unabated, to this day, and is expressed in his constant attacks on the cult's Baby Boomers.
Lyn was enraged that the organization had NOT collapsed when he was in prison; he was enraged that we had let him go to prison, that we had not succeeded in "putting him in power," that we had survived his imprisonment--and that so many of us had responded to his imprisonment by having or adopting babies.
One of Lyn's first objects of attack, in his ravings at the weekly National Executive Committee (NEC) meetings, was what he called the "PMR lifestyle." The reference was to the printing and typesetting companies--PMR and WorldComp, respectively--of which my late husband Ken was the president (he was also PMR's owner and a half-owner of WorldComp).
The "PMR lifestyle," which Lyn characterized as a big problem for the organization, was actually pretty Spartan, and increasingly so as the years went by, but it did involve having health insurance, and above all, it involved having children.
In addition to Ken, two members and one former member of LaRouche's Labor Committee worked at PMR. All of them had children; indeed, each had more than one child.
At WorldComp, in addition to Ken, there were eight Labor Committee members and one former member on staff. All of them, with one exception, had children; several had more than one child.
The most pro-family, pro-child section of the organization was "the companies"--Ken's companies--which came under attack the day Lyn got out of prison. This was an attack that never stopped--in fact, it grew ever more vicious over the next 13 years, until the day Ken died.
The attack abated somewhat when Ken committed suicide on April 11, 2007, and the two companies were shut as of April 13, 2007. But the attack on the memory and reputation of Ken and the companies continues in various forms to the present day.
2. The Phone Team Phenomenon
As more people in the National Center (NCR) in Leesburg had children, the resentment of the NCR phone-team fundraisers grew more intense. (This was in the mid-1990s.) They complained that they were being made to raise money to support other members' kids (the rationale being that, since many members were in those days--until about 1996--paid some pittance of a stipend, the stipend was going to the children). In those days, the NCR had a rule of thumb that for each kid you had, you got $50 a week extra.
The animosity between the fundraisers and the parents grew so sharp that the fundraisers began complaining incessantly to NEC member Gerry Rose about it.
It was okay to have dogs to dote on--it was okay for Helga [Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lyndon's wife--ed.] to fly her dogs to and fro, and feed them steak (see Pam Cowdery's testimony in LaRouche's 1988 Federal trial in Alexandria, VA)--but it was regarded as indolent opulence to waste money and food on a baby.
Why? Because, as Helga obscenely said, "We are the parents of all the babies in the world." Hardly. She certainly wasn't sending charity to Feed the Children. And when I tried to hand my infant son to her to hold--he was two months old at the time--she was terrified and appalled; actually refused to take him. And she and Lyn insisted on referring to him as a puppy--a conceit they maintained for years, as more and more Labor Committee babies managed to arrive.
The atmosphere in the National Office became poisonous with the phone team's venom--and yet, better than the atmosphere in the "field," in the regions where the NCs [National Committee members--ed.] held sway, ruling with a dictatorial power, and where no one ever, ever had a baby.
It's not too hard to imagine the outcome. Ultimately, many of the people with children left the organization. The phone team is still there, older, grayer, and more lined; more enraged, more fanatical, and more unbalanced. But now, attacked daily by LaRouche as Baby Boomers, they devote their fundraising prowess to bringing in money to feed, not their own kids--they were never born--but someone else's kids: the trapped, exploited, oppressed kids of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM).
So it's all right to support kids after all, apparently, as long as they're someone else's whom you've stolen and entrapped.
3. Lyn's Kulturkampf
When Lyn got out of prison in January 1994, not only did he discover just how many Leesburg members now had children, but he also discovered how many Leesburg members had "gotten religion" in his absence.
This posed a huge social-control problem for him, because if you were a Christian, and believed that Jesus Christ had saved the world, you didn't believe Lyndon LaRouche was here to do the same.
If you were a Jew, and believed that God had chosen the Jews to be a light unto the Nations, you didn't believe that God had chosen Lyndon LaRouche for that same role.
As Ken and I used to joke, Lyn said to God, "The universe isn't big enough for the two of us."
And guess which one had to go?
To rid the Labor Committee of this threat of religiosity, Lyn began a campaign which culminated in the fall of 2000, when he drove FQ and RQ (former NEC and NC members, respectively) out of the organization, and with them many of their fellow Catholics. It was an absolutely brutal campaign, whose culmination was announced in a rabidly anti-Catholic morning briefing written by--who else?--Tony Papert, the NEC member who channels Lyn most uninhibitedly and specializes in writing killer briefings.
With the eviction of the Catholics (and those Catholics who didn't leave the organization rapidly left the Church, because you couldn't serve both Lyn and God), the organization's population of children dropped precipitously. And a high percentage of the children who remained wound up in the LYM.
As for us, I told our son that if anyone ever tried to recruit him to the LYM, he should just say: "I'm not joining any organization that tried to have me aborted."
And Ken told the LYMsters who kept asking him for our son's phone number, "He knows how to get in touch with you if he wants to."
Of course, he never did.