Open Letter #1 to LaRouche Youth Movement members:

Ah, the Youth--Lyn Finally Finds a Use for Them

"The positions then switched--the children whose birth was previously regarded as tantamount to treason against LaRouche were now the ones he wanted, and their formerly important parents, the original members, the Baby Boomers, had now become the 'useless eaters' and the saboteurs."

By "eaglebeak" (posted on Factnet, 04-27-2008, 12:38 PM)

Dear LYMers:

Do you realize that if your parents had been members of the Labor Committee, you probably wouldn't be here?

(Think about that the next time Lyn starts ranting about how Baby Boomer parents don't care about their offspring.)

Do you realize that when Lyn's first wife, Janice, had their son Danny, Lyn had a nervous breakdown and the marriage ended--because he couldn't take the presence of a child?

(Think about that during Lyn's rants, or perhaps while reading the startling self-revelatory "Beyond Psychoanalysis.")

Do you realize that virtually every woman in the Labor Committee from the early 1970s through the 1990s--every woman who was fertile, that is--had at least one abortion?

Do you know that it sometimes took repeated "interventions" by the National Executive Committee and other "leaders" to force pregnant members to get abortions?

Do you know that in the 1970s Lyn declared that women want to have children only when they are tired of their husbands (a little autobiographical hysteria there)?

However, did you know that by the 1990s, he had refined that to declaring that women want to have babies only when they want to act infantile themselves?

Have you ever considered that maybe Lyn doesn't know that having babies is the way our species is reproduced?

Did you know that, although women in the Labor Committee were having abortions routinely, in the mid-1980s Lyn came to the position of opposing all forms of birth control for what we might call the "broad masses" of people?

And that meanwhile, the Labor Committee regarded abortion for its members as a form of birth control?

So that what he called genocidal in public was precisely the policy of the organization in private?

Have you ever considered the profound irony that the offspring Lyn had no use for when they were infants and children--if they managed to squeak by and live to grow up--became prime targets for the LaRouche Youth Movement?

And that the positions then switched--the children whose birth was previously regarded as tantamount to treason against LaRouche were now the ones he wanted, and their formerly important parents, the original members, the Baby Boomers, had now become the "useless eaters" and the saboteurs?

Say, did you know that, with Lyn's blessings, Nancy Spannaus ran for office in Virginia on a pro-life platform?[FN 1] You might want to have a far-ranging discussion about that with her one of these days.

The word you're looking for is "expediency." That's the hallmark of Lyn's moral makeup, and that's what has enabled him to adopt truly Schachtian[FN 2] policies against the useless old in his own org.

(Reference: The Schacht Campaigner.[FN 3] Borrow a copy from the Archives. Its analysis of the Nazis is grotesquely mechanistic, arguably anti-Semitic, and factually wrong, but it will be an eye-opener all the same.)

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Footnotes by Dennis King

[1] Ex-LCers say that Nancy Bradeen Spannaus was the leading figure in enforcing the quasi-mandatory abortion policy for LaRouchian women--first, in New York City (where the NCLC national office was located in the 1970s and early 1980s), and later in Leesburg, Va. (to which the headquarters staff and many other cadre were moved in stages during the early and middle 1980s). Ms. Spannaus's informal group of anti-childbirth women--who would exert the heavy psychological pressure on those who became pregnant, march them to the abortion clinic and stay to make sure the job was done--became known as the "coat-hanger brigade." It is estimated by ex-members that Ms. Spannaus and other enforcers were responsible for hundreds of abortions by NCLC women nationwide. Curiously, Ms. Spannaus and her husband Ed (see FN 3) had two sons of their own, born in 1970 and 1971 before LaRouche had developed the total control within the NCLC that would make possible the enforcing of such intimate control over the bodies of female cadre. Although Ms. Spannaus thereafter worked ruthlessly to prevent other women in the organization from having children, these same women were expected to make great displays of sympathy for her when her older son was killed in a car crash while home from college on vacation in 1990.

[2] Reference is to Dr. Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970), who was Nazi Germany's economics minister and president of the Reichsbank during the 1930s. He helped finance Hitler's rise to power and was the key figure in financing the regime's arms buildup in preparation for World War Two. Apparently never a Nazi party member, he participated in various murky intrigues against the regime, including a planned coup in 1938. He was removed from office in 1939, continued to plot against the regime and ended up in a concentration camp. After the war he was tried at Nuremberg where he was found not guilty (by a close vote) of perpetrating war crimes. He was then arrested by Germans who found him guilty in a denazification court and sentenced him to serve eight years (he was released after two). In the LaRouche lexicon of villains, Schacht looms larger than any other Third Reich leader, including Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. One has to ask why over the past 33 years LaRouche has been so obsessed with Schacht--arguably the least guilty (although certainly guilty) of the big names in Nazi Germany--and has tried to paint him as being by far the worst monster of this genocidal crew. I suspect that the anti-Schacht stance proved useful in the 1980s, when LaRouche was aggressively cultivating alliances with "ex" Nazi scientists and "ex" Nazi military officers (including a former top aide to Admiral Donitz, the hardcore Nazi fanatic whom Hitler named as his successor in 1945). Such secretly unrepentent characters were probably pleased by LaRouche's attacks on the late Schacht, who was regarded by some as a traitor to the Third Reich. Certainly the LaRouche organization's excessive focus on Schacht's villainy became (after the decisive turn to anti-Semitism and fascism in 1977-78) nothing more than a sly adjunct to LaRouche's Holocaust denial (roughly comparable to his well-publicized assertion that Hitler was a British/Jewish agent who had sabotaged the struggle of the "heroic Wehrmacht" against the alleged "alien species" headquartered in London).

[3] Reference is to the March 1975 issue of The Campaigner, a now-defunct theoretical journal of LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees. It is known as the "Schacht issue" because of two lengthy articles therein: "Final Solution: The Schachtian Economy of the Third Reich," by Costas Axios (Kostas Kalimtgis) and "Beyond Schacht: The Destruction of the Cognitive Powers of Labor," by Ed Spannaus (husband of Nancy; see FN 1). Although the historical analysis in these articles is extremely dubious, the authors were probably sincere in their dislike of Nazism since the NCLC had not yet made its decisive lunge to the far right.