Petra Kelly, 1947-1992.
NOTE: This page now includes links and postings re the Social Therapy cult (aka the International Workers Party) led by ex-LaRouchian Fred Newman and his sidekick Lenora Fulani, along with our coverage of the LaRouche movement. If you would prefer to view the Newman-Fulani postings separately, go HERE.
March 20, 2014: LaRouche on geometry. The Great Pontificator had trouble with plane geometry in high school in the late 1930s. Decades later, when he was developing his conspiracy theories, he managed to fit Euclid (fl. 300 BC), the putative father of geometry, into the picture, describing him as a "fraud" and an evil Aristotelian. "Eaglebeak" from the Factnet online forum comments here on the appalling ignorance underlying LaRouche's assertions about Euclid, geometry, Plato, Aristotle, etc.
October 30, 2012: Pro-Romney cartoon in New York Post might as well have been signed by the KKK Imperial Wizard. Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch's New York tabloid published a cartoon last Wednesday that more appropriately belongs in a Ku Klux Klan rag or as a poster for Lyndon LaRouche's street-corner agitators. Sean Delonas, the longtime cartoonist for the Post, depicts an angry white man on horseback (Mitt Romney) chasing down a terrified skinny black man fleeing on foot (President Obama)—and the Romney figure is aiming what appears to be an assault rifle at the Obama figure's backside...
September 20, 2012: Former member of LaRouche Youth Movement alleges widespread sexual exploitation in German branch. "Lightseeker" writes that Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "in the name of saving Africa and mankind from Armageddon," allows "impressionable teenagers to be sexually exploited by abusive and stupified male cult victims," bullies young women into inappropriate sexual relationships, and engages in "emotional and psychological blackmail" of female LYMers. Lightseeker discusses the subject in a generalized way, which is not uncommon when any abuse charge is first raised. I've heard similar allegations about sexual exploitation in the U.S. LYM branches, and thus feel confident in reposting this document (from Factnet, Sept. 19) in hopes it will elicit further information.
Sexual exploitation in the LaRouche Youth Movement is an issue which, like forced abortion, needs to be brought into the full light of day.
September 19, 2012: "Why We Left." Eight leading members of the LaRouche Youth Movement announce that they've quit the cult and, in this 75-page document, reveal in great detail the craziness of life under the thumb of an aging guru: "Rick and Ned...had earlier attempted to 'intervene' on Lyn about his spiral into madness, leading to an episode where they chased him upstairs and he barricaded himself into his room." Also described is the 90-year-old LaRouche's wooing of, and desire to marry, a woman disciple in her twenties.
Feb. 14, 2012: Ken Kronberg's Options, and Everyone Else's. Molly Kronberg, writing as "Eaglebeak," argues that her late husband, by committing suicide, was breaking with LaRouche in "the only way he saw as being open to him, given the psychological and situational cage the organization had put him in." Mrs. Kronberg suggests that he might have taken another route if his long-time "friends" in the cult had not betrayed him because of their cowardice and inability to feel the most elementary human compassion. These false friends, she concludes, are themselves trapped in LaRouche's cage, but just won't admit it. (Note: this is a different version of the article Mrs. Kronberg posted on Factnet last October.)
Nov. 2: "Petra Kelly: Profile of a Political Whore," New Solidarity, June 3, 1985. This garbage was first published in Neue Solidarität, the German LaRouchian newspaper, in 1982, under the title "Did You See This Whore on TV?" The original version appeared at a time when the Federal Republic's security services were very worried about the Green Party and the peace movement, in both of which Kelly was playing a leading role. I personally suspect that the BfV, the MAD, and/or some element of the U.S. intelligence community had a hand in the COINTELPRO-style campaign against Kelly of which this article was a part. The campaign involved defamation of Kelly and those closest to her, stalking, threats (like delivering to her the decapitated head of an animal), cornering her on a train, and shoving around her grandmother.
Over the years, it has not been uncommon for LaRouche to put together this type of total harassment package, whether in pursuit of his own ideological or personal goals or on behalf of a client or hoped-for client. The intent is to make the targeted person feel isolated and paranoid, so that he or she will suffer a nervous breakdown or a heart attack, or else commit suicide. LaRouche, who's long been fascinated by "psywar" tactics, refers to this method as the creation of a "controlled aversive environment" (see more on this concept in "Lyndon LaRouche and the Art of Inducing Suicide"). And to whip up the LaRouchian cadre to participate in such an effort, the targeted person is demonized as a symbol of evil and as less than human.
The re-publication in 1985 of the article sliming Kelly may have been triggered by her filing of a defamation suit in New York against the LaRouchians. Although they affected great confidence that they could destroy her at trial, the reader will note that they prudently changed the title of the German article, which referred to Kelly as a "whore," into one which merely called her a "political whore."
Nov. 2: "Green Party's Petra Kelly Faces Grilling Under Oath," New Solidarity, Oct. 10, 1986. In this propaganda assault written on the eve of Kelly's deposition (and, in the typical cowardly fashion of the LaRouche movement, published without anyone's name on it), the continuing attacks on her are justified on the grounds that she and the Green Party were working against "U.S. defense policy" and were part of a Kremlin plot to drag the Federal Republic of Germany out of NATO. (The article then sinks into a certain rhetorical confusion with its allegations re the Green Party's "pro-fascist, pro-Soviet, and terrorist policies and activities.")
The most striking feature of this anonymous rant is its relentless sexism: "aging starlet of the pro-Moscow Green Party," "apparent specialty[] of seducing septuagenarian political and military leaders into working for Moscow's 'peace' movement," "has paraded herself as a liberated female who recognizes none of the traditional customs or institutions," "had an abortion" (as if forced abortion were not then and is not now a policy of the LaRouche organization practiced on hundreds of women; read here) and "Green Party witch...famous for her crying jags and other unrestrained outbursts." And then the final dehumanization: "Perhaps for the first time...Kelly will be forced to face the political evil she represents." Evil woman, evil witch, evil environmentalist, evil Soviet agent, evil subhuman--that's how the LaRouchian mind works, and why they just love death squads.
Nov. 2: "Green Party Leader Kelly Falls Apart at Pre-Trial Deposition," Oct. 13, 1986. Here's a prime example of the LaRouche organization's gloating over the discomfort that they've caused (or fancy that they've caused) to targeted individuals.
In the case of the Kelly deposition, the celebratory sadism is over their presumably successful tormenting of an allegedly fragile and hysterical woman. The litany is as follows: "By the conclusion of the deposition, Kelly was reduced to a frightened infant...," "Miss Kelly's assertion that she has been libelled by being characterized as an unchaste person is perhaps one of the most laughable allegations ever included in an American defamation case...," "Her feminist vocabulary...," "She frequently ranted and raved throughout the deposition...," "The deposition went so poorly for the plaintiff that she became seized with prolonged fits of paranoia," and (in the caption that accompanies New Solidarity's photo of Kelly) "She has that haunted look."
Now I'm very skeptical that everything went as well for the LaRouchians in this deposition as they claim. Especially since they had already described my own 1984 deposition in LaRouche v. NBC in a manner that was highly inaccurate. And I can't help remembering how LaRouche dropped Chip Berlet and me as defendants in the NBC case, claiming in a "fit of paranoia" that we were plotting to murder him in the deposition room--a convenient excuse for avoiding having to answer questions from our attorney, the only one on the defense team who knew the right questions to ask and had the requisite aggressiveness. But that's a story for another day. The point here is what the LaRouchians believed had happened in the Kelly deposition--and the buzz they experienced as a result.
Nov. 2: The truth about Guatemala in the mid-1980s. We couldn't find the 1985 LaRouche film documentary (see below), but here's a non-LaRouchian one from the following year that tells it like it really was in Guatemala, where two percent of the population owned three-quarters of the land and where the army had racked up absolutely the worst human rights record in the Americas. Includes some pretty disturbing footage of those generals and troops that the LaRouchians thought were such heroic defenders of the Guatemalan nation-state.
Nov. 2: Guatemala Army good, U.S. liberals bad evil. In the midst of this odious 1985 paen of praise by EIR staffer Gretchen Small for Central America's most genocidal death-squad regime--a paen laced with scorn for the "liberal press" and the U.S. State Department--we find some more facts about Operation Guatusa (see Aug. 8 posting below). For instance, we're told about the documentary film that EIR made about Guatusa (released in August 1985 and shown at the Pentagon) which had a title identical to that of an EIR intelligence report, "Soviet Unconventional Warfare in Ibero-America: The Case of Guatemala," published the same month.
According to Small, the film (which for some reason the LaRouchians have not included on YouTube with their other fascist dreck) includes interviews with the Guatemalan Army's Col. Marco Antonio Castellanos Pacheco (later the chief of the Treasury Police, which was notorious for its vigilante methods) and Col. Hector Rosales. Both of these spokespersons for unrestrained political repression tried to run a con game on their (and LaRouche's) targeted DOD audience: It's not just Soviet-backed leftist guerrillas and landless peasants we're fighting against; it's Soviet-backed leftist narcoterrorist guerrillas and landless peasants!
And the colonels, with a little help from the PR experts at LaRouche Central, elaborate on this semantic trick with a bit of cognitive reframing: If you won't give us the money because you no longer believe the communist threat in Guatemala is great enough to warrant genocide, well, here's a new excuse: the war on drugs! Save American teenagers from the demon weed! See, we even raid marijuana plantations! We seize millions of dollars worth! (Sorry, guys, I flatly don't believe that what your army seized was simply destroyed, and that a large portion of it didn't end up on the streets of U.S. cities.)
And a little footnote on all this: when LaRouche security chief Jeffrey Steinberg was indicted in Massachusetts Federal court for obstruction of justice in 1986, the line was circulated in the Guatemalan press that he was the victim of a political frameup (hey, in Guatemala itself they didn't bother with frame-ups--they just disappeared you). Steinberg escaped conviction through a mistrial, but I wonder why he and other LaRouchians never got into the slightest legal trouble for failing to register as agents of a foreign power--Guatemala in this instance and Panama shortly thereafter. Guess there was still somebody in the U.S. intelligence community who found them useful. One of these days, we'll know who that "somebody" was.
Oct. 31: "Abstaining from Bad Sects." Halloween is the appropriate time to call attention to this June 2011 article by Chip Berlet on the destructiveness of left sectarianism and cadre organizations; it's the best thing I've read on the subject.
"Ultra-leftism," write Berlet, "is an egocentric form of mythopoetic martyrdom whereby practitioners anoint themselves as the beleaguered guardians of the one true political line. They read long impenetrable manifestos at public meetings. They show up at mass demonstrations with helmets and hockey sticks for a game of self-fulfilling prophecy that often results in violence as they hurl themselves at police."
Ex-LaRouchians will find this article of interest because their former organizational home, although it moved permanently from far left to far right in the middle and late 1970s, still possesses some of the features of its origins. And Berlet's description of his own relationship--as a non-communist activist--to the US/Albanian Friendship Society in Chicago a quarter of a century ago puts paid to the nasty red-baiting of him by Klan apologist Laird Wilcox and by the person on Factnet who recently tried to use Wilcox's accusation to smear both Berlet and Erica Duggan (who'd never even heard of the long-defunct Chicago group).
Oct. 29: Der Spiegel on LaRouche and the Hellenbroich brothers. This 1984 article (text in German preceded by a summary in English) from the Federal Republic of Germany's most prestigious newsmagazine is the source of our information on how BfV official Heribert Hellenbroich took the LaRouchians off his agency's watch list, and kept them off. There may be more here than just a case of an older sibling protecting a younger one. For instance, H. Hellenbroich tells reporter Jörg-R. Mettke that brother Anno, chief of LaRouche's intelligence operation, had refused to tell him where the group's money came from. Huh? Think about it: A leader of a suspicious extremist group conducting private intelligence operations in Germany won't say how his outfit is financed, but Germany's counterintelligence chief--operating on the front lines of the Cold War during years of great tension--fails to instantly restore the suspicious group to his watch list. Perhaps H. Hellenbroich really did know where much of the money was coming from, especially if the BfV and other German and NATO security services were themselves among the contributors.
Oct. 27: LaRouche's 1983 plan for winning the "dirty war"--bring back Franco's torturers. Journalist Darrin Wood, who spent years in Spain reporting on human rights violations against the Basques, finds--buried in a 1983 EIR article by Herbert Quinde (a LaRouche aide who'd been involved in discussions with Spanish security officials in the months leading up to the formation of the GAL)--a statement praising the decision by Spain's Socialist government to invite back former top cop Manuel Ballesteros as an adviser. Wood examines Ballesteros' horrifically sadistic deeds both under Franco and during the years after Franco's death. Also recounts the crimes of the BVE and GAL death squads, Ballesteros' role as a protector of the BVE, and the LaRouche organization's murky involvement in the launching of the GAL.
A sidebar analyzes the strange interview conducted by "correspondents" for LaRouche's EIR with José Barrionuevo, Spain's Interior Minister, in April 1983, and suggests that LaRouchian operatives who were trying to encourage a death-squad approach to the Basque insurgency were operating under the protection of Federal Republic of Germany security officials. (The head of LaRouche's intelligence operations in Europe was the brother of the chief of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, which had removed the LaRouche organization from its watch list of extremist organizations, thus stimulating the LaRouchians to churn out reports and dossiers on German environmental and peace activists--as well as terrorists--for government spooks in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere.)
Oct. 27: The Strange and Sometimes Sinister Past of LaRouche Aide Herbert Quinde. In 2010, Quinde gave a ludicrously sanitized version of his years with LaRouche to The State Journal-Register, the daily newspaper in Springfield, the state capital of Illinois. Now we set the record straight with documentation of Quinde's homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Jesuit, and anti-"witch" articles and of how he drastically contracted the time-span of his sojourn in the LaRouche organization. We also provide a summary of what journalists and authors in Spain have discovered about how Quinde, acting for LaRouche, brokered a secret deal between the Spanish police and a top official of the French gendarmerie in 1983, thus helping to set in motion a murderous cross-border campaign by police agents and mercenaries that would turn into one of the biggest human-rights-abuse scandals in Western Europe of the past 40 years--a scandal that brought the 14-year rule of Spain's Socialist party (1982-1996) to an ignominious end. Somehow, the Springfield daily's Google search missed that minor little footnote of Quinde's life.
Oct. 27: Darrin Wood on Spain's dirty war. This report, published in Covert Action Quarterly (Winter 1995-96), provides the background for understanding the death-squad scandal in Spain that brought down the government of Felipe González. Includes a footnote on how "the LaRouchites came to Spain in 1983 [when the GAL death squads were first being planned] to join the fray against the ETA."
Oct. 27: Sliming the Basques and making excuses for Franco. This two-part series from EIR, published in January 1982, depicts the Basques as having an evil and inferior culture manipulated by the Jesuits and rooted in witchcraft. Claims the Jesuits are promoters of Satanism and that a Jesuit-Basque cabal is plotting to dominate Spain on behalf of the usual suspects (the British, the Venetians, etc.). Praises Franco's righthand man, Admiral Carrero Blanco, who'd been assassinated by ETA in 1973, as someone who'd understood about the "British." Says that Franco's rule was "infinitely preferable to a Jesuit-ETA-dominated Spain" and complains about "Basque priests' destructive meddling in 'theology of liberation.'"
Oct. 27: LaRouche's EIR praises Opus Dei and the fascist Carrero Blanco. This 1979 article fits right in with Darrin Wood's description of how the LaRouchians wanted the new Spain to continue behaving as if it were still a fascist state, with business as usual in the prisoner interrogation rooms.
Oct. 27: "Revolt in the Germany military" (EIR, Jan. 27, 1989). Although the Soviet Union was heading towards collapse at the time, the LaRouchians were happy to ignore this historic trend in the interests of building support for West Germany's military budget while slyly spreading a bit of fascism on the side. EIR "correspondent" Rainer Apel, who would play a key role 14 years later in covering up the circumstances surrounding the death of Jeremiah Duggan, inveighs against "cowardly" politicians and a supposed "witchhunt against the armed forces on the part of the media, leftist and peacenik groups, and the opposition Social Democratic and Green parties." And Apel claims:
"A sense of 'this far, but no farther,' has been reached among many in the armed forces now....Among senior officers in all Bundeswehr services, rage has been building, and the mood is building toward an open political revolt against the politicians."
Apel was careful to use the adjective "political" before the noun "revolt," but the passage is still suggestive of something more than officers testifying before a commission, and can fairly be seen as an attempt to push the envelope and to depict a direct military role in politics as somehow an acceptable response to the Soviet threat (which was still perceived by many Germans as being extremely serious) and the alleged threat from left-of-center political parties and movements within West Germany.
Sept. 5: "Jew, son of Cheney, son of Soros, we don't want you!" Article from Mexico's Diario Monitor (2004) describes how the LaRouche Youth Movement stalked and threatened Presidential candidate Jorge Castañeda. Footnotes by Lyndon LaRouche Watch examine how the LaRouchians have tried to spread anti-Semitism in Mexico by way of conspiracy theories and the demonizing of "SEJs" (Symbolic Evil Jews), while also promoting far-right nationalism and an increase in violence against the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
August 8: Jeffrey Steinberg, Herbert Quinde and Operation Guatusa. How the LaRouche organization tried in the mid-1980s to sanitize the reputation of Guatemala's unspeakably brutal death squad regime. Brave Jeff and brave Herb even got to go on a mission (well, at least as far as the staging area).