Open Letter #2 to LaRouche Youth Movement members:

To the Ice Floes!

"LaRouche owed them [the NCLC Boomers] his life, his livelihood, whatever political chops he had ever had, his ability to get on TV and cavort (making Jeremiah Wright look like Solon)--he owed them his lavish lifestyle, his ability to run around the world and play statesman."

By "eaglebeak" (posted on Factnet, 04-29-2008, 08:33 PM)

Dear LYMers--

To continue my previous comments:

When the Boomer members, of which I was one, were young, LaRouche's big concern was to keep us from having children (or seeing our parents). In other words, he wanted to abstract us from the context of Family.

Very Stalinist, very Maoist, but not very human. Basically the way most cults are run--keep your captives disoriented by wrenching them out of any normative human setting.

So Lyn's idea, expressed fairly forthrightly in "Beyond Psychoanalysis" and in his endless stupid sessions with the NEC, was that we would all sever our emotional ties to Family, and "cathect" to him instead. He would become our father, our polestar, our god, our...whatever.

Now, this didn't always work. And generally, the people who stayed in touch with their families were the people who wound up having children.

But the advent of an embryo was regarded as a disaster. I was present in one discussion where Nancy Spannaus told a pregnant member that the greatest danger of childbearing was that her "priorities would change." That's for sure. Once you had a kid, your interest in Lyn generally waned. Oh, there are exceptions to the rule, but in general, those who had children would cheerfully sacrifice Lyn for their kids any day.

I know I would.

Nancy also, in that same conversation, said wistfully that if she hadn't had her children she could have been more like Helga.[FN 1] Hard to imagine anything more disturbed--who could possibly prefer not to have had their children? (Except Lyn, that is.) And who on earth would want to be more like Helga?

I do think Nancy got over that, as she got to know Helga better.

Now, however, LYMers, it's the elderly Boomers who represent the drag on the org, not the danger of offspring (although when the LYM starts to have kids, look for Lyn to flip whatever remains of his wig).

Because the Boomers are old, and getting older. They're sick, and getting sicker. They need decent food, they need decent sleep, they need cars and flu shots and medical care and clothing.

And they have therefore become uneconomical. And that, boys and girls, is why Lyn wants to be rid of them. They cost too much. They eat too much. They need too much medical care.

They complain too much. They're not all starry-eyed, as once they were.

But above all--like their babies who were feared, hated, and aborted a generation ago--they cost too much.

If every single one of them (a) dropped dead or (b) dropped out of the org tomorrow, Lyn would be perfectly jovial.

And that's the secret of old Uncle Lyn's deranged "polemics" against the Boomers, and the quixotic (ahem) move to Purcellville,[FN 2] and all the rest.

Today he tries to detach the youth from the Boomers, as once he tried to detach the Boomers from their families and from any thought of progeny.

The one invariant, the motivfuehrung, the leitmotif (this, being Wagnerian, will p**s Lyn off)--the one fixed point in a turning world--is Lyn Himself.

Lyn: "We don't owe these people a thing!"

Lyn's tactic of driving out expensive, annoying older members started in earnest in roughly 1996. That was the year that stipends basically stopped getting paid.

It was another "big" LaRouche election year--I'm sure we all remember the tremendous splash his campaign made that year.

Well, perhaps not, but money was flushed away in the millions to put him on TV and this and that.

But the longtime members, the "lifers"? They were told to kiss off.

I was in a meeting with Nancy Spannaus and Dennis Small and a longtime (23-year) member about stipends. The member was told that her problem was that she was a "credit card addict." Dennis "shared" some made-up bull about how he had had that problem too, and how he'd kicked it. The member--and I--pointed out that her credit card was at the limit because she and her whole family (yes, she had kids) were living off it.

But she was told to deal with her credit card addiction. She couldn't get a stipend, she couldn't get a payment, she could only get a crazed Stalinist lecture from a crazed Stalinist (that would be Dennis).[FN 3]

She quit the following year.

I was in another meeting with Nancy and Dennis in 1996, with another longtime member. That member was told that Nancy had seen her husband coming out of Photoworks, a Leesburg photo shop. Nancy railed at the person about how her husband should have taken their pictures to Giant to develop, or KMart, or some other cheaper outlet.

Can you imagine? They couldn't get a stipend, they were starving (they had kids too), but the problem, according to Nancy Spannaus, the Demon Social Worker of Sycolin Road,[FN 4] was that they spent too much money getting their photos developed.

They quit that year. They didn't even wait for the following year.

1996-1997 saw a lot of longtime members drop out--many of them (at first) anguished at the thought of having to get jobs and leave their avocation. However, before long, they had miraculously adjusted and left the org cheerfully.

Good thing, too, because 1996 was also the year, as Nancy told me, that Lyn declared at an NEC meeting that "we don't owe these people a thing."

Not quite true, actually. The old fool owed them his life, his livelihood, whatever political chops he had ever had, his ability to get on TV and cavort (making Jeremiah Wright look like Solon)--he owed them his lavish lifestyle, his ability to run around the world and play statesman.

He owed them everything.

But Lyn didn't quite see it that way then, and he doesn't quite see it that way now.

The only difference between today's LYM and yesterday's Boomers is that today's LYM will outlive Lyn by decades and outlive the org while young and strong.

So, LYMers, prepare for a future without Lyn and the org, and don't let him manipulate you into being vicious to your elders. Just because they were vicious to their unborn children, is no reason for you to be guilty of the contemptible practice of elder abuse.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes by Dennis King:

[1] Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lyndon's German wife, has a reputation in the organization for her haughty attitude and penchant for factional intrigue--and for her expensive shopping sprees paid for by the hard work of NCLC grunts working 50 to 60 hours a week for way below minimum wage (today, they reportedly get between $50 and $100 per week). A former member has written that "Helga is known to be hostile to children and adamantly opposed to any LCer ever having a kid, but her dogs are fed very well indeed and get the best of nurturing care."

[2] Purcellville is a town in northern Virginia near Round Hill, where LaRouche currently lives. He has moved the headquarters of the LaRouche Youth Movement to Purcellville to get the youngsters away from the supposedly corrupting influence of the burned-out "boomers" in and around the NCLC's national office in Leesburg, Va. It would appear that LaRouche is well on his way to creating two parallel organizations and that he regards the LYM as his best bet for ensuring that his ideological legacy survives his death.

[3] This is a reference to Dennis Small's background as a Red Diaper baby (his communist parents fled to Mexico to escape McCarthyism and he was raised there) and to his fanatical mind-set. The formal ideology that Small advocates in his writings is of course LaRouchism, not Stalinism (which shouldn't puzzle anyone--as my friend Kalev Pehme writes, there is a "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the soul of every extremist"). Indeed, Small, as one of LaRouche's chief Latin America experts, heartily supported fascist military regimes and death squads that were torturing and killing every communist (Stalinist or otherwise) they could lay their hands on in the 1980s--and he tried to persuade these rightists to continue their violence during the 1990s in spite of the end of the Cold War. Along with his wife, Gretchen, he edited, and wrote a large portion of, The Plot to Annihilate the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America (1994)--a veritable Mein Kampf for military fascists in the region. For the appalling political record of the Small couple, click here and here and here. For an overview of how the Smalls and their Molotov-Ribbentrop comrades have assisted human-rights-abusing regimes (both rightwing and leftwing) around the world, click here.

[4] When Nancy Spannaus joined LaRouche's nucleus circa 1967, she was a student at Columbia University's School of Social Work. Today she works as a top aide to LaRouche at his organization's national office, which is located on Sycolin Road in Leesburg, Va.