Impeach Cheney
A blurry photo of the “Impeach Cheney” booth that camped outside my work the other day.
We were lucky enough to get this booth at Whole Foods the other day. I want to premise up front that if they could have, the management of Whole Foods would have asked these people/activists to leave, however, because they were officially representing a state ballot measure, the store had to allow them to stay. All you need to know is the state ballot measure was put forth by Lyndon LaRouche.
Who is Lyndon LaRouche?
Well, he has quite a past, LaRouche was a former member of the Socialist Workers Party and is a former leader of a reportedly violent and disruptive cult-like group entitled the National Caucus of Labor Committees. He was imprisoned for 15 years for conspiracy and mail fraud related to fundraising and tax code violations and for conspiring to hide his personal income. This would explain the act he is trying to get passed called The Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007 (PDF), if you know anything about socialism and the like, the graph on his flyer says it all. In fact, to give one last hint, LaRouches history has made one critic call him an “unrepentant Marxist-Leninist.”
He is also a huge conspiracy freak. He thinks that we (the
I will also document some Wikipedia comments on LaRouche that will elucidate the readers into the mind of this nutball! (Take note… if you wish to read an excellent article on LaRouche, I highly recommend a long but thorough article (1985) from the
I personally hope that table comes back to our store, because now that I know that these are the LaRouche Youth Movement, or, LaRouchites, I have a better tactic to engage them on their own grounds. Well, let’s dive into a few of the conspiracies that seem to follow LaRouche. The first is a theory that the British government is the mastermind behind world domination, Skull & Bones, the collapse of the
The "British" conspiracy
According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade. In addition, "The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" (2004) names the British Fabian Society as a potential source of international conspiratorial authority, citing the membership of prominent British democratic socialists and social democrats, especially within the Labour Party and the British government.
LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. This is based primarily on three books authored by members of his organization:
Dope, Inc. by David Goldman, Konstandinos Kalimtgis and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978 (ISBN 0918388082): this book discusses the history of narcotics trafficking, beginning with the Opium War, and alleges that British interests continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money laundering in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of London. In an interview, LaRouche asserted that of the Queen, "Of course she's pushing drugs…that is in the sense of a responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it is happening and she isn't stopping it."
The Civil War and the American System by Allen Salibury, 1979 (ISBN : 0918388023): alleges that British interests encouraged and financed the secession movement and supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War, because they preferred North America to be a primitive agrarian economy that they could dominate through policies of free trade.
The New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White, 1980 (ISBN 093348805X): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells attempted to control scientific progress in order to keep the world backward and more easily managed by Imperialism. In this conspiracy theory, Wells wished Science to be controlled by some kind of priesthood and kept from the common man, while Russell wished to stifle it altogether by restricting it to a closed system of formal logic, that would prohibit the introduction of new ideas. This conspiracy also involved the promotion of the counterculture.
LaRouche publications have also frequently referred to a speech by Henry Kissinger made at Chatham House in 1982, as evidence for a theory that Kissinger was a British agent. In this speech, Kissinger said that he preferred the post-war policy of Churchill over that of FDR, and stated that "In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department."
An article published in 1998 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard claimed that LaRouche had said the Queen was involved in the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The LaRouche publication EIR responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to author Jeff Steinberg's appearance on the British ITV television program about the Diana controversy. Steinberg, however, "refused to rule out" the possibility that Prince Philip had ordered an assassination of Diana.
In 1999, an article in the LaRouche-controlled Executive Intelligence Review accused senior advisers to the Royal family and MI6 of threatening to assassinate him, after a British women's magazine called Take a Break published an article about him entitled "Shut This Man's Mouth." On August 2, 1999, Debra Hanania-Freeman, national spokeswoman for LaRouche, issued the following statement about the alleged threat: "After consulting with security experts familiar with the modus operandi of British intelligence networks, we are treating the piece as a cover for an MI6 order, probably with direct backing from someone in the royal household, to assassinate Lyndon LaRouche…. The inflammatory article … reflects a growing hysteria around
"We are also passing the information on to the White House so they can assess whether the article also constitutes a threat to the security of President Clinton."
His director of counterintelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, has said that he "could not rule out" that Prince Philip was behind the death of Princess Diana.
Another conspiracy from the depths of LaRouches mind is the “Children of Satan” hypothesis.
Children of Satan
Beginning in 2003, LaRouche's presidential campaign committee distributed a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan", which were later consolidated into a book by the same name. The pamphlets charged that there was a conspiracy dominated by what are called Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss) within the Bush administration, and that the dominant personality in this conspiracy was Dick Cheney. LaRouche claimed that these conspirators deliberately misled the American public and the US Congress in order to initiate the US invasion of Iraq. They claimed that the Straussians created the Office of Special Plans in order to fabricate intelligence and bypass traditional intelligence channels.
An important part of this theory was the LaRouchian analysis of the ideas of Leo Strauss, which borrowed heavily from the writings of Shadia Drury. Neoconservative commentators, led by Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, have condemned LaRouche's views on this subject, and worry that it may have influenced other commentators who subsequently published a similar analysis, such as Seymour Hersch and James Atlas of the New York Times. Bartley quotes the pamphlet's assertion that a "cabal of [Leo] Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" have plotted a "not-so-silent coup."
Alleging that "Mr. LaRouche has chosen an Aryan-nation phrase for Jews (descendants of Cain, who was the result of Satan seducing Eve, in this perfervid theology)," Bartley terms the "Children of Satan" title "overt anti-Semitism." He also suggests that the use of the terms "Straussian" and "Neo-conservative" may be coded anti-Semitism when used by LaRouche and other writers.
The Encyclopedia Judaica interprets the title "Children of Satan" to be a form of "masked anti-Semitism." An entry in the encyclopedia includes this passage: "A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the "Children of Satan," which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel. In a twisted irony, the pamphlets imply the neoconservatives are the real neo-Nazis."
LaRouche also has paranoid schizophrenic thoughts of a grand-conspiracy not only against humanity, but against his personal well-being.
Conspiracies directed at himself
LaRouche has asserted that he is a target for assassination. He sued the City of
- "I have a major personal security problem…[Without the permits] the assassination teams of professional mercenaries now being trained in Canada and along the Mexico border may be expected to start arriving on the streets of Leesburg…If they come, there will be many people dead or mutilated within as short an interval as 60 seconds of fire."
According to the Patriot-News of
Since late 1973, I have been repeatedly the target of serious assassination threats and my wife has been three times the target of attempted assassination…My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet President Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Gadaffi, Ayatollah Khomaini and the Malthusian lobby."
Regarding LaRouche's paramilitary security force, armed with semi-automatic weapons, a spokesperson said that they were necessary because LaRouche was the subject of "assassination conspiracies". LaRouche testified 1986 that "I have been 'safe-housed' by friends and associates in many different places because of threats to my physical security". Later that same year his "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded by law enforcement officers during a search of his offices. While surrounded, LaRouche sent a telegraph to President Ronald Reagan saying that an attempt to arrest him "would be an attempt to kill me. I will not submit passively to such an arrest, but . . . I will defend myself." During the subsequent federal trial he was driven to court in an armored limousine, and a bodyguard accompanied him into the courtroom, while another guard stood outside the door. When convicted he predicted that he would be assassinated in prison. A cellmate, televangelist Jim Bakker, later wrote, "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."
In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche says the raid on his operation was the work of Raisa Gorbachev, whom he describes as outranking her husband Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the nomenklatura due to her leadership of the Soviet Cultural Fund. LaRouche asserted in 2004 that the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was "used, and therefore probably intended, to set into motion an environment for what would later pass as a 'justified, retaliatory'" killing of LaRouche." In an interview the same year, he said that the Soviet Union opposed him because he invented the Strategic Defense Initiative. "The Soviet government hated me for it. Gorbachev also hated my guts and called for my assassination and imprisonment and so forth." LaRouche asserted that he has survived these threats because of protection by unnamed
LaRouche has charged that much negative press coverage during the 1980s, as well as aspects of his trial, was orchestrated by powerful persons from outside the journalistic community. In particular he names John Train, who he says "took charge of key aspects of the propaganda and witness tampering." He also names Richard Mellon Scaife as a financier of the efforts against him. More recently, he has claimed that negative coverage in the British press was orchestrated by Baroness Elizabeth Symons.
I could go on, but you get the point. This guy has a loose screw or two! Those activists with the table in front of our store, then, aren’t all there in their critical thinking skills as well. Its people like these that think that either the CIA or MI6 were in those ski masks cutting off the heads of people in
I want the reader to see what type of predictions have been made about
Click on image to enlarge
That is almost like predicting that
