April 1: Major publicity for the Justice for Jeremiah campaign! This is no April Fool's joke, folks. LaRouche's attempt to intimidate the British media by repeating like a mantra the German legal system's "suicide" line and then relying on the media's fear of libel suits, has fallen flat. Here is a terrific article ("Did shadowy cult murder my boy?") from The Sun, a major U.K. daily.
The article, by David Lowe, also publicizes the documentary Lost Abroad, which will be shown on Britain's Channel Four tonight and provides an in-depth look at the fight of Jeremiah Duggan's mother to find out what happened to her son.
March 31: German authorities gave copies of Erica Duggan's confidential files to the LaRouche org and didn't even ask her permission.
Writes one ex-LaRouche follower: "In the USA, this [would be] like the local sheriff handing over the complaints and detective work to the KKK and telling the family of the lynched that there is nothing else to say or do." And another former member writes, regarding the 2003 police determination that Jeremiah Duggan had killed himself: "The suicide ruling is not the result of investigation or police work or anything of the sort. It's the result of what the Labor Committee members in Wiesbaden told the police."
Wiesbaden prosecutor Hartmut Ferse.
March 30: Why won't the ex-leaders of the German LaRouche organization help the Duggan family? A former member from the United States writes: "[T]hey won't say what really happened because something bad DID happen, and whatever that bad thing was, it was sufficiently bad to terrify them into silence." Lyndon LaRouche Watch adds further comments.
Ortrun Cramer, former manageress of LaRouche's Schiller Institute in Wiesbaden. She knows exactly what happened but her lips are sealed.
March 30: "Parents hope son's death documentary will bring justice." From the Harrow Observer (London):
"Police claimed [Jeremiah Duggan's death] was suicide but his family have been pressing for a full investigation after collating evidence that they say shows the young Jew was beaten to death by members of [an] alleged antiSemitic cult...
"Saturday marked the seventh anniversary of his death and speaking to the Observer this week Mrs Duggan said: 'This time of year is obviously horrible for the whole family and I wouldn't have even been able to speak on Saturday.
"'We hope the documentary will highlight how painstaking our attempts to seek answers have been and if it can help in our pursuit for justice then it will be well worthwhile.'"
March 30: "Mystery of Dead Briton and the Rightwing Cult." This article by Jerome Taylor from The Independent (Feb.27, 2010) gives the clearest summary I've seen yet of the forensic evidence contradicting the German authorities' determination that Jeremiah Duggan committed suicide.
"Paul Canning, a former Scotland Yard forensic officer, has studied the 79 photographs taken by German investigators of the crash site and Jerry's body. German police said he was hit by the Peugeot, then run over by the Volkswagen. But Mr Canning could not find evidence of tyre marks on the body. Nor was there any blood, flesh or hair on either car.
"Mr Canning, who has investigated hundreds of road fatalities, believes this is 'inconceivable', reporting that he had never come across a high-speed collision of a car and pedestrian where no traces of blood are found. 'I do not believe the images depict how Jerry came to meet his premature death,' he added. 'It is possible that Jerry lost his life elsewhere, prior to being placed at the scene.'
"Terence Merston, another former Met Police investigator who has studied the photographs, backs Mr Canning. 'Based on my years of experience in attending thousands of crime scenes as a forensic scene examiner, it is my opinion that the evidence at the scene points towards Jeremiah's death being extremely suspicious and not a road traffic accident,' he said. 'It is also my view that the damage to the Peugeot car has been deliberately caused.'
"But how did Jerry sustain the head injuries that killed him? A post-mortem by a British pathologist, Dr David Shove, discovered defence wounds on Jerry's arms as well as blood in his lungs and stomach. At the speed that witnesses say he was struck, he would have been killed instantly, but the blood in his lungs and stomach (caused by breathing in and swallowing after a major haemorrhage) suggest he was alive for some time, after intense trauma."
Feb. 15: "Kronberg as Judas in the mind of Lyndon LaRouche." A no-holds-barred critique of LaRouche's reality-inversion mind control tactics and how he uses them to act out his Hitler fantasies in a "safe" way. And how he always manages to blame the victim: "After driving Ken Kronberg (among the most loyal of his followers) to suicide--that is, after betraying Kronberg in the most profound way possible--LaRouche concocted a self-serving narrative in which it was Kronberg who betrayed...LaRouche!"
Feb. 15: LaRouche ruminates over the alleged treachery of Ken Kronberg. This press release--which talks about those "who chose a Judas-like apostasy, and who may have also chosen to hang themselves in one fashion or another" (i.e., Kronberg)--is comparable to the actions of an enraged bigot who continues to kick his victim's body when the victim is already dead. It shows that LaRouche's hounding of Kronberg, which resulted in the Virginia businessman and longtime LaRouche follower committing suicide, was not just a case of ordinary cult-leader bullying but was motivated by LaRouche's hatred of Kronberg as a Jew.
Feb. 2: Brother of a top European LaRouche aide says his sibling knows what happened to Jeremiah Duggan and should step forward and tell the world. This statement, posted on
Factnet, says that those who want to crack this case should put pressure on Jonathan Tennenbaum, a LaRouche follower for over 30 years, who was assigned to meet with Jeremiah's parents shortly after their son's death with the aim of learning their intentions and trying to allay their suspicions. Jonathan's brother, Peter, who knows the cult well although never a member, doesn't think Jonathan was directly involved in Jeremiah's death, but that Jonathan's high position in the org and his assignment to a key damage-control task make it almost certain that he is privy to what happened.
Jonathan Tennenbaum.
"Jonathan can either step up and be a man for the first time in his life," the brother writes, "or he can continue to protect Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr." Peter uses far harsher language about his brother elsewhere in the posting, and some readers may be shocked. But let me say that I've heard very similar language over the years from relatives of cult members (and relatives of drug addicts) when the problem individual was making life hell for his or her parents and siblings. Family members can't be expected to act like saints forever, although I'm sure that cult leaders such as LaRouche would like them to do so.
Feb. 1: "Shameful, shameful..."
Factnet's "eaglebeak" skewers LaRouche's Jan. 28 statement on the Duggan case. "In this brief release, LaRouche manages to hurl more vitriol at Jeremiah Duggan and his mother than normal people could credit....LaRouche is terrified that Erica Duggan's recent success in court in Britain will reopen the case of Jeremiah's death--something which could have vast consequences for LaRouche and his organization."
Feb. 1: Jeremiah Duggan's mother blasts LaRouche for his latest defiling of her son's memory. The people who run Google News (which has been giving LaRouche's propaganda outlets top billing on the Duggan inquest story) should read this statement. Maybe then they'll begin to comprehend the sleaziness and unreliability of Executive Intelligence Review and other LaRouche publications and websites, which Google News has treated--for too long--as legitimate news outlets.
Feb. 1: Ex-follower explains LaRouche's Jan. 28 lies and slurs about Jeremiah Duggan within the context of the cult's long history of abuse and hate. "What happened as the years went by was something which stabbed me in the heart over and over. I found that whatever the LC was doing beyond raising money was creating a very hard-core cultism of cold-blooded hatred of what was not us....You did not [simply] disagree with the names [vilified] in our publications, you had to hate them for their role in killing humanity."
A copy of this powerful statement by Factnet's "xlcr4life" should be placed in the hands of every young person who shows signs of coming under the influence of the LaRouche Youth Movement.
Jan. 29: A LaRouche press release now ranks on Google News as the number one news source re the U.K. Attorney General's Duggan inquest decision. The AG's "fiat" for a new inquest is an important news story being covered by numerous newspapers and other media outlets in Britain. Responsible newspapers with substantial circulations. But what comes first on Google News as of 10:30 PM, Jan. 28--if you type in "Jeremiah Duggan"--is a scurrilous rant signed by LaRouche.
In his usual elliptical fashion, Der Abscheulicher says that the "British circles" urging an investigation of the "alleged non-suicide of Jeremiah Duggan...have failed to disclose crucially relevant facts respecting the subject's...relevant mental health history since childhood until his suicide in the vicinity of Wiesbaden, Germany."
LaRouche says that these "British circles" (meaning the politicians and financiers who supposedly are using the Duggan family as their pawns) have "curiously failed to take into account statements reportedly made by Jeremiah himself shortly before his suicide, to the effect that he was having difficulty in securing some medication essential to his mental stability." LaRouche asks for a probe of "such relevant facts as [Jeremiah's] reported statements regarding past emotional disturbances dating from his childhood, and indicating a role of the London Tavistock Clinic at some point in this case."
Now the Tavistock Clinic theory is part of the cover story that Helga LaRouche and other leaders of the German LaRouche movement concocted at their headquarters in Wiesbaden within hours of Jeremiah's death (that he was a British/Tavistock agent). And the allegation that he was on drugs comes from cult members who were part of the coverup (note how LaRouche refers to their "reported statements" as "relevant facts").
In the seven years since then, the LaRouche org, which runs a private political intelligence operation worldwide on a multimillion dollar budget, has been unable to come up with any real evidence that Jeremiah was suffering from mental illness or was on drugs or had any ongoing relationship to the Tavistock clinic (he did go there with his parents for family counseling when he was a young child).
Ever since the middle 1970s, followers of LaRouche have maintained that Tavistock, a respected research and mental health facility in London, is an evil British intelligence brainwashing center that incessantly plots against their leader. When Jeremiah revealed to his LaRouchian "recruiters"--during a discussion in which their views on Tavistock came up--that he had once gone there and that it was not the sinister place they fancied it to be, he may have triggered their paranoia and sealed his own fate.
When I read LaRouche's cynical statements demeaning the memory of Jeremiah Duggan (in order to evade responsibility for the 22-year-old Jewish university student's death), I wonder: Does LaRouche have any sense of shame? And I also wonder whether the people who run Google News are capable of feeling any shame over how--for years--they've treated LaRouche as a legitimate journalist and publisher, thus collaborating, in effect, in the lies and bigotry of this small-time Hitler, and facilitating his ability to recruit naive young people.
Statue of Freud at the Tavistock Clinic. LaRouche appears to hate (and fear, really fear) "Jewish" psychiatry.
Jan. 28: "Leigh Day wins AG's backing for new inquest into Jeremiah Duggan's suspicious death." This press release from Jeremiah's mother's solicitors (dated Jan. 21) hails Baroness Scotland's support for a new inquest as a "groundbreaking development" that allows Erica Duggan to "make an application to the High Court for a fresh inquest and move one step closer toward obtaining a just and proper public investigation...."
Jan. 28: The U.K. Attorney General's letter of apology to Mrs. Duggan. Here it is, addressed to Erica at the office of her solicitors, Leigh Day & Co., and received by them on Jan. 20. It is signed personally by the AG, and clearly states that she believes there is an "unanswered question" regarding how Jeremiah died.
And the news keeps spreading...
Jan. 28: LaRouche will gnash his teeth over Molly Kronberg's latest filing (if he has the attention span to read it). Here's what I regard as the key passage of the Kronberg legal team's Jan. 13 response to defendants' supplemental brief:
"The applicable wording under Rule 1.11(c) disqualifies a lawyer 'having confidential information that the lawyer knows is confidential government information about a person...in a matter in which the information could be used to the material disadvantage of that person'...Try as they might, defendants, with their extensive knowlege of the 1988 [LaRouche prosecution]--even down to having retained in the present case the lead defense counsel from that 1988 case--cannot come up with any specific matter or information, which, 21 years later, is still both confidential and known to Markham and which they can credibly argue Markham could use to their material disadvantage."
Maybe your problem, Mr. Convicted Felon LaRouche, is that in the present case John Markham is not prosecuting (or defending) you or your associates for scamming old ladies; he's representing a private client who is suing you in the civil division of federal court for libelling and harassing her. What you did as a scam artist in the 1980s--and whether the CIA "hung you out to dry" in your 1988 trial (your fantasy, not mine)--is not at issue in this entirely separate case filed 21 years later.
Jan. 28: LaRouche and his minions are desperate to get Markham off the case. Here's Defendants' Supplemental Brief in Support of Their Joint Motion to Disqualify Former AUSA Markham (filed Jan. 11, 2010). It focuses on trying to prove that Markham is in violation of Virginia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.11(c). Apparently this is a last-minute response to Markham's success in obtaining on Jan. 7 a determination from the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia that his representation of Molly Kronberg is not prohibited pursuant to federal statute or regulation.
This latest filing by the LaRouche camp is basically a data dump from Lexis describing cases that are only marginally, if at all, related to the case at issue. If I were the judge's law clerk, I'd be real annoyed (at LaRouche, not at my boss) for having to plough through it all.
Jan. 28: "A huge first step" says London's Ham & High News. "Last Thursday, Ms. Duggan found that people were finally starting to listen. After a long legal battle, the Attorney General Baroness Scotland admitted her department was wrong in denying Ms. Duggan permission to make a court bid for a new inquest. It is a huge first step for the reinvestigation of Jeremiah's death and his mother's campaign, run from a paper-stacked attic in his old home in Golders Green."
Jan. 28: U.K. Attorney General apologizes to Mrs. Duggan. As quoted in this Times Series (London suburban news chain) article, Baroness Scotland sent a letter to Jeremiah Duggan's mother, stating:
"I regret your application was not properly dealt with when it was first submitted and the delays and angst the process to remedy those failings has caused you and your family.
"I have granted my fiat because I am of the view on reconsidering your application that there is an unanswered question from the inquest into Jeremiah's death as to whether the fatal injuries he suffered are in fact attributable to a car accident."
Jan. 25: The BBC on the Jeremiah Duggan case. Report quotes the U.K. Attorney General on the "unanswered question" that warrants a new inquest, and summarizes the history of the case, including the 2003 coroner's verdict--that Jeremiah was in "a state of terror" when he died and that a finding of suicide was "impossible." Also notes the findings of the coroner's pathologist that Jeremiah's injuries were consistent with being beaten around the head.
And here's the UKPA (United Kingdom Press Association) article as well as the coverage by ITV's London Regional News (video only viewable within the UK).
Erica Duggan, Jeremiah's mother, wrote the following to LaRouche Watch: "The local newspapers ALL OVER the country are featuring the account of the fate of Jeremiah and the Attorney General's decision. Also the Jewish newspapers next week."
Peter Tennenbaum, the brother of a longtime LaRouche devotee, wrote on the Factnet anti-LaRouche message board: "Praise The Lord (and the work of all good people) for this tremendous news. May The Light finally shine."
And former LaRouche follower "xlcr4life" also wrote on Factnet: "The cult will cut the living standards of members even further as they pump money into lawyers for the Molly Kronberg case and the Duggan inquiry. Lyn should be due for another eruption of bile and lunacy, so keep that LPAC URL handy for the fun next week."
Jan. 25: Why does Google News treat LaRouche's Jew-hating propaganda rag as a legitimate news outlet? When I decided to check yesterday on how the media was covering the British Attorney General's decision in favor of a new inquest into Jeremiah Duggan's death, the second item that popped up on Google News was an article from Executive Intelligence Review. So, hate rags are now news organizations? Read what my blog says about this...
Jan. 21: "New Inquest for Duggan death." This article from today's Jewish Chronicle (a U.K. paper) quotes the British Attorney General, Baroness Scotland: "I am of the view...that there is an unanswered question from the [2003] inquest into Jeremiah's death as to whether the fatal injuries he suffered are in fact attributable to a car accident."
Baroness Scotland.
Jan. 21: Why are the German authorities blocking any investigation of Jeremiah Duggan's death? And what do certain ex-LaRouchians know? Various pieces of evidence suggest that the LaRouche org was for years an asset (albeit not an easily controllable one) of German security and police agencies. High-level ex-LaRouchians have all manifested a mysterious loss of memory on this topic, but we include here some pictures and comments to jog their memories.
Jan. 21: Major breakthrough for the Justice for Jeremiah campaign! The Duggan family attorneys received a letter yesterday from the U.K. Attorney General's Office saying that Baroness Scotland, the Laborite AG, "has reconsidered the application made by you on behalf of the deceased's mother, Mrs. Erica Duggan, and has agreed to grant her fiat to proceedings being commenced...The Attorney General has also written personally to Mrs. Duggan."
And the fiat, signed by the AG, states: "I hereby authorise ERICA DUGGAN to make an application to the High Court of Justice...quashing the inquisition in respect of JEREMIAH JOSEPH DUGGAN take before DR. W.F.G. DOLMAN, one of Her Majesty's Coroners...on 8 NOVEMBER 2003 and directing another inquest to be held touching the death of the said JEREMIAH JOSEPH DUGGAN.
Mrs. Duggan sent LaRouche Watch the two documents along with the following statement:
"We submitted our compelling evidence and now at long last it will be clear to the German authorities that the British authorities want a full investigation of the circumstances of the death of Jeremiah...We now have the right to go to the High Court and apply for a fresh inquest and hope that depending on our appeal being successful we will at long last have the assistance of our own British police in getting answers to the many unanswered questions."
Mrs. Duggan has fought long and hard for this victory--with zero help from the high-level former LaRouchians in Germany and the United States who could have offered vital information, but didn't. It's time for Uwe Friesecke, Anno Hellenbroich, Ortrun Cramer and others who know all about the provenance of the defensive wounds on Jeremiah's body and how he really died, to come forward and reveal these facts. It's also time for these former German LaRouche aides--and certain American ex-leaders of the movement who spent lengthy periods in Germany--to reveal the truth about the LaRouche org's long history as a fascist auxiliary for German and other NATO security services (the probable reason that the Wiesbaden police, the prosecutors in the state of Hesse, and the German federal police have been so adamant about not investigating the LaRouche org's role in Jeremiah's death).
Finally, it's time that the low-level former LaRouche followers who profess sympathy for Mrs. Duggan's plight, but most of whom have done nothing substantial to help her, start putting pressure on the former high level members and security staffers, instead of continuing to be in awe of them and behaving as their emotional peons (or, re the former security staffers, continuing to be in fear of their small-time Tony Soprano act). If the defectors from LaRouche's European and American inner ring continue to refuse to tell what they know--all of what they know--then their own personal crimes, immoral acts and tyrannical treatment of underlings when they were in the LaRouche movement should be exposed to the world by those who were there, saw it and suffered from it.
Why should the Duggan family have to endure years more of justice delayed when the members of the ex-LaRouchian community have it within their power--the power of their guilty knowledge--to bring the case to a speedy and successful conclusion?
Jan. 10: Justice Department determines that Markham's representation of Molly Kronberg does not violate federal law or regulations. Last fall, attorney John Markham--currently the target of a disqualification motion filed by the defendants in Kronberg v. LaRouche et al.--contacted the U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia for its opinion of the propriety of his serving as Mrs. Kronberg's lawyer in light of his role--as a former assistant U.S. attorney--in the 1988 criminal prosecutions of LaRouche and several of LaRouche's associates.
Markham received a reply from U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride (E.D. Va.) signed by AUSA Robert K. Coulter on Jan. 7--just in time for the court hearing the next day on LaRouche's motions to disqualify Markham and dismiss the case. Here's the key passage:
"Based on the facts as presented and the applicable law, the Executive Office of U.S. Attorney's General Counsel's Office has determined that your representation of Ms. Kronberg is not prohibited pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 207 and 5 C.F.R. § 2637.201."
The letter did not offer an opinion on whether Markham's representation of Mrs. Kronberg conflicts with Virginia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.11, stating merely that this "constitutes an issue properly to be considered by the Virginia State Bar Association."
The judge could still rule in favor of the defendants, and even if he doesn't they could appeal the decision. But somehow I don't think that Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. aka Der Abscheulicher is in a very good mood this weekend (but when is he ever in a good mood nowadays?).
Jan. 7: LaRouche and his co-defendants still trying to deny Molly Kronberg the counsel of her choice. Here's the "Defendants' Reply in Support of Their Joint Motion to Disqualify Former AUSA Markham," filed in federal court (Alexandria, Va.) on Dec. 31. The heart of this smoke and mirrors argument is as follows:
"Markham's
representation of Kronberg in this case violates Rule 1.11(b) because Kronberg's present federal
claim for witness retaliation under 42 U.S.C. §1985(2) is predicated upon, and involves similar
facts and parties, as the Alexandria and Boston Prosecutions in which Markham participated
'personally and substantively' as an AUSA. Kronberg's testimony as a witness in the
Alexandria Prosecution is the linchpin of her federal claim that Defendants' defamed her in
retaliation for that testimony. Indeed, in opposing Defendants' Motion to Dismiss her section
1985(2) claim as being insufficiently plausible under Iqbal, Kronberg has argued that there is a
clear connection between her testimony as a witness in the Alexandria Prosecution and the
Defendants' alleged defamatory statements. Hence, it is Kronberg, herself, who has forged the
connecting link between the two cases: her present federal court action and the prior federal court proceedings in which she testified."
Huh? Mrs. Kronberg's case is not "predicated upon" the 1988 criminal prosecutions of LaRouche for mail and credit card fraud. Mrs. Kronberg's civil suit is concerned with an entirely different matter--cruel acts of libel and personal harassment beginning two decades later in 2008. The only "connecting link" is a circumstantial one forged by LaRouche himself when he recklessly alleged (among other things) that Mrs. Kronberg had committed perjury (an act that carries felony penalties) as a witness at the second of his 1988 trials, thus supposedly becoming the primary cause of his (and six of his followers') conviction and incarceration. LaRouche made this allegation only after Mrs. Kronberg publicly denounced him in 2007 and blamed him for driving her husband to suicide. Before that date, she was never the target of perjury allegations from LaRouche, any of LaRouche's 1988 co-defendants, or anyone else in the LaRouche organization. (What LaRouche apparently has done in his typical politically paranoid fashion is to decide that Mrs. Kronberg is now an enemy "agent" and thus she must always have been an enemy agent and therefore she must have perjured herself in his 1988 trial--and should be punished for it.)
Defendants would like the judge to believe that Mrs. Kronberg's suit and the federal government's 1988 case against LaRouche involve "similar facts" to a significant degree and that Mrs. Kronberg's case will somehow turn into a retrial of the issues for which LaRouche was sent to prison. But why should those issues even arise? The trial record shows that Mrs. Kronberg's testimony was of a noncontroversial nature and had little if anything to do with LaRouche's conviction. The real issue is whether or not LaRouche has any evidence to back up his allegation that Mrs. Kronberg lied on the witness stand. He has presented no such evidence (unless one takes seriously his mystical "hypothesis of the higher hypothesis" deductions based on his demented conspiracy theories), and indeed no such evidence exists.
If this case goes to trial, it will be determined not by delving into the financial crimes for which LaRouche was convicted in 1988, but simply by requiring LaRouche to present the slightest shred of evidence that Mrs. Kronberg perjured herself at his trial.
And then there's the harassment issue--LaRouche causing his followers to circulate literature around the town of Leesburg, Virginia, where Mrs. Kronberg lives, alleging that she drove her husband to suicide in 2007 and that she's a "witch" and a "bitch." I defy LaRouche to show how Mrs. Kronberg's complaint re this recent reprehensible behavior (which his attorneys sneeringly dismiss as a "garden variety" defamation claim) is predicated at all upon the issues at trial in 1988.
Leesburg, Va. If you were a grieving widow in this town--where everyone knows everyone else--how would you like to have a malicious clique going around telling your neighbors that you drove your husband to suicide?
Given the bind that LaRouche has placed himself in by failing to curb his tongue and repress his violent emotions, it is no wonder that he and his co-defendants are grasping at straws--by attempting to make Mrs. Kronberg's attorney the issue and get him removed from the case at all costs.
Earlier filings re the motion to disqualify John Markham can be read here.
Jan. 6: Facing the truth about one's years in the LaRouche cult. Factnet posting by "xlcr4life" explaining how hard it is to admit "that you spent good years in pure hate of people all the time, while exploiting other members based on getting in good with Lyn or someone above you."
Dec. 29: The warm fuzzy Christmas spirit of Lyndon LaRouche. A former LaRouche follower muses during the Holiday Season over the LaRouche cult's history of anti-Semitism and the "cheap parlor tricks" by which Der Abscheulicher controls his followers.
Dec. 26: Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest lawyer? Lyndon LaRouche's latest tactic in Kronberg v. LaRouche et al. is to attempt to disqualify Molly Kronberg's attorney, former federal prosecutor John Markham. The link here takes you to (a) LaRouche and his co-defendants' memorandum in support of the motion to disqualify, along with a wacko declaration by co-defendant Barbara Boyd; (b) the reply by Mrs. Kronberg's legal team, supported by the declarations of Markham, Mrs. Kronberg, Criton Zoakos and Mike Minnicino; (c) the transcript of Mrs. Kronberg's testimony in LaRouche's 1988 trial for loan fraud; and (d) commentary by the Usual Suspect at Lyndon LaRouche Watch.
Dec. 22: Merry Christmas from Lyndon LaRouche Watch. "T'was the night before Christmas and all through Lyn's house, not a creature was stirring..." However, that only applied to creatures inside the house...
Dec. 10: Press release on forensic evidence re Jeremiah Duggan's death. I sent a version of this Dec. 9 release to my personal email list. One of the people on my list kindly posted it on Factnet but expressed skepticism about the contents. The redoubtable "xlcr4life," a Factnet regular, replied to the skeptic as follows:
"I read the earlier posted report from the autopsy of Jeremiah. There's at least three issues which I find disturbing.
"First, how blood got on Jeremiah's passport. There may be an explanation as to how the LC [LaRouche's Labor Committee] had his passport; however, Jeremiah's blood on the document is a big problem. I cannot see how I would get blood on my passport or give it up to anyone as directed by the issuing agency.
"Second, the defensive wounds on the forearms was not known by me in the early years of this case. Having worked in a trauma ER, I am familiar with people being admitted with blunt force trauma on their radius/ulna in protecting themselves from baseball bat attacks, hatchets, chairs and other objects. Strong kicks from someone trained to do so can also do the same damage.
"Third, blood in the stomach after swallowing is also something new which was not known to me back then as well.
"I can see plenty of different events taking place which can include or exclude the LC on a limited, but not complete, basis. Where I live I have read in the press about auto accidents where the driver of a crashed car is later found to be shot. The victim of a hit and run was beaten elsewhere, left on a road where an unsuspecting driver(s) ran over the body a few times. Crime victims who were pushed in front of moving vehicles in the course of robbery. People who were in mental or physical shock who ran into traffic. The point is that the family is not going to accept the German version and there are plenty of examples of where initial police reports which were done at the time later had far more evidence uncovered. It was not a conspiracy by the initial officers, but a condensed report which left too many questions unanswered. I cannot be sure here of what took place that night.
"The case I am very familiar with is from Howard Beach, NY in the 1980s where several whites began fighting with three blacks who were in their neighborhood and chased one of them to his death on the Expressway [where] he was run over. The defense was that since they did not hit the victim, they are not guilty. The courts found that since the reason the victim was on the highway in the late night was to run for his life away from the pursuing mob, then they are to blame.
"There are far too many questions and very few answers with the LC being in the middle."
Dec. 9: The human toll of Newman and Fulani's cult. Here's an April 12, 2009 posting at The Cahokian recalling the late gay activist Steve Rose, who became HIV positive in the 1980s and ended up in Newman and Fulani's New Alliance Party before dying of AIDS in the early 1990s.
"The last time I saw Steve was on a street corner. Although a few years before he made numerous sharp and stingingly incisive polemical attacks against the New Alliance Party and their ilk, by then he was defeated. Facing personal demoralization along with the challenges of fighting HIV Steve joined the NAP. When I saw him on that corner telling me of his new allegiance to NAP I saw such despair behind his eyes belying the wooden and rote recitation of how NAP had helped him to see that his problems were not his own, rather the burden of oppression and capitalism. It was heartbreaking to see him so broken, so surrendered to the easy answers of a cult that could do his thinking for him. I grieve that he spent his last years in such company. While brash and not always sympathetic, Steve was a fighter and a real hero of gay liberation. The cult that parasitically attached itself to him, joining the HIV in sucking out his life force, cannot now go unopposed."
Steve Rose (holding sign) shortly after he joined the NAP.
The Cahokian's account rings true. Several former members of the NAP (and of the underground "International Workers Party"--the cadre org that controlled the NAP and today controls the Bloomberg-financed New York City Independence Party) have described to me in interviews how Newman & Co. often ruthlessly exploited people with serious illnesses, by getting them into social therapy sessions and persuading them that Revolutionary Struggle was the answer to their trauma and despair. The first experiments were with people suffering from cancer back in the 1970s. Next came AIDS patients, and gays haunted by the fear of AIDS or the death of close friends.
The late activist Robert Cohen, after breaking with the Newmanites, wrote a long letter to the New York Amsterdam News (1993) about the cult's attempts to parasite off the gay and lesbian community and how AIDS had become just another fundraising gimmick for Fred Newman.
"When Newman, a self-described 'benevolent despot,' sent his followers (myself included) out to the streets of Greenwich Village to raise money in support of the AIDS Bill of Rights (ABOR), it soon became apparent that the measure was a sham.
"There was never any serious attempt on the part of the NAP (IWP, etc.) to gather enough legislative support with which to pass the bill (just ask any of the representatives on Capitol Hill about the ABOR). In fact, the proposal (actually a rough draft which was never assigned a bill number), was simply a tactic designed to elicit an emphatic response so as to solicit money from a desperate community which was, and remains, under siege from AIDS.
"I will never forget the despair of the gay community, and the initial hope and faith that they had in us when we first began to raise money through the ABOR scam.
"It was not uncommon those days to work an 8-hour fundraising shift on Bleeker Street or Sheridan Square and then walk away with one or two thousand dollars donated by people affected by, concerned about, or who had AIDS.
"I remember going to the home of Noel Levert (a brethren NAPer who has since died of AIDS), to count the money, and how proud we were to finally have found a way to gather support (i.e., big bucks) from our community.
The late Noel Levert, also duped and exploited by the Newmanites.
"After counting the money, we would promptly hand it over to Jim Mangia (Newman's most useful and skilled operative in the gay community). But, the money was ultimately used to pay for anything that Newman ordained (i.e., rent for NAP/IWP offices, salaries, and/or used in ways that only Newman will know), and definitely not for the ABOR as we were led to believe."
And back to Steve Rose: IWP/NAP defector Marina J. Ortiz described in a 1993 New York Planet series on the cult's inner workings how it managed to make use of Rose even while he was dying. The cult had concocted a scheme to report inflated expenditures on Fulani's 1992 Presidential campaign to the Federal Election Commission, thus enabling the Fulani campaign committee to obtain matching funds to which it was not really entitled.
"Fred Newman Productions, Inc., New Alliance Productions, Inc., Ilene Advertising, Castillo Communications, and other NAP subsidiaries, for example, billed the campaign almost one million dollars for advertising, public relations and consultation services. However, aside from, perhaps, one or two salaried employees (who averaged $300 a week), much of the actual labor provided by these businesses was borne by unpaid 'volunteers.'
"Descriptions of services rendered are equally dubious. Automated Business Services, for example, was paid thousands of dollars for 'payroll and accounting services,' while the owner himself was then listed under a 'clerical services' heading, as were dozens of other supporters--including the late Steve Rose (by then an AIDS-stricken invalid). Quite a few, however...maintain that they never received any money from the campaign."
In other words, once Rose was too sick to work for the cult on the streets or in an office, Newman and Fulani found a way to squeeze a last dribble of profit out of him--as a name on a phantom payroll.
You can read Cohen's full letter here and the full Ortiz series here. The Cahokian posted a second piece (Nov. 26, 2009) on Steve Rose here which is mostly personal reminiscence but also includes comments on "social therapy." The photos of Rose and Levert above come from ex-iwp.org's "In Memory of People Exploited by the IWP" collection.
Dec. 4: The empire strikes back (feebly). Here is the reply by LaRouche and his co-defendants (filed with the court on Nov. 17) to Molly Kronberg's memorandum opposing their motion to dismiss. If portions of LaRouche's initial Oct. 26 pleading in this case were rather odd, these follow-up arguments are downright ludicrous. For instance:
Plaintiff's Complaint is utterly devoid of specific factual allegations as to the time, place, and manner of any purported concerted activity of the Defendants in conspiring to injure her. To the extent that any of the writings described by Plaintiff in her Complaint may be defamatory, Plaintiff may have a common-law claim for defamation. Nonetheless, she should not be allowed to transform a state law defamation claim into a multi-defendant, wide ranging civil rights conspiracy under Section 1985(2). Because Plaintiff's Complaint fails to set forth the factual requisites of a Section 1985 conspiracy claim, but merely has strung together a series of bare, conclusory allegations, Plaintiff's Section 1985(2) conspiracy claim is fatally flawed....
Well now, what about those pesky "specific factual allegations" regarding published statements by LaRouche that Molly Kronberg is a "witch" and a "bitch," that she committed the felony crime of perjury, and that she drove her husband to suicide? Who uttered or wrote those statements? Wasn't it Defendant Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.? And who published one or more of the statements--wasn't it defendant LaRouche's Morning Briefing newsletter on April 26, 2009? Wasn't it defendant LaRouchePAC's website on February 26, 2009 and March 25, 2009? Wasn't it Defendant EIR News Service's website on March 6, 2009 and April 10, 2009? Are we to believe that these specific instances of defamation and harassment occurred spontaneously, by osmosis, without LaRouche transmitting the statements in some fashion to his "philosophical co-thinkers" at the Morning Briefings newsletter staff and at LaRouchePAC and EIR?
And note defendants' admission that some of the statements described by Plaintiff "may be defamatory" and that "Plaintiff may have a common-law claim for defamation." This is just legal tactics, and a normal client would recognize it as such. Yet LaRouche is not a normal client--he's a malignant narcissist/egomaniac who cannot tolerate even the barest suggestion that he has ever, ever made a mistake. I suspect that he went berserk over this conciliatory remark and took out his rage on his organization's in-house paralegals, threatening to send them back to the telephone fundraising boiler room (the LaRouchian version of Hell).
Defendants' reply also takes a new stab at evoking the intracorporate conspiracy immunity doctrine (wholly intracorporate conduct does not provide an actionable conspiracy claim since the officers, employees, etc. of the corporation are acting merely as its agents). Plaintiff's attorneys, in their Nov. 9 memorandum in opposition to the motion to dismiss, pretty thoroughly demolished the idea that this doctrine is applicable to Kronberg vs. LaRouche, but defendants now offer a truly bizarre twist:
[I]f this Court were to assume that the Defendants were acting in concert because they all supported and promoted LaRouche's political views, as Plaintiff contends, then they also should share a unity of interest under the corporate immunity doctrine.
Huh? By this reasoning, a group of Klansmen--if they lynched someone and were then sued for violating the victim's civil rights--could claim, oh, we all share a common white supremacist philosophy and activist commitment and, look here, we purchased the rope as a business expense; therefore we should be immune from conspiracy charges.
And here's one more example of Lyndon's legal lunacy:
It can not be enough that the alleged libelous statements refer to Plaintiff's testimony in the LaRouche trial, although this apparently is Plaintiff's view....That is because the statutory language specifically provides that the alleged wrongful actions of the defendant in a Section 1985(2) action must have been taken to injure the plaintiff "on account of his having...testified" in any court in the United States [actually the statute says any court of the United States, i.e., any Federal court--DK]. It is not sufficient that a plaintiff merely demonstrate that the alleged wrongful conduct, in this case libel per se, refers to the witness's testimony. Simply because the author of a purported libelous statement comments upon the testimony of a trial witness does not mean that the statement was made with the motive and intent to injure the witness for having testified in court, as is required in order to set forth a claim under Section 1985(2).
As a journalist, I've read my share of legal pleadings over the years, but this is the first time I've ever seen defendants end up arguing the plaintiff's case rather than their own. LaRouche and his co-defendants set forth the requirements that plaintiff Kronberg would have to meet under Section 1985(2) without being aware, apparently, that these requirements fit their own behavior to a T. Indeed, plaintiff Kronberg's memorandum had already provided several examples of the linkage between the campaign of defamation against Mrs. Kronberg and LaRouche's belated but real rage over her 1988 testimony. For instance, here's the statement from LaRouche that was published in the April 26, 2009 Morning Briefing and distributed to his followers worldwide:
...Molly has been, as we all knew--those of us who knew anything about this, knew that none of us would have gone to prison, not in that trial, not in Alexandria, except for Molly....Molly gave the false testimony without which the trial could not have occurred in Alexandria....
When this woman...sent a bunch of us to prison directly and deliberately...She lied! It was only her lies that got us imprisoned. If she hadn't had that lie, nobody would have gone to prison in that trial.
Now, you've got a situation, where he [Ken Kronberg, Molly Kronberg's husband] kills himself, because he was living with that witch: Who's been evil all along! Her behavior had never been good. She's never been honest. And then, he commits suicide, and these bums try to blame me for it! He was driven--there was no reason for the suicide, there was no excuse for it. But there's an understanding of the oppression that he felt by being married to that bitch....
If any new recruits to the LaRouche Youth Movement are reading this web page on the sly, I hope they'll think long and hard about the above, and consider that maybe, just maybe, the group they've joined with such idealistic motives is in fact an insane cult. If they begin to suspect this is possible, their next step should be to call their parents, ask for a bus ticket home, and then spend some time researching the history of the LaRouchians in a non-controlled environment before making any decision as to whether or not to continue any association with them.
Dec. 4: LaRouche gets hoist by his own petard. Plaintiff Molly Kronberg's memorandum in opposition to LaRouche's motion to dismiss, filed with the court on Nov. 9. Here we see her attorneys, John Bond and John Markham, demolish the defense's arguments point by point, showing them to be based on outdated or irrelevant case law as well as devoid of common sense.
The memorandum includes some elegant legal reasoning and is well worth careful reading, especially on the issue of whether or not the defendants have a "unity of corporate interest" that would provide them with the protection of the intracorporate conspiracy immunity doctrine, which precludes (under the principles of agency law) a civil conspiracy between a corporation and its agents (officers, directors, employees, etc.).
We contend that the [intracorporate conspiracy immunity] doctrine has no place here since there is no showing that all four defendants possess such a unity of corporate interest that they are legally incapable of conspiring with each other. Defendant Lyndon LaRouche has no qualifying legal connection with defendant LaRouchePAC, [defendant] Barbara Boyd has no such relationship with defendant EIR, and, of course, Barbara Boyd and Lyndon LaRouche are separate individuals. The two corporations likewise are not functionally joined. Thus the defendants are fully capable of being charged with conspiring with each other.
Occasionally legal pleadings can be very funny, and I imagine that a shadow of a smile appeared on the judge's face as he perused the following argument re LaRouche's personal eligibility for intracorporate immunity:
Plaintiff alleges co-defendant Lyndon LaRouche is the founder of LPAC...."Founder" is an historical relationship and contains no allegation as to the present relationship or to the relationship that existed at the time of the alleged wrongful actions.
Plaintiff alleges co-defendant Lyndon LaRouche is a founding editor and contributing editor of EIR. Again, founder is an historical relationship and contains no allegation as to the present relationship or the relationship that existed at the time of the alleged wrongful actions. A contributing editor means many things to many different publications and does not assert whether the relationship is one of agency, independent contractor or beneficial volunteer.
If the defendants wish to establish facts not contained in the Complaint to establish LaRouche is an agent of the kind qualifying to trigger the intracorporate immunity as to him and either corporate defendant named in this case, they certainly also have that right to do so and argue their position at a later proceeding. However, the plaintiff also has the right to establish with further facts LaRouche is a separate actor either based upon the personal interest exception...or that he undertook the offensive actions outside the scope of his agency should such an agency actually be established....
Indeed in this regard plaintiff does allege LaRouche has an independent personal stake in LPAC and organizations that support him as these entities are fundraising conduits funding LaRouche's lavish lifestyle. His extravagant personal lifestyle has no relationship to the success or failure of these corporate defendants' stated purposes but provides cash flow for the defendant to fraudulently raid....Discovery will amplify this.
The operative word in the above is "discovery," a process that includes document production and pre-trial depositions, both of which LaRouche fears like a vampire fears sunlight. Be afraid, Count Lyndon. Be very afraid. Molly Harker is on your trail.
Dec. 1: LaRouche, as usual, blames the victim. Here is Der Abscheulicher's (and his co-defendants') memorandum in support of their motion to dismiss Molly Kronberg's libel and harassment-of-a-federal-witness lawsuit. Filed by defendants' counsel with the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Oct. 26, this document presents a pathetically unconvincing legal argument while also incorporating propagandistic formulations that appear to have been prepared by convicted felon LaRouche's in-house paralegals rather than by outside attorneys. It is useful, however, for gaining an understanding of how LaRouche and his co-defendants justify to themselves their libel and harassment of a widow whose husband they drove to suicide. Example:
Following Mr. Kronberg's death on April 11, 2009, Plaintiff began a public and
international media campaign in conjunction with long-time opponents of Lyndon LaRouche to
blame her husband's death on LaRouche. Plaintiff has been informed by public authorities and
lawyers that there was no factual or legal basis for her claim that LaRouche caused her husband's
death according to various postings she has made on the Internet, and she has not filed a
wrongful death or similar action because of her husband's death. Nonetheless, Plaintiff has
continued her attacks with this lawsuit, alleging in conclusory fashion a contrived conspiracy to
violate Plaintiff's civil rights based on events that occurred more than 20 years ago.
Does anyone believe that outside counsel wrote this absurd passage? Note especially the allegation that Plaintiff is basing her suit on "events that occurred more than 20 years ago." In fact, it was LaRouche who raised the issue of events of "more than 20 years ago," accusing Molly Kronberg in numerous statements between 2007 and 2009 of committing the crime of perjury at his 1988 conspiracy and mail fraud trial although he had never made such accusations at any time prior to Mrs. Kronberg quitting his organization and denouncing him in 2007. And it was LaRouche who selected Molly Kronberg's 1988 federal court trial testimony as his chief excuse for having his followers harass her. LaRouche picked this particular rationale out of the almost infinite grab bag of suspicions and grievances that are constantly swirling around in his head, any one of which he could have chosen instead. Thus, through his own willful behavior, LaRouche has laid himself and his associates open to a civil action in federal court for having conspired to harass a federal witness.
Molly and Ken Kronberg in 2001.
And it doesn't matter that she was a witness 21 years ago. The federal courts take seriously any conspiracy to harass federal witnesses either before, during or after such witness's testimony; and Section 1985(2) of the Federal Code clearly proscribes such conspiracies:
"If two or more persons in
any State or Territory conspire to deter, by force, intimidation, or threat, any party or witness in
any court of the United States from attending such court, or from testifying to any matter
pending therein, freely, fully, and truthfully, or to injure such party or witness in his person or
property on account of his having so attended or testified..." (emphasis added).
Note also that plaintiff's memorandum gives the wrong year (2009) for Kronberg's death, which actually occurred in 2007. Here we see an old pattern: LaRouche cares so little about his victims (whether they die as a result of emotional abuse, physical assault, dangerous deployments, unsafe cult-supplied automobiles with worn tires, or the failure of the cult to provide health insurance for its full-time worker bees), that he can't even get the simplest facts about them straight.
The erroneous date here is similar to errors in statements LaRouche's org issued after the 2003 death of Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish lad from the U.K., who apparently was severely beaten about the head after revealing that he was Jewish at a LaRouchian youth cadre school in Wiesbaden, Germany. Over an extended period after the young man's death, LaRouche and his followers referred to Jeremiah (nickname Jerry) as "Jeremy" (a non-Jewish name) and even once as "Jermiah" (as in germ), thus not only insulting a grieving family but also helping to send a message to LaRouche's neo-fascist allies that he has nothing but disdain for Jews who end up dead as a result of his struggle to save the world (although he might have to pretend otherwise, to a certain extent, in order to evade criminal investigation).
Nov. 21: Erica Duggan's appeal to the U.K. High Court of Justice for a fresh inquest into the death of her son Jeremiah. This "skeleton argument" filed by Mrs. Duggan's counsel last year, appears here for the first time on the web. It includes details of reports by independent forensic experts that contradict the cursory official findings of the German police, who claim that Jeremiah committed suicide by running into traffic on a Wiesbaden motorway shortly after dawn on March 27, 2003, thus causing himself to be hit by one car and then to be run over by another.
The scene where, according to the lip-service-to-human-rights government of the "new" Germany, Jeremiah Duggan met his death. I ask the reader: Would you trust the German police, long riddled with far-right elements, to investigate the death of a young Jew whose body was found on this motorway less than an hour after he had called his mother for help in escaping from a fascist, anti-Semitic cult with longtime ties to Germany's security services? In fact the cops didn't even try. Six million already dead...who cares about one more?
Among other items, the skeleton argument includes an excerpt from a 2005 report prepared by forensic scene examiner Allan John Bayle, who is described as "an independent forensic scientist of 30 years experience, formerly of the [London] Metropolitan police." From the conclusion of Mr. Bayle's report:
"The Blue Volkswagen Golf car showed no evidence of hitting Mr Duggan,
although there was damage to the front bumper, there were no fibres, hairs,
blood or skin or any other evidence to prove that this car was involved in an
accident."
"The red / brown Peugeot 406 Estate car had considerable damage."
"The windscreen had been hit several times with an instrument, possibly a
crow bar or something similar. There was also no evidence of any fibres,
hairs, blood or skin on the broken glass."
"The offside driver's door had also been hit with probably the same instrument...The dent in the side of the door was too sharp and pointed and therefore,
could not have been made by the human body."
"Mr Duggan and the two cars were together in another place, possibly a
builder's yard."
"I could not find any physical evidence to show that these two vehicles ever
came into contact with Mr Duggan. There appeared to be no tyre marks on Mr
Duggan or on his clothing."
"The pathologist's report was very short and did not explain the lack of injuries
consistent with a traffic accident."
"I firmly believe this incident was stage managed and Mr Duggan met his
death somewhere else and the body dumped in its position on the road."
And here's an excerpt from the report of forensic examiner Terence Merston (also ex-Metropolitan police), who visited the scene of Jeremiah's death as well as viewing the photographs.
"Based on my years of experience in attending thousands of crime scenes as
a forensic scene examiner, it is my opinion that the evidence at the scene
points towards Jeremiah's death being extremely suspicious and not a road
traffic accident, it is also my view that the damage to the Peugeot car has
been deliberately caused."
"The alleged damage to the Volkswagen car (light lens missing and piece of
metal hanging down), together with a total lack of physical evidence from
Jeremiah on the vehicle and vice versa, it is total[ly] inconsistent with that
vehicle having been involved in the alleged accident."
And a third statement, from forensic scientist and engineer Herr Manfred Tuve:
"...the head injuries cannot be matched to the damage to the right-hand side of the Peugeot."
"No drag marks attributable to movement from the right-hand side of the left-hand lane to the left-hand edge of the carriageway were observed on the road surface near the final position of the body. No adhesions of blood or hair were found on the Golf. These would necessarily have been detectable if the deceased had collided with or been run over by the car and if this had caused the severe head injuries, as alleged. What caused the head injuries therefore remains an open question."
"There are mud-coloured stains and adhesions on the Peugeot, the Golf and the clothing of the deceased, particularly on his shoes. These are not normal grey-black road dust, which is a mixture of different soils, road grit and abraded rubber. Since all three objects can be assigned to a single causal group, it can at least be concluded that they come from a common location."
Mrs. Duggan had originally applied to the U.K. Attorney General (Baroness Scotland) for a new inquest. After her request was denied (possibly under pressure from British security authorities doing a favor for their German colleagues--who don't want their dealings with the fascist LaRouche org to be made public), Mrs. Duggan took her case to the High Court. The Attorney General's office replied (basing itself on outdated case law), that its denial of her request was immune from judicial review. The High Court, however, disagreed--and granted permission for a judicial review to proceed.
In March 2009, Mrs. Duggan's attorneys issued a press release stating that "[t]he Attorney General has now agreed to withdraw her refusal and to promptly reconsider our client's application for permission to ask the Court for a fresh inquest." However, as of Nov. 2009 the
AG is still stonewalling Mrs. Duggan on the inquest issue.
Just what has the LaRouche organization been up to in Germany and elsewhere in Europe that would require a coverup of the type that has unfolded over the past six and a half years? The suspicious official maneuverings date back to the earliest days after Jeremiah's death, when the police in Wiesbaden declined to investigate any possible involvement by LaRouche's Schiller Institute (one investigator even described the outfit to Mrs. Duggan as a "respected" local organization), failed to take written statements from the drivers whose cars allegedly had struck Jeremiah, neglected to perform a post-mortem, and even destroyed Jeremiah's clothes (which may have borne trace evidence of a brutal beating) without seeking permission from the family. Subsequently, the German authorities would simply ignore a DNA test which confirmed that Jeremiah's passport (which was not on his body when it was found on the highway but rather in the possession of the Schiller Institute) had his blood on it.
If the coverup ever begins to unravel, it will bring increased scrutiny on the LaRouche organization and its sinister network of alliances. We may then find out why more than one NATO intelligence/counterintelligence service feels it has to protect this gang of thugs. I suspect the motive has to do with at least one covert operation that went south in the 1980s with disastrous results. (The moral of the story, for the agencies I'm referring to, is that if you lie down with dogs such as LaRouche and his psychopathic followers, you're inevitably going to get fleas.)
A number of high-level ex-LaRouchians, both in Germany and the United States, know pieces of the puzzle that could help expose the German government's motives and win justice for the Duggan family. But these former close associates of LaRouche, although they love to whine about how they were personally exploited and abused by him, remain quiet about the organization's secret alliances and crimes--not only out of fear but also, in too many cases, because they really don't believe there was anything wrong with the group's ideology and deeds. The only problem, in the view of certain of these former inner-ring members, was LaRouche himself--and especially his self-defeating personality traits that prevented the group from achieving its full potential in the political arena.
Such individuals--especially those formerly in the German branch of the movement--are proud of what they did, and will (like old SS and NKVD officers) take the LaRouche org's secrets to their graves unless lower-level former members, who do feel a modicum of remorse, start putting pressure on them. I must say I'm not holding my breath.
Nov. 21: Transcript of Nov. 5, 2008 proceeding before the U.K. High Court re Erika Duggan's request for a fresh inquiry into the death of her son Jeremiah. This transcript, posted here for the first time, includes the most comprehensive description publicly available of the forensic experts' reports obtained by the Duggan family.
Jeremiah Duggan, 1980-2003. He stood up in a brainwashing session to protest the rampant anti-Semitism, proclaiming "But I'm a Jew!" That may have sealed his fate.
The hearing transcript includes an excerpt from the report of forensic medical specialist Dr. Ivica Milosavljevic--one of several experts whose findings were presented in argument before Mr. Justice Wyn Williams. (Dr. Milosavljevic had based his analysis on the photographic record and on the April 4, 2003 report of Dr. David Shove, the pathologist who performed a non-forensic post-mortem on the body after it was shipped back to the United Kingdom.)
"In the report of the performed autopsy, Dr Shove has established abundant quantity of fresh blood in all respiration tracts, as well as numerous bruises of the surface of both lungs. Such a finding is pathonemonic, ie indicates directly the aspiration, inhaling, of a large quantity of blood in both lungs to the level of alveoli and is most probably the direct consequence of hemorrhage from the hurt blood vessels around the fracture of bones of basis of the skull and bones of the face. It also indicates the fact that the death of Jeremiah Duggan was not instant, which should be expected from an injury of head made by overrunning....
"But that late Duggan lived for some time, few minutes, ie that injury of the head did not arise at once overrunning by motor vehicle but by multiple action of some other mechanical force. This claim is more corroborated by the fact also from the autopsy report by Dr Shove that in the stomach of the victim there was also found an abundant quantity of blood, which is the consequence of swallowing the blood, which had merged from hurt blood vessels around the fracture of the bones, the basis of the skull, the bones of the face, round towards the mouth and respiratory organs.
"Also in the above mentioned autopsy report, Dr Shove has found the presence of numerous contusions on both hands and on the back side of both forearms. The shape, volume, localisation and symmetric pattern of these injuries on both arms clearly indicate their defensive character...these injuries have been inflicted most probably by multiple actions of the blunt side of a mechanical tool (fists, feet with shoes on, and similar object) brandished onto the surface of both hands and hand sizes of both forearms ...at the moment, when those parts of the body were in an elevated position in the level of the head aiming to protect it from action of the above mentioned blunt side of a mechanical tool brandished."
The response of the Attorney General's office evaded the above points and simply repeated the German police's position, which was based on a snap judgment made within hours of Jeremiah's death that he was just a suicide, and that no criminal investigation was necessary. The AG's counsel even tried to dismiss the LaRouche issue by asking: "What is the purpose of the inquest, could it allay suspicions or rumours about the involvement of the LaRouche organisation and its members in the time leading up to his death?" What "suspicions or rumors"? Even the LaRouchians and their German police protectors don't deny that Jeremiah attended the Schiller Institute conference in Bad Schwalbach in March 2003 and went on to participate in a LaRouchian cadre school in Wiesbaden immediately thereafter. (His parents even have the handwritten notes he took during these sessions.)
Lest the LaRouchians on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web try to debunk Mrs. Duggan's request for a fresh inquest by quoting from the Attorney General's arguments, I note the following:
1. Justice Williams found for claimant Duggan: "I consider that there are formidable legal difficulties which face the claimant in her quest to succeed in a judicial review....But I have been persuaded that there are sufficiently unusual features about this case that it would be wrong to refuse permission."
2. According to a March 26, 2009 press release from Mrs. Duggan's attorneys: "In December 2008 [the month following the proceeding described above--DK] the Attorney General, while preparing her evidence for the case, became aware that she had not fully considered some documents received from the German Authorities before refusing our client permission to ask the Court for a second inquest. The Attorney General had had these documents in her possession prior to making her decision in February 2008 [eight months before the High Court proceeding]....Both we and our client are alarmed that it took the Attorney General until well into the Court proceedings to realise her omission."
3. The LaRouche propagandists on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet hide behind "user names," but no one in the organization is known to have medical training or any scientific knowledge of forensic science or of crime-scene or accident-scene investigation or trace-evidence chemistry. This should be contrasted with the qualifications of the experts whose reports were cited by Mrs. Duggan's attorneys in their "skeleton argument" presented to the High Court.
4. The LaRouche propagandists cannot muster any scientific evidence to support their negative opinion of the findings of the forensic experts cited by Mrs. Duggan's attorneys. This is because there is no contrary scientific evidence at this point--the German police never performed a post-mortem and therefore never formulated any opinion one way or the other about, say, the evidence of defensive bruises on Jeremiah's arms and of his having sustained severe blows to the head that could not have come from the alleged impact with the cars. Indeed, the only way the German police could formulate a counter-explanation of these findings would be by reopening this case as a criminal investigation, which they adamantly refuse to do. Thus the sole response available to the LaRouchians, the German government and the U.K.'s Deutschland-uber-Duggan Attorney General is to mindlessly repeat the initial opinion formulated by Wiesbaden police investigators within hours of Jeremiah's death and adhered to by them ever since in spite of subsequent findings that raise the most serious doubts about the initial rush to judgment.
One would think that if the LaRouchians were really innocent of any involvement in Jeremiah's death, as they claim--and if the evidence of foul play were really as insignificant as they say it is--they would welcome a full inquiry in expectation of total exoneration. But instead, they are completely opposed to any fresh examination of this case either by the U.K. authorities, the German authorities or the media. I wish that at least one of LaRouche's internet trolls who love to heap ridicule on Jeremiah's mom while portraying Jeremiah himself as just a crazy person (they say he liked to "run around in traffic") would answer this simple question: Why, if your movement has nothing to hide, are you so adamantly against any further investigation of the circumstances surrounding Jeremiah's death?
Nov. 6: "Lyndon LaRouche and those 'mystical, misty' Anglo-Saxons." More evidence that Lyn doesn't know what he's talking about. The written record of the Anglo-Saxon era is massive--and hundreds of assiduous scholars have filled in the gaps. Doesn't LaRouche believe in googling a subject before he pontificates on it? Has he ever personally performed a Google search, even once?
Nov. 6: "Lyndon LaRouche: world's greatest expert on Shakespeare?" Not hardly. Posting by "eaglebeak" exposes LaRouche's ignorance--he can't even get the simplest facts straight. Includes an excerpt from a recent LaRouche speech in which the master of credit card fraud confuses early medieval England with pre-Roman Celtic Britain, and makes statements that indicate he's never even read Shakespeare. He also tells us the English, Scots and Danes of a thousand years ago were morally unfit to survive and indeed were "doomed." Unfortunately for Lyn, they're still here--and thriving.
Oct. 27 (expanded commentary added Nov. 6): "Crashes, crashes, everywhere, and not a one is real!" Since the 1950s, Lyndon LaRouche has predicted economic doom (depressions and worse) on hundreds of occasions. Mostly, these forecasts have been totally wrong. However, in the normal course of the international economy, recessions and stock market crises do occur from time to time, thus enabling LaRouche to crow about the inevitable intersection of one of his incessant predictions with a real event (while keeping quiet about the 99 out of every 100 times in which he was just whistling Dixie). At the Factnet link above, a LaRouche critic traces the history of the World's Greatest Self-Styled Economist's forecasting failures from 1987 to 2009. I found this to be an excellent piece of work--and, unlike most message board essays, it's well-footnoted. What we need next is a full compilation of LaRouche's Chicken Little warnings re world wars, nuclear holocausts, famines and plagues (also his alarums over the years about assassination plots against himself--none of which were ever actually attempted because none ever existed in the first place).
I should add that LaRouche is clever like a fox about all this. When an economic crisis occurs, then, regardless of whether it actually converges with one of his predictions (except in the vaguest way), he issues statements in multiple languages boasting of his Nostradamian prescience. Inevitably, some obscure paper in the former Soviet Empire or some flying saucer obsessed Latin America daily will publish the statement either thinking LaRouche is for real or because of the statement's kook value. (The Chinese state media is also inclined to publish LaRouche's pronouncements because he's been for some years now a booster of China's economic and foreign policy interests and of its anti-human rights agenda in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Tibet.)
Next: LaRouche's worldwide multilingual network of organizers and fake "news correspondents"--who are always trolling for fellow Jew-haters as well as for naifs--will scare up some obscure economist in the Ukraine or a similar impoverished pit (where any economist over 45 would have received his training in the quack economics of the Soviet era) and induce him to issue a statement praising LaRouche either in exchange for some type of compensation or simply to help out a fellow anti-Semite.
The LaRouche org has been collecting statements from dubious academics in the former Soviet bloc since the early 1990s, when the economic circumstances of academics in that region were generally pretty desperate. And the LaRouchians are especially energetic in cultivating elderly ex-Soviet experts who are beginning to lose their acuity. One example (the Russian equivalent, one might say, of Lyn's nursing home fan the late U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy) is Stanislav Menshikov, b. 1927, a former Soviet diplomat and Communist Party Central Committee economist, who worked in the KGB-infested UN Secretariat in New York in the 1970s when the LaRouchians were cozying up to a KGB official at the Soviet UN Mission.
Today, Menshikov is a member of LaRouche's Schiller Institute, according to EIR. At a celebration of Menshikov's 80th birthday in Moscow in May 2007, LaRouche was one of the speakers and was warmly praised in Menshikov's own speech (again, according to EIR, which also asserted that the Russian people should begin once again to listen to "members of the older generation, some of them having been leading figures in the Soviet Union during the Cold War").
Menshikov (left) and LaRouche in Moscow.
Statements by the likes of Menshikov praising LaRouche as a major thinker are highlighted in U.S. LaRouche publications to lure in college freshmen--and senior citizens with lootable stock portfolios. But such statements are also employed in attempts to puff up LaRouche's image in non-LaRouchian media; for instance, on Wikipedia.
LaRouche's Wikipedia war room in Los Angeles takes the statements from the Russian or Chinese press, as well as the effusive praise by former Eastern European central-planning hacks, and uses them in sly edits of the Wiki LaRouche bio and in talk-page defenses of those edits (read here) to make it appear that LaRouche really is a great economist and that his critics are all liars.
In the case of Menshikov, the LaRouchians were especially clever, citing the fact that he has his own Wikipedia biography as proof for the notability of his opinion on LaRouche. But the history of Wikipedia's short Menshikov article shows that it was created by one "MaplePorter," a pro-LaRouche editor who would later be banned from Wiki as one of the estimated 50 "sock puppet" user names that have been employed (often several of them at the same time) by a long-banned LaRouchian trickster known as "Herschelkrustofsky."
It's not as if the LaRouchians have total free rein on Wikipedia. An editor with the user name "Willbeback" got into a battle with pro-LaRouche editor "Leatherstocking" over the latter's incessant restoring of quotes and citations from Russian sources that were intended to demonstrate that LaRouche is a great economic thinker and statesman. Leatherstocking's references were few in number, the publications were dubious (one of them had been described euphemistically by the LaRouchians as a "Russian patriotic journal") and the articles were only available in the original Russian, so non-LaRouchian editors couldn't easily verify the contents. Willbeback contrasted this casual attitude to the job of providing credible sources with the earlier insistence by LaRouchian editors that non-LaRouchians supply numerous sources for the most common criticisms of LaRouche (like that he's anti-Semitic):
Leatherstocking, I count seven Russian citations in your listing above: three for "Leading economist" and four for "Founder of Physical Economics", and none of those appear to have been from the most prominent Russian news sources. By contrast, the other phrases used for LaRouche that are in the lead have far more citations. There are 72 sources for "anti-semite" and 56 for "fascist", many of them in the newspapers of record, or quotations from prominent individuals. If the threshold is just 3 or 4 cites, then there are many more terms we should add [like "crypto-Nazi"?--DK]. If the threshold is higher, then we should delete the Russian terms. But we can't have it both ways.
Shortly after this amusing interchange (which one talk-page reader said was "better than watching Seinfeld"), Wiki administrators finally banned Leatherstocking indefinitely after obtaining proof that he was in fact posting from the same LaRouchian business office as the previously banned Herschelkrustofsky. (LaRouche Watch will be posting more soon on the Wikipedia wars.)
Oct. 6: The Newman-Fulani organization: a study in deception. Here, available on the web for the first time, is the Anti-Defamation League's 1990 report on Newman, Fulani and their "Marxist-Leninist" therapy cult (the shadowy International Workers Party). Shorter but in some respects more perceptive than the ADL's 1996 report ("A Cult by Any Other Name"), this one has a certain literary as well as political interest--it was written by the distinguished American novelist David Evanier, who worked as an ADL editorial staffer in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Of special importance is the section on Newman and Fulani's dealings with Libya (pp. 8-9), including how Fulani led an IWP delegation to the then capital of terrorism in 1987 and how she and Newman held a rally at their Castillo Cultural Center in April 1989--only four months after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland--at which Newman called for "unconditional defense" of the Libyans. Also, on page 9, Evanier cites how Newman and Fulani's National Alliance mourned the death in 1988 of Palestinian terrorist Abu Jihad--the mastermind of the Black September attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics. According to Evanier, the cult's weekly newspaper hailed Abu Jihad as "one of the [international left's] greatest political-military tacticians" while labelling his assassins a "Zionist murder squad."
Fulani (center) in Libya's Geryan Mountains in April 1987. She and her International Workers Party delegation were paid by the Libyan government (at the urging of Louis Farrakhan) to attend a "peace" conference that was really an unsuccessful attempt to launch a Terrorist International. This was at a time when Gadhafi was already targeting American military personnel with his terror attacks. On Fulani's left is IWP muckamuck Nancy Ross, who in 2005 would receive tens of thousands of dollars from a lump sum donated by Mayor Bloomberg to the New York City Independence Party (an IWP front) for campaign work on behalf of his 2005 reelection bid.
I hope Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will read this report, and do some hard thinking about whether she wants to continue her involvement with the Newman-Fulani movement. I also hope that her fellow justices will read it, and demand that she repudiate this sick cult.
I'd like to hope that Mayor Bloomberg would also break with Newman and Fulani--and apologize to the families of the 270 victims killed in the Pam Am Flight 103 explosion for his foolish mistake in donating $50,000 to the Castillo Cultural Center in 2002 (only months after Fulani had compounded her earlier antics by blaming the Sept. 11, 2001 murder of an additional 3,000 innocents on the "arrogance" and "aggression" of the U.S. government). Unfortunately, our mayor doesn't seem morally capable of recognizing that there's anything seriously wrong with the beliefs and practices of his Newmanite friends.
Sept. 3: Widow of Ken Kronberg targets LaRouche's weekly "news" magazine. Molly Kronberg, who filed suit last month in federal court against Lyndon LaRouche, his political action committee, and one of his top aides, has now added the EIR News Service, putative publisher of LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, as a defendant in the case.
It looks like a real news magazine...until you examine the fine print.
In her amended complaint filed in federal court in Alexandria, VA on Sept. 2 (click above for PDF), Mrs. Kronberg cited passages from EIR earlier this year that mirror those in the LaRouchePAC press releases and LaRouche "morning briefings" which she had already presented as evidence of "harassment of a federal witness and libel." For instance, according to the amended complaint:
The March 6, 2009 issue of EIR published an article on page 79, which asserted that the federal government's 1988 "railroad" conviction of Lyndon LaRouche "relied exclusively on perjured testimony from one crucial witness, Molly Kronberg, whose false statements under oath were the basis for the illegal conviction of LaRouche on false allegations of tax fraud conspiracy. LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in Federal prison on the fabricated charges, and colleagues were sentenced to 3-5 years, all on the basis of the fraudulent Kronberg testimony, which centered on her own criminal uttering of a false check."
It is widely known that EIR is a scurrilous propaganda rag that has accused the targets of LaRouche's wrath (ex-followers, Jewish bankers, environmentalists, investigative journalists, leftwing activists, neoconservative pundits, European aristocrats, members of the British royal family, etc.) of a wide variety of unsubstantiated motives and actions involving drug trafficking, terrorism, child abuse, Satanic rituals--and plots to assassinate or otherwise harm LaRouche.
The chief allegation about Mrs. Kronberg cited in the amended complaint--that she committed perjury at LaRouche's trial as a part of a government conspiracy to destroy him--is especially ridiculous because Mrs. Kronberg remained on the National Committee of LaRouche's organization for 19 years following the trial without LaRouche or any other member of the org ever once accusing her of the alleged treachery that is now being outlined for the first time. LaRouche was present in court when she appeared as a witness under duress (and, as only one of many government witnesses), and he personally heard the prosecutor's questions and her answers. Why didn't he complain about her testimony then? Why did this notoriously paranoid man continue to trust her in a responsible position in his org for almost two decades thereafter?
It would appear that LaRouche is raising these allegations in an attempt to divert his followers' attention--and that of the general public--away from Mrs. Kronberg's recent public statements in which she has characterized LaRouche as an abusive cult leader who drove her husband to suicide in April 2007.
Whenever LaRouche has come under attack over the years for criminal activity, anti-Semitic hate speech, or mistreatment of followers, he has always added a new twist, or a new circle of villains, to his conspiracy theory, using this tactic to turn the reality of his self-created problems inside out in the minds of his loyalists.
In the current instance, LaRouche says that Molly Kronberg was and is involved in an ongoing plot emanating from high places, that Ken knew about it and was torn between his loyalty to Molly and his loyalty to LaRouche, that Ken ultimately saw no way out of his divided loyalties except via suicide, and that the Episcopalian "witch" Molly is responsible for Ken's suicide.
In this manner, LaRouche manages to pose as the defender of Ken's good name and, ultimately, as Ken's wrathful avenger. Such breathtakingly cynical cognitive reframings--mirroring those in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four--have been a key feature of life inside the LaRouche cult for decades. Unfortunately, many of his high-IQ boomers just can't see through (or don't want to see through) what is ultimately a child-like logic rooted in LaRouche's malignant narcissism.
EIR has been a vehicle for the Orwellian nonsense of LaRouche ever since its founding in the mid-1970s. Now that Mrs. Kronberg has drawn much-needed attention to the magazine's true nature, I'd like to follow up with an overdue question about its relationship to Google.
For years, the world's premier search engine has spidered EIR for its "Google News"--as if LaRouche's magazine were a legitimate online news source. This should end. EIR should be treated for what it really is--a propaganda website producing wildly unreliable reports that mirror the mind of a paranoid anti-Semite.
I am not suggesting that Google should withhold the contents of EIR from the public. I'm merely saying that EIR should be removed from the index of news sites that are accessed via Google News. LaRouche's publication should be treated like an ordinary website the search engine listings of which are not given any special imprimatur of reliability and topicality.
This is not an unprecedented idea. In 2005, Google News removed neo-Fascist publishers in the U.S. and Germany from its news index (read here). In the case of LaRouche, persuading Google to do the right thing would require that Jewish communal leaders show some backbone, which in turn would require them to repudiate the double standard that long has protected LaRouche simply because he, unlike David Duke and Louis Farrakhan, is cunning enought to wrap his hate in code language and recruit anti-Semitic Jews to serve as his smokescreen.
And it might help if more individuals from the ex-LaRouchian community would decide it's time to stop prevaricating, and come forward with public testimony as to the sinister ideas and sentiments that in fact permeate the LaRouche movement.
August 23: Widow of cult victim sues LaRouche in federal court. Marielle (Molly) Kronberg, widow of northern Virginia businessman Kenneth Kronberg, filed a lawsuit last Friday in U.S. Federal Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against cult leader Lyndon LaRouche and his political action committee, claiming they have defamed and libeled her and have "conspired to injure her" because she once provided testimony against LaRouche in a federal criminal trial. (Click above for PDF of her complaint.)
Mrs. Kronberg's suit (Case No. 09cv947) comes after three years of public statements by Mr. LaRouche trying to blame her for the death of her husband, who had been the cult's printer and, along with his wife, a member of the LaRouche organization for decades. Mr. Kronberg committed suicide on April 11, 2007, only hours after Mr. LaRouche--who had subjected Mr. Kronberg to incessant verbal abuse for several years--suggested in a daily briefing to the cult's membership that Mr. Kronberg should consider killing himself.
LaRouche: It's all the fault of "that witch."
The suicide caused consternation among Mr. LaRouche's followers as well as attention from the media, thus apparently prompting Mr. LaRouche's efforts to shift the blame. Here's a sample (April
26, 2009) of the rhetoric his daily briefings have used against Mrs. Kronberg, as cited in her court papers:
"Now, you've got a situation, where he kills himself, because he was living with that witch: Who's been evil all along! Her behavior had never been good. She's never been honest. And then, he commits suicide, and these bums try to blame me for it! He was driven--there was no reason for the suicide, there was no excuse for it. But there's an understanding of the oppression that he felt by being married to that bitch. Because he was a moral person. He made a lot of mistakes. But it was on the question of divided loyalty, divided pressures. And she was evil. And she still is."
Mr. LaRouche laid himself open to a federal court suit when he also alleged that Mrs. Kronberg had perjured herself during Mr. LaRouche's widely publicized 1988 federal criminal trial in which prosecutors said he'd swindled millions of dollars from senior citizens across the country. Mrs. Kronberg testified under subpoena by the prosecution, and says that although she was a LaRouche follower at the time, she had attempted to answer all questions truthfully. Mr. LaRouche is now suddenly claiming--19 years later--that she testified falsely in order to destroy him. Mr. LaRouche was convicted in the 1988 trial on loan fraud and conspiracy charges, after the jury heard testimony from many of the victims of his scams. He received a sentence of five to 15 years in federal prison, and ended up serving five years (1989-1994).
Mrs. Kronberg is represented by co-counsel John Bond of Fairfax, VA and John Markham of Boston, MA. Mr. Markham is the former Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Mr. LaRouche in the 1988 trial, which took place in the same Eastern District of Virginia court in which Mrs. Kronberg has now filed suit. Mr. LaRouche lives near Purcellville, Virginia, and his cult's national offices are in Leesburg.
The E.D. Virginia was also the venue for a 1984 civil suit Mr. LaRouche filed against NBC that likewise resulted in a high-profile trial. Mr. LaRouche accused NBC of libelling him in a TV news magazine segment which reported that Mr. LaRouche had once discussed killing President Jimmy Carter with a remote-controlled bomb, and which included an interview with an Anti-Defamation League official who called Mr. LaRouche a "small-time Hitler."
After hearing rambling and abuse-laden testimony from plaintiff LaRouche, the jury found that NBC had not libelled him--and awarded the broadcasting giant $3 million in punitive damages on a counterclaim (later reduced by the judge to $200,000).
Dennis King, an expert on cults and the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, stated regarding Mrs. Kronberg's suit: "No outsider has a better grasp of the inner workings of the LaRouche cult than John Markham. And no former insider understands it better than Molly Kronberg. If this case ever goes to trial, I predict that LaRouche will lose big--especially after yet another Virginia jury has listened to his bombast on the witness stand day after day."
Readers with information they believe might be helpful to Mrs. Kronberg's case should contact:
John J.E. Markham, II
MARKHAM & READ
One Commercial Wharf West
Boston, Massachusetts 02110
Tel: (617) 523-6329
Fax: (617) 742-8604
E-mail: jmarkham@markhamread.com
Those who wish to donate towards the expenses of Mrs. Kronberg's lawsuit should send their checks to Mr. Markham at the above address. All checks should be payable to: Markham & Read Client Trust Account (with notation: "For Molly Kronberg v. LaRouche Legal Fees and Expenses"). All donations will be recorded and an accounting of all expenditures will be kept on a monthly basis.
August 17: Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani make hay out of their connection to Sotomayor. When Sonia Sotomayor was being sworn in on August 8 as the newest Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, over one hundred young people were watching it on TV at the mid-Manhattan headquarters of the All Stars Project--a youth charity run by Marxist psychotherapy guru Newman and his sidekick Fulani where Sotomayor has long served as a mentor for teenagers. Although the kids doubtless were thrilled to see "their" Sonia take the oath of office, Newman and Fulani apparently saw it as an opportunity to garner publicity for themselves even if it might prove embarrassing to their most famous volunteer worker.
The result was, among other news items, this segment on CBS-TV's New York Local News gushing over All Stars, its kids, and the Supreme Court Justice Who Cares. Apparently the show's producers couldn't bother to spend a couple of minutes googling the youth program (if they had, they might have restrained the puffery a bit). I can only imagine how much this TV clip (and other adulatory news reports about Sotomayor's work with All Stars) will be worth in donations to Newman and Fulani from wealthy liberals--and how much it will improve the public image of their cult-racket. Still, the news segment does give us two useful bits of information:
All Stars Project's theater and offices (including telephone fundraising boiler room) in midtown Manhattan.
First, we are told (and this apparently comes from All Stars CEO Gabrielle Kurlander, who is interviewed during the segment) that Sotomayor has been working with the charity since 2002. Note how, as more information about Sotomayor and the Newmanites emerges, the starting point of her association with Lenora Fulani and other cult organizers keeps getting pushed back: from 2006 to 2003 to 2002 (and that's assuming our new Supreme Court Justice's first contact with the Newmanites was through All Stars and not through social therapy sessions at an even earlier date--a large percentage of All Stars volunteers are recruited through social therapy).
Second, the script of the news segment states: "Even though she now serves on the highest court in the land, organizers at the All Stars project believe [again, this is probably from Kurlander] that Sotomayor will be back this year to run a workshop." Does that mean All Stars already has a commitment from her?
It would appear that the incontrovertible evidence of the sleaziness of All Stars founder and behind-the-scenes leader Newman--for instance, his defense of patient-therapist sex on NY 1 News in 2005 (here) and again in 2007 (here and here), and his boastful 1990 account here of his own behavior as a therapist which he published along with pathetically servile expressions of adulation from several of the women in question, including Kurlander, here--will be dumped into the New York Times/Fox TV Memory Hole for political reasons. It would also appear that the media will continue to ignore the various eyewitness accounts suggesting that the reality of All Stars has been quite different from what's in the fundraising brochures or displayed at the Potemkin Village talent shows, and that the Newman cult's record with young people over the past 37 years has been nothing short of appalling (see here and here).
However, on the issue of the Newmanites parasiting off Sotomayor to improve their image, it was actually the Obama administration that first seized on Sotomayor's work for All Stars (which the cult had been rather discreet about) as a way of presenting her as the minority candidate who "gives back" to her community. Newman and Fulani were thus presented with an opportunity they couldn't let pass. I just wonder how many teens will end up on the cult's Marxoid/Friendosexual recruitment track as a result of the recent publicity boost for All Stars.
July 30: Fred Newman lays bare the secrets of his cult racket (Judge Sotomayor take note!). Here's the transcript of a clandestine 1983 meeting of the so-called Office of Economic Development (OED) of the International Workers Party (the party that Newman would have us believe is a myth--he's trained the members to "perform" its non-existence when among outsiders). Newman and other IWP leaders--most of whom are still with him today--discuss in this transcript the party's control of various front groups, including social therapy's New York clinic, and allude to what appear to be plans or practices re money laundering, loan fraud and other financial crimes.
The transcript--long available to researchers at ex-iwp.org but presented here in a reader-friendly version--also shows that Newman's greed was clearly getting out of control: "There's big money in Marxist-Leninist organizing if we set up the structure." And: "The damn New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research is a bloody goldmine. I really wish I could convince you business types that that's true. There's big money out there. In all of its versions--Marxist version, cleaned-up version--all the different versions. There's heavy money."
"There's big money in Marxist-Leninist organizing"? Left: organizer. Right: big money.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, our soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice who apparently thinks the Newmanites are the cat's meow so far as youth programs go, should read this transcript. Yes, read it, Judge. Count how many times the participants in this discussion appear to be referring to past, present or anticipated criminal acts. Count how many times they refer to what appears to be the manipulation of social therapy patients (all IWP members have to undergo social therapy) in order to squeeze donations to the party from them (a highly unethical practice, if not an illegal one). Do you think this crew has changed over the years? That Newman and his communist "wives" and other IWP "lifers" have magically turned into the Father Damians and Mother Teresas of inner-city charity work? Just what kind of Harry Potter spell would have accomplished this?
And please note that although the statute of limitations has obviously run out on any criminal acts that may have been alluded to in this transcript, the document also provides evidence--as does subsequent information on the public record--that the Newman network is structured in some respects like a racketeering enterprise (see New York Newsday articles here and Gasink complaint here, both from the early 1990s).
As to recent questionable activity: Why in the early and middle 2000s was All Stars raising funds from the public for a supposedly very large talent show program (for many years, they falsely claimed to work with 20,000 kids annually) yet only producing three or four shows each year in New York? Why was the All Stars Talent Show Network reporting expenditures of over a quarter million dollars per each of these shows, which were held in public high schools where only modest rental fees (if any) were charged, and with staffing mostly by adult and youth volunteers? What happened to this money (as much as eight million dollars over about a decade): Was it simply transferred elsewhere through the creative IWP accounting techniques alluded to by Newman in the 1983 transcript?
You should not need to be told, Judge Sotomayor, but I'll say it anyway: your involvement with these people has been naive, reckless and totally inappropriate for a federal judge. You should immediately separate yourself from any and all entities controlled by Fred Newman, Lenora Fulani and their followers.
Mayor Bloomberg, shown here testifying at Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing, played a huge role in President Obama's decision to nominate the Wise Latina. Is it a coincidence that of all the Supreme Court-qualified judges in New York (or in the entire United States), Bloomberg chose to promote the only one who happens to be involved with his Newmanite friends? And will Sotomayor, given what she owes to the mayor, ever be willing to repudiate her involvement with Newman's All Stars Project?
July 26: "Lyndon LaRouche: make-believe scholar." Factnet's "eaglebeak" once again skewers the World's Greatest Genius for his inability to process even the most elementary facts and details of academic scholarship--this time, in his ramblings on Shakespeare, ancient Greek literature, and Latin philology. And then there's Lyn's views on the "rottenness" of all human culture outside of his own movement...
July 24: How the LaRouche Youth Movement recruited my son.
Speech by French mother
B. Bonneau at the Justice for Jeremiah public meeting, Wiesbaden, Germany, March 27, 2009. "My son's 18th birthday is probably the saddest day of my life. None of his friends came. There was nothing to celebrate. He wasn't leaving to become an adult, but to become a shadow, a LaRouchite..."
July 23: Roger Griffin's paper "Lingua Quarti Imperii: The Euphemistic Tradition of the Extreme Right." This was the major paper at the International Symposium on the Language of Far-right Movements held at Northampton University, June 26, 2009.
Roger Griffin.
Although Griffin does not deal directly with the linguistic tricks of the LaRouche organization, his analysis is profoundly pertinent to understanding LaRouchism. For instance: "One social function of professional or 'official' system/regime-sustaining euphemism is to counteract the pain of cognitive dissonance....State 'Newspeak' offers a series of unquestioned automatisms which allow people to reconcile their societal lives and the demands made on them by their official function with core moral values....In extreme cases a regime's Newspeak...allows the coexistence or active collusion of theoretically incompatible...value-systems..."
Griffin, a professor at Oxford Brookes University, is the author of The Nature of Fascism (1991). Every former member of the LaRouche organization could benefit from reading his paper on the euphemistic tradition, even though it is still only in outline form.
July 23: The "forked tongue" of Lyndon LaRouche--and of Hitler. Two ex-LaRouche followers discuss how malignancy gets disguised by clever use of words. "Of course, the Nazis didn't say they were going to slaughter the disabled. They also didn't say that they were going to exterminate the Jews of Europe--they said they were going to 'solve the Jewish question,' and left enough vagueness in their formulations that--at first--the population might believe that all the Jews were going to be deported to Madagascar or some such."
As to LaRouche & Co.: "Only people who have NO conception of what the Nazis were...could talk about Nazi health care plans. It's in the same category as what [critics inside the org] used to refer to as the 'Auschwitz was a daycare center polemic' that LaRouche and his minions essayed in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Or the 'Hitler was raised in a Warburg orphanage' claptrap LaRouche tried on for size in the same period."
July 23: Will Sotomayor try to say that she didn't know about Newman and Fulani's Body Snatcher cult? Apart from the fact that just about everyone in New York politics in the early 2000s knew Newman and Fulani were nuts, Sotomayor may have read media exposes of their network such as this 1999 cover article from The New Republic: "What You Don't Know About Lenora Fulani Could Hurt You." Before signing up as a volunteer, Sotomayor easily could have found the TNR piece at http://ex-iwp.org (along with massive additional documentation). And at any time after its original publication she could have accessed the article (or gotten one of her assistants at the Federal court to access it) via LEXIS-NEXIS. My guess is that she DID read TNR's unsparing critique of the Newman movement--which tells, among other things, about their clandestine "International Workers Party," the paramilitary camp, the quack therapy, and Newman's predatory sexual behavior--but managed to rationalize it away in order to pursue her new friendships with Fulani, Pam Lewis, etc.
Playwright William Pleasant--a former member of the IWP's central committee and a key eyewitness source for the TNR article--sent me his take on Sotomayor and Fulani the other day:
"Sotomayor, a child of the NYC regular Democratic Party--literally sprung from the thighbone of Chuck Schumer--is no political fawn-in-the-woods. She knows who Fulani is. She knows that Fulani's alleged Youth Development program is but one of many paper-mâché "charities" hatched by Fred Newman to shake down corporations and guilty liberals in the name of ghetto kids. The kids get nothing in the end, Newman gets paid.
William Pleasant.
"Sotomayor knows that Newman/Fulani are a walking political shipwreck, careening from one end of the political spectrum to the other in search of patronage--READ: $$$ and only $$$ for themselves. There are certainly scores of former Newman associates who could have pulled the WISE LATINA's coat to Newman's corruption and dubious psychiatric schemes--including his self-serving myth of development and copulating with his patients. No parade of pro-Newman schills can erase 40 years of Newman's lies, abuse and graft. And Fulani's lockstep obedience to her 'mentor'. It's public record.
"So, why is Sotomayor agush for Lenora Fulani's sandlot bootstrapping program? It's a phony from start to finish. Only Sotomayor can answer. She should have been asked in Washington at her confirmation hearing. Rev. Al Sharpton certainly got rewarded for boosting Newman's All Stars Network ("Let's Develop") scam. How about Sotomayor? Let's hear."
[NOTE: Mr. Pleasant was Newman's close pal in the 1980s and knew many of the group's secrets--where they stashed the cash, where they hid the guns, etc. He quit when it became clear to him that Newman was using the party's funds for personal purposes. Mr. Pleasant became an outspoken critic of the group, in spite of being physically assaulted by Newman loyalists. You can read here his statement about coerced abortions in the IWP, which should shed a bit of light on where Fulani fan Sotomayor stands on Roe v. Wade.]
July 22: Judge Sotomayor, your favorite charity is part of a destructive cult! If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe this 2007 University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation by sociologist Alexandra Stein, who closely examined how social therapist Fred Newman recruits and controls his followers. I also urge you to read Dr. Stein's recent comments on her blog here, in which she gives you the benefit of the doubt re your involvement with All Stars (she was once in a cult herself and knows how easy it is for such groups to manipulate idealistic people).
Sociologist Alex Stein.
I agree it's easy to fall victim to cult manipulation. I myself was briefly taken in by Newman's followers in 1977 and even wrote a newspaper article that defended them against charges of cultism and helped elected one of their candidates to a Manhattan school board (I corrected my mistake in follow-up articles). However, for you to stay around them for six years or more, and not spot their weirdness and sociopathy, betrays extraordinary naivete, at the least. And your allowing the White House to cite your work for Newman's Development School for Youth as an example of your civic mindedness and concern for social justice can only be described as outrageous.
Judge Sotomayor, you are about to ascend to the Supreme Court of the United States--and Supreme Court justices should be held to the very highest standards. You owe it to the American people and to the leaders of this country who've placed their trust in you--and to the kids you've irresponsibly helped to steer into the Social Therapy orbit--to look beneath this cult's deceptive veneer.
First, read Dr. Stein's study, then read my "Report to the City" here which documents Social Therapy's appalling exploitation of children and teens going back to the early 1970s. Talk with former members of the cult. Ask American Psychological Association ethicists about Newman's ideas on patient-therapist sex. And finally, do the right thing: Publicly renounce all association with All Stars, Newman and Newman's sidekick Lenora Fulani. Contact all the young people who were in your All Stars workshops, and also their parents. Tell them about your decision and warn them about the true nature of this outfit.
Stein's chart of the Newman cult from inner to outer layers: Fred's "wives," the "40 lifers," the "party cadre" divided into "cells," the cultural and political peripheries.
July 16: Lyndon LaRouche, would-be classical scholar. I thought I'd proven LaRouche's ignorance and fatuousness pretty thoroughly in my analysis of his views on history and military affairs here, but I apparently only scratched the surface. Now "eaglebeak" of Factnet has undertaken to puncture Lyn's pretensions as a classicist. Lest anyone think eaglebeak is nit-picking, I should point out that LaRouche presents himself to his followers as the world's greatest authority on classical thought--without ever having bothered to learn Greek or Latin (or to read, even in translation, the Greek philosophers he pontificates on).
Alas, the so-called British oligarchy will never give Lyn the job of his dreams, tutoring all those potential young Prometheans at Oxford...
July 14: "Performing the World" with Sonia Sotomayor? In responding to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Judge Sotomayor has revealed that she gave a speech to a Development School for Youth graduating class as early as 2003. And here, on the committee's webpage, is the text of that speech, which suggests that Sotomayor was already beginning to pick up the Newmanite jargon: "We all have to work and to perform our lives....I hope you hold on to the memory of each time you performed in this program and felt good about yourself and about the group you have been part of." (emphasis added)
And: "Look at me. Look at Dr. Fulani and Pam Lewis [a longtime Newman follower who helps lead All Stars]. Look at all of the people who have led you in workshops. These can be your lives." Hmmm...Sotomayor is recommending Farrakhan friend Lenora Fulani--the woman who once urged Libya's Col. Gadhafi to get "not nonviolent" with the United States--as a role model for teens?
July 14: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and the "friendosexual" cult. The media has pretty much ignored the Daily News column by Errol Louis (June 9) that reveals how Sotomayor has worked as a volunteer for the past four years (actually it's at least six years--see above) with the Development School for Youth (DSY), a program controlled by veteran anti-Semite and psychotherapy guru Fred Newman along with his infamous sidekick Lenora Fulani. The White House says that the DSY is Sotomayor's "favorite project."
The DSY--a dress for success program based on the idea that you succeed by performing as if you were succeeding--is part of the All Stars Project, a multimillion dollar charity scam founded by therapist Newman, who has bragged publicly about having sex with his patients. Newman's cult has introduced his theory of "friendosexuality" to teenagers via the All Stars programs. The cult--which works with kids as young as four through an All Stars talent show network--also has a history of defending the National Man-Boy Love Association and a number of high-profile individuals and groups accused of abusing children.
Oh, and don't forget the clandestine revolutionary meetings at Chinese restaurants, the burn-after-reading commands from headquarters, and the semi-automatic weapons training at a Pennsylvania farm where, um, things got a bit out of hand.
It would have taken no more than five minutes of due diligence via Google for Judge Sotomayor to find all this out. Perhaps she never bothered to check...Or perhaps she just sees nothing wrong (as disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer didn't either) with the antics of Newman and his multiple "wives," the most important of whom is the one you never hear about--the bookkeeper.
My opinion? If after several years of hanging out with the Newmanites, Sotomayor still doesn't notice that there's anything Pod-like going on, she doesn't have the judgment or common sense to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The most charitable spin one can put on this is that neither Obama (a former law professor) nor Sotomayor (a former prosecutor) did any due diligence on the Development School for Youth.
July 14: The Fred Newman cult tells us that the National Man-Boy Love Association is only a group of tragically misunderstood men and boys who're into "consensual" sex. This little piece of special pleading is from Newman's former newspaper The New York Alliance, Jan. 10, 1983. The author accepts NAMBLA's self-definition at face value, reviles law enforcement as a bunch of fascists, and sorrowfully observes that "what is desirable (what should be) is not always what is possible."
This article shouldn't be dismissed as some one-shot opinion piece expressing only the author's personal views. Nothing this controversial EVER would have appeared in Newman's paper without his express approval of its ideological contents. Indeed, it marks the beginning of an off-again/on-again Newmanite campaign to defend notorious child abusers that would continue into the mid-1990s. (And note to the left of the article the ad for Newman's then-named New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research.)
Although the article appears under the heading "The Pink Triangle," no one should blame this on the gay or lesbian movement, which Newman and his followers were never legitimately involved in. (Newman did induce straight men in his cult to dress up as gay in order to man tables asking for money to fight AIDS--the cash would then go to his inner core to be used, according to ex-members, for purposes unconnected to the AIDS issue.)
I hope that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court (and a former prosecutor), will read this early 1980s piece which expresses the cult's evolving views on the issue of sex with minors. Sotomayor has been working as a volunteer with Newman's Development School for Youth, which she describes as her favorite charity. She certainly needs to learn something about the history of this charity--and of the people who run it.
July 10: "Pawns of His
Grandiosity: Psychological and Social Control in the Lyndon LaRouche Cult." Molly Kronberg's paper for the panel on LaRouche at the University of Northampton's June 26, 2009 symposium, "Speaking with Forked Tongues: The Rhetoric of Right-Wing Extremism Today." In my opinion, this is the best analysis of the LaRouche "Boomer" org's cultism by an American ex-member since Linda Ray's 1986 In These Times article.
Writes Mrs. Kronberg, from her perspective as a former National Committee member: "Fear and love--the emotions felt for a Father--were the emotions engendered by 'Lyn.' It was all part of his apotheosis, his assumption of Godlike qualities of infallibility."
And: "He was watching over your shoulder--your internal, psychic shoulder. He was the measure of all things, the standard to which you tuned your thoughts, your behavior, your self. Rejection by LaRouche meant ego-death in the organization--and was meant to mean that. Thus every member would strive mightily to please 'Lyn.' If you did not so strive, and did not strive obviously, you were suspect."
July 9: How David P. Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg equated Zionism with gangsterism and portrayed a respected U.S. Jewish leader as a symbolic Font of Evil. This is an expansion of my analysis of Goldman's "Confessions of a Coward" in which the former LaRouche aide tells lie after lie in an attempt to evade responsibility for his career as an anti-Semitic propagandist. I've also expanded (and corrected a few errors in) my comments on the dubious sourcing of the information in the second edition of Dope, Inc. (1986), co-authored by Goldman and Steinberg.
The late Max Fisher: demonized by Goldman and other LaRouche minions as a Symbolic Evil Jew.
June 23: Is David Goldman (aka "Spengler") being truthful about his past with Lyndon LaRouche? Well, among other things, he didn't join LaRouche's movement in 1976, as he now claims, but was already a member in 1969; he didn't leave his editorial post with LaRouchian publications in 1982, as he claims, but continued to serve as an EIR editor until 1988; and he certainly was not just a fearful bystander re the LaRouche org's production of anti-Semitic propaganda. Here is a detailed analysis of Goldman's "Confessions of a Coward" (First Things website, May 7) and of what he either left out, lied about, or grotesquely distorted.
David Goldman and other LC members, 1969.
June 15: LaRouche: I know how to conquer the world--and it sure needs conquering! This 1978 article by Der Abscheulicher was posted here last year, but in a hard-to-read format. Here it is with expanded commentary, a new format, and dozens of illustrations both wacky and serious. Step by step, we take you through the mind of America's most celebrated monomaniac, relentlessly exposing his grandiose schemes, his obsessive use of anti-Semitic euphemisms and ellipticisms, and his appalling ignorance of just about every topic he touches on.
Although we focus much of our commentary on LaRouche's peekaboo Hitler fantasies involving poison gases and bacteriological weapons, we would caution our readers not to start darting dirty looks at their ex-LaRouchian neighbor in the supermarket aisle. Probably many of LaRouche's followers in the late 1970s didn't even notice the most outrageous statements in this article, because they had gotten into the habit of only skimming very briefly (if that) the nonstop flood of repetitive (and eminently forgettable) tracts that emanated from his late-night alcohol-drenched ruminations.
Strange as it may seem, a large percentage of LaRouche's followers at that time knew subconsciously that his writings were scarcely worth reading even though they continued (and some still continue) to adulate him as their Genius-Leader. But this lack of attention to the details of what he was (and is) saying--especially in the case of those who remained in the movement for many years thereafter--can't entirely be dismissed as a joke: most Germans in the 1930s only skimmed a few pages, at best, of the equally turgid Mein Kampf, although everyone bought it, displayed it on their coffee tables, and began to act according to its precepts.
May 28: LaRouche's version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? In a recent blog essay, former LaRouche aide David P. Goldman conceded that Dope, Inc., a key LaRouche movement tract co-authored by Goldman in 1978, has "unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones." Here are excerpts from Dope, Inc., highlighted and carefully annotated, showing not only that Goldman is correct (as far as he goes) but also that this underground conspiracist "classic" is a Jew-baiting screed of the highest order of virulence--a prescription for what the authors envisioned as a "mop up" campaign against Jews allegedly involved with the British monarchy in a giant drug-pushing plot.
Also included is documentation on how Dope, Inc. was used by the LaRouchians in the late 1970s and into the 1980s as a tool in attempting to build an anti-Semitic mass movement around the drug issue. And this first edition of Dope, Inc. in which the infamous Protocols forgery is described as the authentic minutes of a Paris "Order of Zion" meeting, is today being promoted on the website of the LaRouche Youth Movement, a cadre formation founded circa 2001 that is recruiting aggressively on college campuses throughout the United States with little opposition from Hillel or anyone else.
May 4: Another "conspiracist" borrows from LaRouche. Winnipeg hate-monger Henry Makow is big on the Illuminati conspiracy, which LaRouche rarely mentions, yet agrees with Lyndon re the Frankfurt School, the Lucis Trust and the Rothschilds. And the hook-nosed Satanist illustration that accompanies Makow's article sends a message not much different from that embodied in the title of LaRouche's Children of Satan pamphlets, or in the "Rohatyn as Satan" banner displayed during a LaRouche Youth Movement march against New York banker and Holocaust refugee Felix Rohatyn.
Makow's version of what LaRouche calls the "oligarchy"?
May 4: Hollow Earther gets the point of LaRouche's fill-in-the-blanks conspiracy theory. LaRouche's followers may deny that when LaRouche warns against the "Synarchists," the "Venetians" or the "Anglo-Dutch" he's really talking about the Jews, but non-LaRouchian anti-Semites on the web--from the Stormfront crowd through Henry Makow and Jeff Rense through those occult-obsessed individuals who fancy Black Masses being performed in every synagogue--are often quick to decode LaRouche's pronouncements and incorporate the underlying message into their own ideological mishmashes.
One such individual is "The Fetch," who posted the following on a May 2004 thread at the Barbelith discussion board, along with a link to the website of LaRouche's chief front group in Australia, the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC).
"In order to understand the New World
Order in the Jewish Synarchist model, one must first understand the nature of
'capital' and its effects on global markets.
"Synarchism is a form of
'El' worship [El is a generic word for "god" in ancient Hebrew--DK] which...is a belief in the supremacy of the Jewish god...A whole
array of ritualistic channels are used....There are basically two components of
Synarchism that one needs to be acquainted with: Martinis[m], a form of Free Masonry linking in to 'Mars' or Jehovian energy
systems, and Zionism, which become manifest in the 'fake' Protocols of Zion and
from which would spring Nazism....
"The...hinge pin history of this movement can be
found in the roots of Nazism, which will lead you back to 'satanists' (actually
Hyper Jehovians) and Jewish Zionist founders."
The Fetch, not himself being a LaRouchian, weaves in his own
idiosyncratic obsessions: "The main 'El' component of [the Synarchist] system of thought
is Noahidism, a pseudo-religious idea that Jews are the Master race and
that mankind's only purpose is to be 'rectified' through submissive service to
all adherents of 'El.'" [Read here about the Lubavitchers' Noahide campaign...it's not sinister at all.] The Fetch also weaves in various fringe-of-the-fringe themes involving "Vril" (a mysterious energy source) and Admiral Byrd's alleged trip to a hidden land under Antarctica inhabited by an advanced civilization.
The members of the freewheeling discussion board would probably have just shrugged off the Hollow Earth stuff with a few good-natured jokes, but the Fetch had picked the wrong place for peddling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Other discussants lashed back at him in scores of postings, as this one by user name "Phex: Dorset Doom":
"All we need now is to bring in
shape-shifting Lizard-men, holocaust denial and a plea to wear tin-foil around
our heads to stop the evil JewLizardCapitalistWorldOrder(TM) from stealing our
thoughts...This is another disturbing example of the current growing
anti-semitic trend in both occultism and radical politics, the creation of a
Jewish bogeyman to explain away all the problems in the world."
"Synarchist" lizard-man on the prowl
This led to a general discussion of conspiracy theories, with "Rex Feral" asking:
"Why does the observation that politicians are corrupt and lie ergo lead to the truth that the world is 'controlled'? If you think of the influences and pressure every politician is subject to--party funding, business sponsorship, in-party 'whips' and all the other groups they have to negotiate between--it’s no wonder that they are sometimes economical with the truth. I don’t see how or why this leads to the shadowy controllers or the New World Order."
The Fetch later attempted a comeback using a LaRouche-style trick: "Jews are every bit a victim in this as are they who are 'not Jews,' and you have to marvel at the fact that you have to treat Jews as if they are a wholly seperate [sic] 'class' of being that is beyond any criticism whatsoever." But this argument fell flat, and Phex: Dorset Doom commented:
"Fetch, as regards to your credibility:
ask any journalist and they'll tell you that once a source on any particular
matter lies or gives bad information, they lose any credibility they might have
had. Within your first post you posited...that Nietzsche was Jewish and that the
Earth is hollow and inhabited by super-people. The links you have been kind
enough to post suffer from the same problem; the CEC puts you only a few clicks away
from Lyndon LaRouche's bizarre (but strangely familiar) rant about the
'Pro-Satanic Pokemon Cult.'"
Phex also asked: "Why does Lyndon LaRouche's name keep
popping up in connection with this thread?"
The larger question should be why (apart from the labors of the LaRouche org's tiny band of internet warriors) Lyndon's name keeps popping up on so many hate-oriented web sites as well as on benign discussion boards such as Barbelith. I suggest it's because LaRouche has been a sly, prolific and effective purveyor of anti-Semitism on a massive scale for over 30 years, and has also offered an elaborate ideological system from which readers can pick and choose. Portions of his viewpoint--especially of his conspiracy theories--have taken root in the minds of individuals who have their own agendas and would probably never join the LaRouche cult, but who see LaRouche as a validator of, and intellectual buttress for, their own preexisting viewpoint as well as their underlying anger and hate.
It's all part of the process by which anti-Semitic theories and rhetoric (both coded and uncoded) have proliferated over the years: LaRouche himself adopted themes from Nesta Webster, "Cincinnatus," Eustace Mullins and others, and wove these conceptions into his "inner elites" theory. Today's web bigots, in turn, pick up LaRouche's conspiracism and weave it into their own imaginative scenarios. Throw into this bubbling pot the LaRouche-influenced offerings of conspiracy entrepreneurs such as John Coleman and Webster Tarpley, and you get Der Abscheulicher's "legacy" (for what it's worth). I'll be posting more examples.
April 22: Full report on Wiesbaden protest meeting to demand German authorities investigate death of Jeremiah Duggan while attending LaRouche indoctrination school. "Dr Matthew Feldman, Senior History lecturer at Northampton College, revealed how the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda is even more dangerous when it takes on the coded form evident in the propaganda of the LaRouche organization. He was supported by all members of the family and ex-members panel who called upon the German authorities to take action....The families described how their sons and daughters were idealistic young people who were trapped in a dangerous web where they were misled with fraudulent conspiracies and how they were manipulated so that their capacities to detect the coded anti-Semitism went undetected."
Unfortunately, the local police in Wiesbaden, the Hessen authorities and the BKA (German FBI) are still protecting the LaRouche org, while LaRouche has told his followers to keep their mouths shut or else. But all it would take is for one, just one, of the leaders of the German branch expelled by LaRouche in 2006 to come forward--and the unravelling of the official lies would begin.
March 27, 2009 Wiesbaden meeting--six years to the day after Jeremiah's death.
April 17: Traditional anti-Semitic conspiracists KNOW that "British" means Jewish in the LaRouchian lexicon. Here's a google listing, and the first page, of a 2007 article from LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review as republished on the Jew-baiting website rense.com run by Portland, OR talk show host Jeff Rense. The article bears the headline "British Hand Is Pushing Bush Into Iran War Trap." But look at the document title (the text that appears in the title bar at the top of the screen and in the google hit list) inserted by Rense: "Rothschild Zionists Pushing Bush To Attack Iran." And Rense even names the file "roth.htm." Significantly, the EIR version of the article does NOT include "Rothschild Zionists" but rather "British," as in the article's headline, and does NOT have "roth" in the file name (but rather "brit_war_trap"). One would think that if Rense had somehow distorted EIR's intent, the magazine would have complained and Rense would have restored the EIR document title. (The rense.com article is here with EIR version here.)
Jeff Rense
Rense has published many LaRouchian articles and press releases over the years; for instance a 2002 statement blaming 9/11 on the Jews (read here). As for himself, Rense claims, in a "Personal Statement from Jeff Rense," that he is "pro-Jewish" but also "anti-ZIONIST" (a trick LaRouche has also used on occasion). However, Rense gives the game away when he adds:
ZIONIST neocons want to take YOUR Freedom of Speech away with their so-called "hate laws"...which they have successfully installed in nearly a dozen otherwise free countries of Europe (and Canada) with catastrophic results that have led to the imprisonment of free men who have dared express a simple opinion at odds with the Zionist hustle and their withering agenda of domination.
ZIONISTS have no hesitation liquidating in a mass-death Holocaust any and all who attempt to question ZIONISM or call attention to its pathological efforts to impose total control on America. They want to "piss on your bones" after they murder you... (Read here or here.)
And take a look at rense.com's version of Holocaust denial, saying that the "six million" deaths were all an invention by Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg during World War Two:
He was a notorious liar and a pathological monster. He was a Jew.
As a leading member of the Soviet-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ilya Ehrenburg appeared at fund-raising rallies in the United States, raising support for the Communist cause while displaying fake bars of soap allegedly manufactured by the Germans from the corpses of dead Jews.
But Ehrenburg was perhaps most notorious for his viciously anti-German hate propaganda in World War II. In it, he exhorted Soviet troops to kill all Germans they encountered without pity.
The allegations about Ehrenburg as a war propagandist that have circulated ever since World War Two (including the charge that he called on Soviet soldiers to rape Aryan women) are largely based on Nazi forgeries or on crude mistranslations of his sophisticated prose; see the Wikipedia discussion here. And who is spreading this stuff today (beside the Institute for Historical Review)? The rense.com article urges readers to go to NS Publications for more information. NS Publications is a neo-Nazi mail-order house in Wyandotte, MI which offers books that promote national socialism and "racial science."
NS Publications poster
The list of rense.com columnists includes Winnipeg anti-Semite Henry Makow, who occasionally decodes, and presents in a direct form, the artful formulations of the LaRouchians, while also showing a certain talent for inventing code words of his own; for instance in a column here (PDF here), which informs us that "'Modernity' is Satanism, i.e. the deification of Man, i.e. Rothschild Cabalist Man." (Cf. LaRouche's use of "Children of Satan" and "Beastmen.")
Another columnist is "ex"-LaRouchian Webster Tarpley, who uses his column to bash LaRouche critic Chip Berlet ("that well-known gutter-dwelling character assassin," etc.) and defend insane conspiracy theories about 9/11 (read here). As of April 17, 2009 the topmost featured article was by another "ex"-LaRouchian, F. William Engdahl. Since the writings of Tarpley and Engdahl are strongly promoted on the website of the Argentinian neo-fascist "Movimiento Civico-Militar CONDOR" (here), I'm not surprised to see the two getting a boost from Jeff Rense as well.
NOTE: Rense has a disclaimer on his site stating that he posts various items to uphold the "idea of a free press," that we shouldn't "make 'assumptions'" about his "official position on issues" and that he believes it "to be unwise to sweep controversy under the carpet." Sounds nice, but the Jan. 10, 2007 "Personal Statement from Jeff Rense" quoted above tells us EXACTLY what his "official position" is--that the "Zionists" are out to take away our Freedom of Speech and then kill us and piss on our bones. Given this position, I somehow can't believe that Rense is filling his website with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi drivel for idealistic, freedom-loving motives.
April 10: A Freemasonic researcher dissects the LaRouche movement's allegations against his fraternal order. "Lyndon LaRouche [makes] an accusation that British Freemasonry, under the control of the House of Windsor, is secretly plotting to gain control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and build the third Temple. Like most attacks on Freemasonry, it can easily be debunked by identifying the errors in fact and logic." The author focuses mostly on a Nov. 3, 2000 article from EIR, pointing out outlandish charges that either contradict the documented facts or are not supported by reliable sources (or by any sources at all). As to the LaRouchian theory that the Freemasons and B'nai B'rith are plotting together, the author notes that this fantasy was also promoted by Nikolaus Markow in Der Kampf der dunklin Mächte (Frankfurt am Main: Welt-Dienst Verlag, 1944, p. 51). (For other possible sources of the LaRouche movement's obsession with Jews and Masons, see the writings of Erich Ludendorff, Leonard Young, Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins--Jew haters all.
COMMENT: The historic Freemasons whom LaRouche has pretended to revere at one time or another (without mentioning their Freemasonic affiliations) include George Washington, FDR, Benjamin Franklin and James Monroe (ex-LCers will remember LaRouche's drumbeats of praise for Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine during the spring of 1982 when the Argentine junta was paying the LC to stage demonstrations in support of the invasion of the Falklands by Col. Seineldin and the Virgin Mary). Franklin--an even greater hero than Seineldin in the LaRouchian pantheon--held the Freemasonic title of "Grand Master of Pennsylvania," an honorific that reminds me of former LaRouche security advisor Roy Frankhouser: the Grand Dragon of Pennsylvania (that's a KKK title, but since the LaRouchians claim the KKK was founded by Albert Pike, a Scottish Rite master, Frankhouser is a Mason by proxy...if you buy LaRouche's theory about Pike, which is not supported by any credible evidence).
This Freemason was part of a British plot? Lyn, you gotta be kidding.
Another notable Mason is Lyndon LaRouche himself--or at least he called himself one while courting the endorsement of African-American Masonic lodges during his 1979-80 Presidential campaign. LaRouche included a few of these Masons in lists of his supporters. I was working for Our Town at the time and called William V. Banks (now deceased), the founder of the International Free and Accepted Masons, to ask if the LaRouchians had bothered--when they met with him--to disclose their group's ties to the South African apartheid government or the KKK; Banks said they had not. FEC records would later show that LaRouche's 1980 campaign committee made substantial payments for advertising to a Detroit TV station owned by Banks.
LaRouche's attacks on Freemasonry appear to have often been opportunistically motivated--sometimes to curry favor with rightwing Catholics and sometimes to impress anti-Semitic/fascist allies. The one anti-Masonic theme that seems to have a consistent place within his ideology is that the Masons are an instrument for brainwashing people into becoming agents of the "British" (Jewish) oligarchy. But here LaRouche extends the Jewish brainwashee concept, which he may have picked up from Erich Ludendorff (Hitler's co-leader during the Munich Beer Hall putsch who argued that Freemasonry is used by the Jews to turn gentiles into "artificial Jews") to embrace a vast number of secret and open societies and institutions (the Fabians, the Round Table, Oxford University, the Tavistock Institute, the Anglican church, various university anthropology departments, the New Age movement, etc.), with the Masons sometimes getting lost in the shuffle.
The exceeding cleverness in LaRouche's version of rightwing conspiracy theory lies in his concept of the subterranean struggle of opposing elites, who operate via "tendencies" (a little influence of the SWP, Lyndon?) within every political party, government, cultural institution, and religious or ethnic movement. Thus if LaRouche wants to cozy up to a Mason--or someone in the Jewish community, or an aging Nazi war criminal, or the British lord whose public relations firm LaRouche hired to protect his reputation from the onslaughts of Jeremiah Duggan's mom--he can always say, oh, we only attack the bad (oligarchy-controlled) Masons, Nazis, Jews, etc.; we welcome alliances with humanistically inclined (he means proto-LaRouchian) members of these categories. This peekaboo tactic can also help LaRouche explain away embarrassing contradictions in his public pronouncements--like telling his followers to commit fundraising fraud because the great Franklin supposedly had committed similar acts to help win the Revolutionary War against the British, even though Franklin was a member of a fraternal order that LaRouche had previously described as evil, satanic and British-controlled.
LaRouche uses the same idea to justify his psychological terror tactics against his followers. The ego-stripping process is brutal? Ah, but it's intended to liberate the higher potentiality of the targeted person's mind from the selfish, Jewish-mother-dominated side. And Ken Kronberg ended up committing suicide? Alas, he was a sad casualty of a beneficent attempt to liberate his golden soulhood from the influence of his LaRouche-hating wife, who was attempting to drag him down into subhuman beasthood.
April 7: "They gassed mental defectives too." Secret British government tapes reveal that Nazi officer Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte (1907-1994)--who in his final decade would become a staunch supporter of Lyndon LaRouche--knew all about the Holocaust while serving in World War Two but still continued to fight enthusiastically for Hitler. The much-decorated paratroop colonel was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and ended up in a detention camp in England where he and other Third Reich officers were caught on tape discussing the mass killing of the Jews and other targets of Nazi racial hygiene methods, and gloating over it. The London Daily Mail reports: "At Trent Park, Colonel Dr Friedrich Von der Heydte told Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth about the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia: 'Half a million people have been put to death there for certain. I know that all the Jews from Bavaria were taken there. Yet the camp never became over-crowded. They gassed mental defectives, too.'
'Yes, I know,' replied Wildermuth. 'I got to know that for a fact in the case of Nuremberg--my brother is a doctor at an institution there. The people knew where they were being taken.'" Von der Heydte was held in England until 1947 on suspicion of committing war crimes, but was never charged.
Von der Heydte wearing the Iron
Cross that his Fuehrer awarded him.
April 3: The 1981 "Declaration of Independence" (from the tyranny of King Lyndon). This short but sweet statement of resignation by 117 members, mostly from Michigan but with many also from Texas, Illinois and Massachusetts, represented a stunning setback for LaRouche's efforts to build a nationwide movement. These individuals organized their move secretly over a period of months--right under the nose of LaRouche's security staff--to gain as much support as possible. LaRouche was enraged but could do nothing--the Detroit branch, almost all of whom signed the statement, had better ties to the Teamsters than he did. If any LaRouche Youth Movement members today are expressing a bit of an independent spirit by visiting Lyndon LaRouche Watch on the sly, I urge them to peruse this list. 117 people quitting, all at once! Maybe they had a REASON for what they did? Like a recognition that Lyn is not only tyrannical but also totally bonkers? Think about it.
April 1: "Anti-Bolshevik Action in Argentina!" This article from The New Federalist, Dec. 9, 1988, is the ultimate in LaRouchian glorification of the sinister "dirty-war" commando leader Col. Mohamed Ali Seineldin. According to the article's author (who has since left the LaRouche org), the failed coup attempt the previous week by Seineldin and the Carapintadas ("Painted Faces") had been aimed at foiling a giant Moscow plot. In fact, Argentina was in no danger of communist revolution and had a democratically elected government on friendly terms with the United States. The coup leaders had more to fear from prosecutors looking into the military's crimes during the 1970s when tens of thousands of Argentinian leftists (most of them noncombatants) were raped, tortured and/or murdered during the junta's war against an undeniably violent, but relatively small-scale, insurgency.
Seineldin in the Falklands, 1982.
The second article in this file, "Charismatic Military Leader Behind Argentine Action" (also Dec. 9, 1988) praises Seineldin as a "stauch [sic] anti-communist" and a "devout Catholic." Says he calmed the waters for the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by appealing to the Virgin Mary, and that the sea became "clear as a mirror." (Unfortunately, the Virgin did nothing to stop the British Harrier jets several weeks later.) This adulatory article was written by Carlos Wesley, an intermediary in the LaRouche organization's dealings with Panamanian cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega in the 1980s. Seineldin served in Panama in the mid-1980s first as an Argentinian military attache and then as an advisor to the Panamanian Defense Forces, training them in "dirty war" tactics before returning to his own country to take command of the coup attempt. He almost certainly was in contact with the LaRouchians in Panama, which may be why the "Anti-Bolshevik" article described LaRouche as a "friend of Col. Seineldin." But the LaRouchians could have also met him in Argentina during the junta years when emissaries of LaRouche were treated as honored guests.
I suspect LaRouche and some of his top aides had fantasies that if Seineldin seized power he would invite LaRouche down to Buenos Aires to be his economics adviser and would appoint the likes of Jeff Steinberg and Dennis Small to be security officials of his regime. (Maybe he'd even have given them land to build their own community to which he could have sent his enemies for interrogation, just as Chile's Pinochet sent prisoners to be tortured at the compound of the neo-Nazi Colonia Dignidad cult.) But LaRouchian fantasies aside, these two New Federalist articles are among the many HUNDREDS of examples from LaRouche's publications (read dozens of them here) that refute the delusional claim by certain ex-LaRouche followers that LaRouche is just some kind of weird leftist and that he--and they--were never, never, never sympathizers of any brand of fascism.
April 1: John Flannery's dossier on the LaRouche organization (1986). Flannery is a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to the U.S. Senate who ended up as one of the attorneys for LaRouche's followers in Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Richard Freeman et al., a case that resulted in several defendants being convicted of securities fraud. Earlier, however, according to a 1987 Stipulation of Facts in the case (to which Flannery's dossier, in the form of a chronological outline, is appended), Flannery had met with Loudoun County Sheriff John Isom to exchange information about the LaRouchians, who had become a source of great annoyance for the county's ordinary citizens, and had expressed an interest in being appointed as special prosecutor on the case. During this meeting, Flannery presented Isom with a photocopy of the dossier, which he had prepared--according to the Stipulation--"for reasons and purposes not related to the meeting." I have highlighted several items from the chronology that I found amusing or of substantive interest.
John Flannery, Esq.
The most important item describes the LaRouchians' 1982 effort to defend U.S. Labor Secretary Ray Donovan--then under investigation for alleged connections to organized crime--by seeking damaging information on the Senate investigators, and suggests that LaRouche's minions did find embarrassing information about at least one Senate staffer. Flannery himself had been appointed by Senate Labor Committee chair Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) to investigate the Donovan confirmation hearings, so he would know whereof he speaks.
For more on the LaRouchians and the
Donovan probe, go to Chapter 38 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, where I discuss how LaRouche security chief Jeff Steinberg had made inquiries about the outside Special Prosecutor's investigation of Donovan, and especially about whether a former official of Tony Provenzano's Teamster Local 560 named Fred Furino was cooperating with the probe--shortly thereafter, Furino was found dead in a car trunk. Roy Frankhouser once told me Paul Goldstein did it. I flatly don't believe this--and only mention it because today is April Fool's day--although Goldstein may have tried to give Frankhouser that impression (the two were always bullshitting each other). But certainly some of the LaRouchians were trying to dabble in the mob world during that period; for information on the Genovese crime family associates and other thugs they were in contact with, go to Gangsters, Inc.'s web page re the New York mob of the "Roaring 1970s" era.
March 31: More hypocrisy on abortion from LaRouche's so-called Club of Life. Pro-life report to COL conference in Wiesbaden, Germany (2001) by LaRouche follower who seems oblivious to the fact that the cult had coerced its own members into having hundreds of abortions over the previous quarter century. At the time of this report, most of LaRouche's Boomers were past the child-bearing age, but the cult was already pressuring newly-recruited LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) members to undergo abortions. In effect, the European Boomers who participated in the COL conference were helping to create a deceptive cover that would facilitate the cult's ongoing practice of forced abortion, with lasting emotional trauma for LYM women. [Commentary by Dennis King blames Janet Reno, Clinton's attorney general, for allowing LaRouche's early release from prison, which enabled him to crack down on the trend that had developed among his followers during his incarceration, of families giving birth to or adopting children--a trend that might have led to the cult's dissolution if the DOJ had kept LaRouche where he belonged.]
March 30: How LaRouche hired a New England mobster to help with his 1980 Presidential campaign. NBC-TV correspondent Mark Nykanen testifies about his meeting with George Kattar ("Cator" in the transcript), a self-described coin dealer and real estate investor in Salem, New Hampshire [whose business was known locally as "Piranha, Inc."--DK]. Nykanen describes his interview with Kattar: "He said that he was approached by Lyndon LaRouche and about a dozen or so of his, and these are his words now, gun-toting followers. Said they had all kinds of guns on them. They came in and they said, you know, we're running in this election [the New Hampshire Democratic primary], we need your help." In addition, Nykanen outlines his evidence--including Congressional testimony by a former mobster--that Kattar was an associate of the New England-based Patriarcha crime family.
George Kattar, CEO of Piranha, Inc.
March 30: LaRouche testifies on his favorite subject--Elizabeth Windsor. LaRouche's followers on Wikipedia flatly deny that Der Abscheulicher ever called Queen Elizabeth a drug pusher. But in 1984, LaRouche himself admitted--in testimony under oath in federal court--to having said exactly that. And don't be confused by his qualification that he made the accusation in a "specific context." ALL human statements are made in a specific context.
March 28: Swimming in the sea of Germany's far right? Evidence of a murky relationship between LaRouche and the German neo-Nazi Ekkehard Franke-Gricksch, described here as "a kind of Willis Carto" (a reference to the founder of the U.S. Holocaust Denial movement). I took this bit of esoterica (apparently part of ongoing research) from Factnet and added pictures.
March 22: A pattern begins to reveal itself. Forced abortion is not just a quirk of the LaRouche movement, but is the policy of other cults as well--and may be a public health concern on a wider scale than anyone has suspected. Here, added to our menu of items on abortion in the LaRouche org, are examples from Scientology, Social Therapy, other groups...with more to come.
March 20: Erica Duggan and her supporters will march right into the enemy camp! Details on public meeting to be held in Wiesbaden, Germany on Friday, March 27 at the Crowne Plaza, 11 am to 1 pm. Wiesbaden is the city where Erica's son Jeremiah died under unexplained circumstances, the city where the LaRouche organization has its European headquarters, the city from whence the LaRouche organization targets youth throughout Germany with anti-Semitic hate propaganda (in violation of the nation's Basic Law) and the city where the police department looks the other way whenever its favorite fascist cult does anything suspicious. Will LaRouche's thugs try to break up Erica's meeting or the memorial march to the site where Jeremiah's body was found? Will the cops stand by and let the LaRouchians engage in violence? SPREAD THE NEWS ABOUT THIS MEETING ON BLOGS AND MESSAGE BOARDS. EMAIL IT Y0UR FRIENDS IN THE MEDIA. LET THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT KNOW THAT THE WORLD WILL BE WATCHING!
BREAKING THE SILENCE!
Site where Jeremiah Duggan's body was found.
JUSTICE FOR JEREMIAH PUBLIC MEETING We invite the PRESS and the Wiesbaden PUBLIC!
Fri., March 27, 2009, 11 am - 1 pm
CROWNE PLAZA (Conference room: BACH) Bahnhofstr. 10
65185 Wiesbaden, Germany
Before
our Berlin Conference last fall, acts of intimidation and defamation were aimed
to muzzle the Press by those not wanting to respect our right as
citizens to examine publicly the dangers.
Other events on this day will honour the memory of Jeremiah Duggan, who died in Wiesbaden six years
ago.
For more
information:
http://justiceforjeremiah.com/NEW/wiesbaden032709.htm
. |
March 16: Lyndon LaRouche, you're no Eisenhower. The blogger named "European" provides more evidence of the need for rest for combat troops, plus a description of how he came to realize the insanity of the Labor Committee's fantasy war-mobilization cycle (little sleep and lots of work, seven days a week).
NOTE: LaRouche used to dream about having his own military forces (the U.S. Army plus the German Army under "neo-Platonic humanist" rule) and a Christmas stocking full of chemical, bacteriological and nuclear weapons (not to speak of the package under the tree: cobalt bombs that would spread the radiation eastward with giant fans). Good thing for the Germans that this Drang nach Osten was all just pie in the sky: LaRouche's exhausted troops--hallucinating from lack of sleep--would probably have dropped the bombs or released the microbes on the wrong side of the border.
March 15: "We're at war!" Ex-LCer "European" comments on the nonstop pseudo-military hysteria in the LaRouche movement--and the rigorous "14/7" work schedules that are imposed on recruits. Points out the disconnect between these schedules and the realities of real warfare. [Lyndon LaRouche Watch adds a quote from General Dwight D. Eisenhower.]
March 12: Forced abortions were common in Scientology as well as in the LaRouche movement. Affidavit of Mary Tabayoyon, Aug. 26, 1994. Ms. Tabayoyon was a member of Scientology's Sea Org, a tightly disciplined inner cadre of the church. She states that Sea Org women "were forbidden to have any more children if they were to stay on post and the Hubbard technology was applied to coercively persuade us to have abortions....[We were told] that we had the responsibility on our shoulders for the expansion of Scientology and freeing mankind....We, at this high level, could not afford the time and resources it would take to raise children. Having children was found to undermine our production and our purpose." Also describes the harsh punishment dished out to Sea Org women, after their abortions, for getting pregnant in the first place. Says that the abortions--possibly many dozens of them--were performed at a single Planned Parenthood clinic.
L. Ron Hubbard's good ship "Apollo": When it was in port,
the Sea Org slaves were marched to the abortion clinic.
March 10: Pressure to have abortions in the Swedish branch of LaRouche's movement. A former member who was active in the European wing from the 1980s into the 2000s, recalls (in a posting on his new "Why Lyndon LaRouche is a fraud!" blog) that when a woman in the Swedish leadership gave birth in 1986, "the response of Helga Zepp-LaRouche was 'if they feel lonely they should get a dog instead of a child.'" The blogger sums up Helga and Lyn's underlying policy: "To have children is expensive, they would have to be fed and encouraged to develop....The CAUSE, the 24/7 warlike mobilization for the future of mankind is the only thing that matters...."
March 10: "LaRouche's revolution devours its children." Molly Kronberg describes Der Abscheulicher's opposition to his followers becoming parents: "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." Yet when members of the Labor Committee defied LaRouche and had families anyway, LaRouche simply tried to recruit the kids as a new generation of cult slaves. Mrs. Kronberg says she told her son, when he was growing up, that if anyone tried to recruit him to the LaRouche Youth Movement, he should say "I'm not joining any organization that tried to have me aborted."
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Steak for her
dogs, poverty for the cult's rank and file.
March 9: Did LaRouche mimic German ultranationalists of the 1950s when he formed the "Schiller Institute"? Excerpts here from Kurt Tauber's monumental Beyond Eagle and Swastika (1967) describe how Nazi poet Herbert Böhme formed the radical nationalist Schillerbund Deutschland and its youth group, the Schiller League of German Youth. Tauber jokes about how Böhme liked to hold conferences on the Klüt, a mountain that was the traditional haunt of the Pied Piper. LaRouche, certainly a Pied Piper of sorts for contemporary European and American youth, would later form both the Schiller Institute for adults and the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), which is referred to sometimes by German LaRouchians as the LaRouche Jugend. Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish university student from the U.K., was invited by members of the LYM to attend the 2003 Schiller Institute conference in Bad Schwalbach--and ended up dead.
Tauber's two-volume masterpiece is rich in examples of German far-right use in the two decades after World War Two of euphemisms, peekaboo phrases and cryptic framings (examples here include the code words "Morgenthauism" for Jewish influence, "Third Nation" for Third Reich, "period of fate" for the years of Nazi rule, and "spiritual freedom" for extreme nationalism/revanchism). A careful reader will discern that these tricks are not very different from the ones LaRouche began using in the late 1970s and still employs today.
The great Kurt Tauber, Professor
Emeritus of Williams College.
March 9: How LaRouche's "Club of Life" suckered a distinguished Colombian.
The Feb. 22, 1983 issue of LaRouche's EIR included a translation of an article that had appeared earlier that month in leading Colombian newspapers. The byline given was that of "Jaime
Sanin Cheverri" (journalist, academic and man of letters Jaime
Sanín Echeverri, 1922-2008). Sanín hails Lyndon and Helga LaRouche and their Club of Life for fighting against the population-control-oriented Club of Rome. He alleges that the Club of Rome, with its "incomparable financial power," has "spread propaganda for and practiced contraception, sterilization of females and males, abortion, and ultimately, the most sinister plans to assassinate the elderly and the handicapped." He contrasts this supposedly evil organization with the "men and women of the Club of Life [who] offer a promising future for all mankind."
Doubtless Sanín was unaware of the LaRouche organization's hypocritical practice of enforced abortion within its own ranks and its predatory financial practices targeting the elderly (much less its exploitation of the handicapped). EIR's introduction to the article describes Sanín as a "close friend of President
Belisario Betancur" (Belisario Betancur Cuartas, b. 1923, was Colombia's president from 1982-86). If the two were in fact close, Betancur appears not to have been influenced by Sanín's enthusiasm for LaRouche. Betancur is currently (as of 2009) the vice-president of the Club of Rome for Latin America. As to the Club of Life, it no longer exists. LaRouche purged the Catholics and other Christians from his organization and moved on to "fresh scams and con games new."
Feb. 27: LaRouche's ban on children. Comments by "xlcr4life" on Molly Kronberg's "forced abortion" article. "A few years ago, Lyn waltzed through the Leesburg office and declared that he was a grandfather as his son's wife had just given birth....People who were there could not help but see the looks of disgust and pain on the faces of many LC women who had to hear that from Lyn." Article also deals with the problems of parents who defied LaRouche to have kids, only to have their children funneled years later into the hellish LaRouche Youth Movement.
Feb. 26: "Forced abortion" in the LaRouche cult: Molly Kronberg gives the full story. Widow of Ken Kronberg and mother of Max discusses the devastating effect of LaRouche's abortion-or-else policy on many women in the cult. Describes a "particularly ghastly forced abortion" that involved "one of the most extreme cases of psychological abuse I have ever seen." And the rationale? "We were told that Plato didn't believe in generating children of the body, but children of the mind. Aside from the fact that Socrates had children, this was about as malevolent as you can get--invoking Plato to try to stampede someone into aborting a baby."
Feb. 26: The ultimate hypocrisy on abortion. Here's a 1983 pamphlet of LaRouche's Club of Life (COL). Note highlighted passages that show how the LaRouchians tried to pose as part of the Right to Life movement. The "Founding Principles" section states that "human life must be defended from the time of conception..." The "highlights" section includes a description of a Jan. 2003 COL conference held in Madrid, supposedly with the participation of Right to Life activists; this was at the same time the LaRouchians were lobbying the Spanish security forces to set up the anti-Basque death squads out of which "Operation Mengele" would emerge (read here).
Feb. 26: And look who was in charge of LaRouche's so-called right to life group. This pamphlet (which again affirms that life must be defended from the "time of conception") shows that the Club of Life's U.S. chairperson was none other than Nancy Spannaus, who has been identified by Molly Kronberg and others as playing a key role in enforcing the "abortion or else" policy in the LaRouche cult. Furthermore, the pamphlet lists Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Ms. Spannaus's role model--see Kronberg article above) as the COL's founder. Note Spannaus's wacko article in which she accuses the average citizens of the developed world (brainwashed of course by a cabal of international bankers) of being willing to "pull the plug" on their own grandmothers. At the time this was published, the LaRouche organization had already begun a huge fundraising campaign that would result in their stealing the life savings of grandmothers all over the United States. Spannaus also complains about the public's alleged acquiescence in "euthanasia, suicide, and withdrawal of medical treatment from 'marginal' people." Yet in more recent years it has been LaRouche, with the help of his wife and Ms. Spannaus, who has withheld decent medical care from his own aging followers, whom he now regards as worthless burnouts. And it was LaRouche who suggested in 2007 that these boomers--especially Ken Kronberg--might as well commit suicide.
Club of Life's Nancy Spannaus. Note the
Elizabeth Clare Prophet-style New Age
aura/halo around her head in this electoral
campaign photo. Helga LaRouche,
I suspect, was not amused.
Feb. 26: Hundreds of abortions at LaRouche's command. Ex-LCers speak out about how the right of LaRouchian women to choose life was underminded by a system of control involving psychological abuse, ostracism, even beatings. This is the full menu of old and new files on this website re forced abortion in the cult of Der Abscheulicher.
Jan. 10: More evidence that LaRouche can be held responsible in a civil case for the deaths of Kronberg and Duggan. In a rare internal document, "The Present Internal Situation," written at a high point (March 1974) in his initial experiments with ego-stripping, LaRouche admits that the challenges he posits may result in individuals falling into psychological conditions that lead toward "disassociation and possible paranoid-schizophrenic episodes." Says that the org must "accept the danger of casualties." Says "[d]on't be terrified by such casualties when they occur." And: "It is better to die than to let the bastards turn one into a zombie." By this logic, I guess LaRouche thinks he did Ken Kronberg a favor, 33 years later, by driving him to suicide and thus preventing him from becoming a zombie for Molly, the Republican Party, Dick Cheney, et al.
NOTE: LaRouche, as usual, couches his language somewhat ambiguously. For instance he predicts the org will suffer "hideous casualties" among members "notably vulnerable to brainwashing." Does he just mean brainwashing by the CIA or the KGB? Not bloody likely: The only "brainwashing" methods his followers ever experienced were the ego-stripping sessions and inducements to organizational hysteria that LaRouche himself orchestrated. And, in this remarkable document, he gives us a pretty good idea of exactly how and why he's doing it (note the references to the need to raise more money to save the human race from extinction).
Ken Kronberg: just another "casualty" in
LaRouche's war against personal demons?
Dec. 23 (2008): "I Was a Drone for Lyndon LaRouche," by Anonymous. "When I first joined it was the custom to give one night off a week plus Sunday, but for the last few years it was seven days a week with no pretense of providing time to foster the intellectual development of the membership."
Dec. 22: "T'was the night before Christmas and Lyndon was snoring/But no dreams of sugarplums: that would be boring..." To see what LaRouche REALLY wants for Christmas, follow this link.
Dec. 18: Ex-LaRouche follower tells how to construct a conspiracy theory about your enemies in one easy lesson. "When the party is over with a person or group, then you can use the six degrees of separation principal to show how they were part of an all-encompassing evil conspiracy since the time the first primitive humans took a baby step."
Dec. 18: "The sad tale of Jeremiah Duggan." From Muxuyou's Blog (Dec. 16, 2008): "Whereas most of us would have left the weirdly named 'Schiller Institute'...when the bizarre political diatribes began...including blaming the Iraq war on 'the Jews,' Duggan stood up and proclaimed: 'But I'm a Jew!' Wasn't there someone in the room with the remnants of a conscience who told him that he should get the fuck out of there for his own safety? Apparently not or he wouldn't have died under extremely suspicious circumstances."
Dec. 18: The children of the LaRouche cult. "It had never occurred to me the great paradox that must forever live in a LaRouchie-parented child's mind: If Lyndon LaRouche had not been in prison, they would never have been born."
Dec. 18: Leaving the LaRouche cult. "I had to 'hit bottom' with LaRouche before I could even begin to steer clear of the wreckage my life had become; unfortunately, this appears to be the only way out of a cult--just to be honest with yourself about the desperation of your own personal situation and to walk into a counseling center or police station and ask for help getting out."
Dec. 18: LaRouche admits that ego-stripping is an extremely dangerous psychological method. Here is how he puts it in Beyond Psychoanalysis (1973): "Since the analyst [psychoanalyst] is unable to offer his subject a mass-movement orientation in which to locate a new, positive social identity, if the analyst were concerned to strip away the persona, the result would be FREQUENT PSYCHOSES AND SUICIDES among the individuals so stripped of those protective illusions which hide from them the emptiness of their individual qua individual lives." (emphasis added)
But if psychoanalysts--medical doctors with years of specialized psychiatric training--do not practice such a dangerous method, why is it okay for LaRouche, who has no mental health credentials whatsoever, to employ it? LaRouche suggests that he, unlike the psychoanalysts, can offer the ego-stripped victim an alternative to psychosis and suicide, i.e., the reconstruction of his or her personality on socialist lines and as part of a mass movement.
And he states, in his usual turgid prose: "Because the activity of socialist groups is task-oriented toward attempting to explore and remove bourgeois ideology, and since the psychodynamics of ideology are only the more general form for the psychodynamics of neurosis, the intellectual preoccupations of the socialist profession properly impel the movement, however reluctantly, to converge upon much of the work of psychoanalysis in that respect."
NOTE: LaRouche used pithier language to state his intent in an August 1973 speech, the transcript of which was circulated as an internal document: "I will...destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical. I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee. I shall not pull you back from fleeing, but rather destroy the place to which you would attempt to flee." ("The Politics of Male Impotence"; read it HERE.)
Dec. 14: How to recruit a slave for LaRouche. A former member reveals the basic techniques: "So the mama's boy who's never done anything in his life is going to come here and say 'Alex made some homosexual kid cry and I want my mommy'...are you homosexual, Frank? Is that it? Is that why you haven't been able to raise any money out there?"
Dec. 12: "The Little Boy Who Never Was," by Michael Scott Winstead (from Factnet, 2004). An account of one of the hundreds of cases of enforced abortion in the LaRouche cult: "And they pushed her tearfully into the car, and into the clinic, and they signed her consent forms, and they had her child vacuumed out of her."
Dec. 11: Want to know why LaRouche keeps harping on the theme that Jeremiah Duggan's parents are part of a Fabian Society plot? Read here an early LaRouche attack (1976) on the venerable U.K. social-democratic intellectual circle in which he makes it crystal clear that he thinks the Fabians are a policy-connivance, dirty-tricks and intellectual contamination operation controlled by the Rothschild family--or, as he would call the latter in The Case of [the Jew] Walter Lippmann the following year, "the British (Rothschilds)." And note LaRouche's use of the term "fungus-cultures," which foreshadows his current employment of the epithet "slime-mold" to characterize the conspiracy against himself that he claims the Duggans, the Fabian Society, Tony Blair, Dick and Lynne Cheney and the "British" bankers are all part of.
Dec. 9: Anyone who's thinking of quitting the LaRouche Youth Movement should read this. Chaim, a young person who left shortly after 9-11, found that the LaRouchians were totally unable to acknowledge that he had developed real doubts and disagreements. Instead, they insisted he was just "blocking." How could they have done otherwise? To acknowledge that legitimate doubts are possible would have undermined "LaRouche's image and infallibility."
Dec. 9: LaRouche and the suicide of the Freedom Rider. In The Power of Reason, his 1979 autobiography, LaRouche describes an odd incident in the early 1960s that may shed light on how he would later respond to the suicide of Ken Kronberg and the death of Jeremiah Duggan.
LaRouche claims that he began--during a period of increasing tension with his first wife--to provide "personal counseling" to a troubled young man named Griswold, a former Freedom Rider. After a number of visits, Griswold was making progress...until, supposedly, LaRouche's wife intervened. "An intruded household scene, during which [she] carelessly included savage complaints against my 'uncompensated' help to Griswold, so profoundly disturbed him that I never heard from him again--until being informed, some months later, of his suicide." LaRouche alleges that the news of Griswold's death killed his "last strong feeling" for his marriage and helped to establish in him "a deepening ruthlessness toward any aspect of personal life which corrupted the dictate of conscience in respect to the duties of public life."
>
The wise mentor (with his pipe as stage prop).
Is there a pattern here? LaRouche serves as a mentor to a younger man. When the latter commits suicide, LaRouche blames his own wife and develops a new "ruthlessness" regarding the primacy of the political over the personal. Years later, LaRouche becomes a ruthless (to say the least) mentor to another young man who, after decades of service to LaRouche, commits suicide. LaRouche blames the suicide's wife. And then there's the young man who decides he doesn't want LaRouche to be his mentor at all--he ends up dead, LaRouche claims this death was a suicide, and blames the young man's mother.
Thus we have three suicides (real or alleged), three witch-women--and a completely innocent (if ruthless) Lyndon! I leave the explanation of all this to the psychiatrists, but I do have two final questions: Why did LaRouche, a college dropout with no mental health credentials, undertake to serve as a counselor to Griswold? And why did LaRouche, in later years, having earned no credentials in the interim, presume to practice the "ruthless" form of therapy known as ego-stripping on other young people, many of them possibly as troubled as Griswold had been?
Dec. 9: The LaRouche movement's view of the suicide of Arthur Koestler (1983). Anyone who wants to understand why LaRouche suggested in April 2007 that Ken Kronberg kill himself--and why LaRouche and his followers behaved in such a callous (indeed, sadistic) manner towards the Kronberg family after Ken went out and did it--will find a partial explanation here, in the sick "humor" of this editorial from LaRouche's New Solidarity, March 14, 1983.
The anonymous editorial writer, in commenting on the double suicide of the eminent Jewish author (referred to euphemistically as a "Hungarian-emigré intelligence agent for the British") and his wife Cynthia, says the "world might benefit if a selected few took the Koestlers as a heroic example." The editorialist then fantasizes about various fitting modes of suicide for Jews and non-Jews hated by the LaRouche organization: Henry Kissinger, Nancy Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Swiss banker Fritz Leutwiler, and Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei (the latter, it is suggested, should turn his body over "to the local dogfood manufacturer"). And then: "We could go further, but why should the worthwhile vast majority of the human race settle for attempts to solve its antisocial problems on a case-by-case basis? Why not get organized to settle with such characters all at once?"
Oh, and readers should note the emphasis on husband-wife suicide: first, the real-life example of the Koestlers; second, the fantasy example of the Kissingers. There's an eerie parallel here to what the LaRouchian troll "revenire" has been saying on blogs recently: that Molly Kronberg should join her husband (and Jeremiah Duggan) on the "jumper brigade." Hmmmm...I wonder if revenire's IP address can be traced back to the environs of Round Hill, Virginia...
Dec. 8: Ex-followers of LaRouche blast his insults to Jeremiah Duggan's mom and his attempts to evade any responsibility for Jeremiah's death. "What kind of a man, desperate to exculpate himself, blames a bereaved mother for her son's death--and somehow thinks that makes him look good?"
These postings from Factnet (with footnotes by D. King) also express outrage over LaRouche's attempts to block any new probe of what happened to Jeremiah. The postings are by three ex-members (and a close relative of a current longtime member) who possess in the aggregate over 50 years of experience in and around LaRouche's hostile and paranoid cult-world. If people with this depth of knowledge believe there's a strong possibility that Jeremiah was murdered, that is yet another powerful reason for supporting the call for a new investigation.
Dec. 1: Blood libel, anyone? This illustration appeared in "Rockefeller's Fascism with a Democratic Face," the book-length article that comprised the Nov.-Dec. 1974 issue of LaRouche's theoretical magazine The Campaigner. I don't know the original provenance of the drawing, but within the editorial context of the "Rockefeller" Campaigner (and given the dynamics of the LaRouche organization at the time), I think it is a clear expression of anti-Semitic paranoia--and note the hooked nose on the biggest of the four banker-vampires.
As of 1974 the LaRouche organization still employed a Marxist and "anti-fascist" rhetoric of sorts, but the main emphasis in the Rockefeller Campaigner was on attacking international financiers and speculators in a manner redolent of post-World War One fascism and national socialism. And LaRouche had already published his notorious footnotes to the "Feuerbach" Campaigner (Dec. 1973) attacking the Jews (with nary a protest from his followers) as merchant-usurers who lack a "Christian conscience" and alleging that their culture is "merely the residue left...after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim" (read here).
In addition, the May 1974 Campaigner had started the practice of labeling the British and U.S. troops who fought against Hitler as being an "SS," with the implication that the crimes of the German SS were, well, not good, but at least no worse than those of the Allies. (The cover of the May 1974 issue even depicted Hitler's great foe Winston Churchill as a 1930s Bugsy Siegel-style gangster; see here.) And the "SS"-ness of the Allied military was blamed, in part, on one of LaRouche's earliest Symbolic Evil Jews: the psychologist Kurt Lewin, a refugee from Nazism whom LaRouche depicts as having had almost demonic powers for brainwashing individuals and the masses.
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947): LaRouche's
symbolic evil Jewish psychologist.
Thus LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) was already well on its way to effecting the cognitive inversion of reality in which the Jews are seen as Nazis "100 times worse" than the German ones, and the latter are regarded as having been Jewish puppets (i.e., shadow Nazis who were neo-Platonic reflections of the Jewish ones) or, by their fight against the British, as objectively ANTI-NAZI (because the British, and Adolf Hitler, were supposedly under the control of Jewish oligarchs plotting to kill billions of people, not just millions). The full development of this lunacy was still a couple of years off, but the grotesque illustration of human-blood-quaffing bankers in the "Rockefeller" Campaigner shows where the NCLC was already headed.
And I should add that Daniel S. Messinger, today a developmental psychologist at the University of Miami, was absolutely right when, after interviewing ex-LaRouchians in the early 1980s as a University of Chicago graduate student, he concluded in a lengthy study that the psychosocial aspects of the LaRouche movement had been essentially fascist in character from the early 1970s on. Belated kudos to Messinger for thinking outside the box--and discerning the reality beneath the rhetoric.
Dec. 1: LaRouche's fixation on damage control. After posting the NCLC chairman's 1973 statement about how ego-stripping sometimes creates "a bit of a mess to be cleaned up" (Nov. 29 item directly below), I received a tip from "eaglebeak," an ex-LaRouche follower with many sources inside the cult's headquarters in Leesburg, about Lyndon's more recent use of such terminology. It would appear that Der Abscheulicher's cynical disregard for the well-being (or even the physical survival) of his followers has remained unchanged over the decades.
Nov. 29: Was Jeremiah Duggan, to LaRouche, just "a bit of a mess to be cleaned up"? In his Beyond Psychoanalysis treatise (The Campaigner, Sept.-Oct. 1973), Der Abscheulicher reveals his disdain for the psychological crises triggered in young recruits by "ego stripping" group-confrontation sessions, and also admits that he is fully aware of the dangers involved in the use of such tactics.
In the final five-page section ("The Psychology of Mass Organizing"; excerpted here from the pamphlet version published in late 1973), LaRouche describes in detail his theory of how "bourgeois ideology" can be destroyed in the minds of both his "petty-bourgeois" intellectual cadre and his hoped-for working-class recruits through ego "stripping and rebuilding processes." Suggests that he can overcome the "neurotic bourgeois deformations of the personality of the individual cadres." Discusses, within a Marxist framework, the problem of how to use psychological confrontation to remold the personalities of "worker contacts." (Since LaRouche has long since jettisoned Marxism and now focuses on building an elitist youth movement, the reader should translate "worker contacts" circa 1973 into "youth contacts" circa 2008.)
LaRouche provides us with his first zinger on p. 51: "He [the practitioner of ego stripping] succeeds in either organizing or estranging worker-contacts on the basis of induced heteronomic rage. (Either way, the organization is thus confronted with a bit of a mess to be cleaned up.)"
DK: I would like to be sitting in U.S. federal court (civil division) during a future trial of Lyn and Helga LaRouche for violating Jeremiah Duggan's civil rights--and listening as the Duggan family's attorney asks Lyn what a "bit of a mess to be cleaned up" means, and whether LaRouche disciple Jean Gabriel Maheo manifested an "induced heteronomic rage" towards Jeremiah in Wiesbaden, Germany during the early morning hours of March 27, 2003.
The second zinger is found on p. 52 in LaRouche's discussion of "clinical group confrontations" within his movement. He writes: "The hazard in utilizing the powerful concentrated social forces of an entire organization to effect forced [!!!] therapy ought to be more or less obvious." He describes how his movement had experimented with this methodology during a "preliminary period of several weeks of intensive sessions by member groups in the U.S.A. and Western Europe." He boasts that these sessions occurred with "an absolute minimum of instances of neurotic episodes in individual participants," but then admits in the next sentence that success had been achieved "[d]espite the disturbing, although much-reduced incidence of neurotic behaviors..."
LaRouche pays lip service to such hazards by suggesting that ego-stripping methods should be conducted only "under rigorous control of qualified leading individuals..." Nevertheless, he writes, "the approximation of clinical group confrontations within the limits of clear and restricted task-orientations is absolutely mandatory."
DK: I would like to be present when the Duggans' attorney in the above-predicted civil rights suit asks LaRouche why ego-stripping of ANY sort should have been made "mandatory"? And what constitutes a "qualified" practitioner? And what training are such individuals given? And who provides the training and then makes the decision that a particular person is qualified--LaRouche himself? And what gives LaRouche--a man with only a high school education and no experience whatsoever in the mental health field--the capability to provide such training and make such decisions?
Nov. 20: The thuggery of LaRouche's Wiesbaden gang goes way, way back. "Earnest One," a close relative of a long-time LaRouche activist, tells of his own nasty encounter with the group's recruiters at a conference in Wiesbaden in the late 1970s. Says they told him that if he didn't agree to join up they'd do serious physical harm to his relative. "I was carted off to a room where a team...kept me sleep deprived for six straight days as they conducted one of their infamous ego-stripping sessions." Earnest One draws on this experience to create a fictional scenario of how a cult recruitment process gone wrong might result in a victim such as Jeremiah Duggan dying in a "state of terror." The insights of Earnest One are offered in the course of an online debate with the most annoying LaRouche apologist one is ever likely to meet online or anywhere else.
Nov. 11: Have the LaRouchians no shame? Vicious Executive Intelligence Review attack on Jeremiah Duggan's mom. The following appeared in EIR, Dec. 15, 2006: "In reviewing the ongoing smear campaign, LaRouche raised a pointed question in the light of Erica Duggan's obsessive, aggressive campaign: What did Jeremy's mother say to her son in the phone conversation which they had right before he ran out to commit suicide? It has been well documented that Jeremy was a deeply disturbed youth, who had already been treated by the Tavistock Clinic as a child, after the breakup of his parents' marriage. Erica Duggan's behavior has all the earmarks of a guilt-ridden parent, whose own neurosis is being used by those political forces wishing to harm the LaRouche movement. LaRouche asked: What ugly secret is Erica Duggan trying to cover up? What did she say to Jeremy? That is the question the media should be raising..."
DK: Once again, LaRouche can't get Jeremiah's name right (hey, Lyndon, even Eichmann kept careful records of the names of the Jews HE killed). Note also that the suggestion that Mrs. Duggan somehow triggered her son's death foreshadows LaRouche's use of the exact same argument four months later re the suicide of Ken Kronberg--that it was something Molly Kronberg did or said, not LaRouche's own explicit suggestion to Ken, which triggered the printer's leap from a highway overpass.
Nov. 8: Parents from across the world speak out against LaRouche's exploitation of their loved ones. Detailed statements re the LaRouche Youth Movement's effect on recruits: sudden personality changes...robotic mouthing of slogans...anger and hysteria...delusional thinking...separation from family and friends...the abandonment of university studies, career goals and personal dreams to join LaRouche's all-consuming crusade against an imaginary global conspiracy.
Nov. 7: A discussion among ex-followers of LaRouche: Is he responsible for Jeremiah Duggan's death? "The LAST thing you want at a [LaRouche conference] is a Jeremiah Duggan asking questions...In the crazy world of LaRouche profiling, a British Jew who knows about Tavistock and just called your group's views on Jews and Tavistock crazy is not going to be high on the friendly list."
Nov. 7: "Jewish Student's Death in Germany Was Murder, Experts Say," Arutz Sheva (Israel), Nov. 2. "Although Jeremiah's blood-soaked address book was found in his pocket, his passport was not. Instead, his passport, which was also stained with his blood, was later handed to the police by Ortrum Cramer, one of LaRouche's followers....Cramer has never been asked how the passport came into her possession."
Nov. 7: "Cult death student's family in court fight for new inquest," Daily Mail (London), Nov. 1. "New evidence gathered by three top forensic specialists shows the young student was savagely beaten to death with a blunt instrument. Their reports said that the damage sustained by his body could not have been caused by vehicles hitting him, and appeared to have been deliberately inflicted."
Nov. 7: "Overseas fight for son's justice," Harrow Observer (London), Oct. 23. Report on Berlin conference quotes Hugo Duggan, Jeremiah's father: "Former members of [the LaRouche organization] gave powerful statements and damning accounts about the group. These people do not normally speak out...It was a very positive meeting with people coming together to make sure we are in the process of blowing this far-right organisation away and we will continue to campaign for justice."
Hugo Duggan, father of Jeremiah.
Nov. 6: "High court grants mother new inquest," Times-Series (London), Nov. 6. The wall of denial finally begins to crack! Erica Duggan's lawyers have successfully argued that the U.K. Attorney General's refusal to allow a second inquest into the death of Mrs. Duggan's son, Jeremiah, "should be amenable to review, allowing Mrs. Duggan to resubmit her case to the High Court." Mrs Duggan says: "This is the best outcome we could have wished for. The court said we had a lot of important evidence that the original post mortem missed. Hopefully the application for a new inquest will now just be a formality. We are not expecting anyone to oppose it." In other words, a new inquest will look at the forensic evidence that Jeremiah may have been beaten to death, including the fact that his passport, with his blood on it, was in the possession of the LaRouchians, not on his body, when the body was examined by the police at the putative "suicide" scene. This could finally lead to the British government putting heavy pressure on the German government to stop covering up for Lyn and Helga LaRouche and their far-right Jew-hating thugs in Wiesbaden.
Nov. 6: "Inquest win for student's family," BBC News, Nov. 5. "The family of a student killed in a 'state of terror' after unwittingly attending a far-right event in Germany have come closer to a fresh inquest..."
Nov. 4: A powerful analysis by "eaglebeak" of the Berlin anti-LaRouche conference. "When the LaRouche leadership seems to have something very intimate to do with the death of a loved one, and then denies it, covers it up, lies about it, and blames the dead person and the dead person's bereaved family for the death--it has the effect of creating an implacable demand for justice against LaRouche and all his epigonoi."
Ex-members, parents, experts speak out.
Nov. 3: Report on the Oct. 17, 2008 Berlin anti-LaRouche conference. Parents, experts, politicians, lawyers spoke out more strongly than ever about LaRouche's psychological terror tactics, intimidation of opponents, expoitation of young people, and coded anti-Semitism. And speaker after speaker urged the German government to finally launch a serious investigation of the case of Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish university student from the U.K. who traveled to Germany for a LaRouche-sponsored event in March 2003--and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances.
Oct. 31: "Rights leader sentenced to 15 years for incest" (Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2008). Former LaRouche Vice-Presidential running mate and civil rights activist James Bevel had raped his own underage daughter. "[The prosecution] revealed that at least four other daughters Bevel had with various women have made similar allegations against him." And: "The assault occurred in the early 1990s in Loudoun County, when Bevel was working closely with the Virginia-based organization led by...Lyndon LaRouche."
DK: Lyndon sure knows how to pick 'em for his self-styled movement of neo-Platonic humanist golden souls. Remember how Rev. Bevel served as the public face for LaRouche's 1992 jailhouse race for the Presidency? Remember how Bevel described LaRouche as the successor to the mantle of Martin Luther King? And how Bevel served as a go-between for the alliance of LaRouche with NOI leader Louis Farrakhan? Now we see the true face of con man Bevel--a serial molester of his own daughters. (Ex-LaRouchians who were in Leesburg at the time recall that Bevel was a bizarre and dubious personality but say the cult's leadership looked the other way since Bevel was believed to be carrying out vital assignments for Lyn.)
Rev. James Bevel.
Oct. 31 (updated Nov. 5): Did the LaRouchians work to death a paraplegic in one of the cult's fundraising boiler rooms? Comments by ex-followers of LaRouche on the life and death of Andy Klein. "You cannot have a [person like Andy] in an immobile position for hours on end making phone calls and being yelled at as the potential for blood clots and bedsores begins to skyrocket."
Oct. 31: Lyndon LaRouche and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad attacked George Soros as their Symbolic Evil Jew. Translation of Sept. 22, 1997 article from Corriere della Sera, Italy's most important daily newspaper, in which correspondent Stefano Cingolani writes: "Mahathir used in his argument the venom disseminated by a singular American hyperreactionary, Lyndon LaRouche, who never misses an opportunity to recycle his theory of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. This time he has accused Soros of having collaborated – although Jewish – with the Nazis who occupied Hungary, his native country. And the Malaysian press has embroidered on it."
Earlier postings here.