The Virginia-based cult leader ranted at his Baby Boomer followers, the majority of them Jewish, calling them worthless and suggesting they kill themselves. One of them did.
By Dennis King
JULY 30, 2007–Right-wing cult leader and convicted felon Lyndon LaRouche is in big trouble this summer–not with the FBI this time (at least not yet), but with his own followers and many heretofore silent ex-followers. The source of his problem is a now infamous morning briefing that emanated from his Leesburg, Va. headquarters in the early morning hours of April 11, 2007.
This document–signed by LaRouche assistant Tony Papert but clearly reflecting remarks LaRouche had made at a meeting the previous evening–was in some respects just a garden-variety tirade in which the 84-year-old LaRouche called the Baby Boomers in his organization (those who had joined in the late 1960s and early 1970s) a pack of deranged, senile, and morally degenerate slackers because they hadn’t been raising enough money to pay for his various political projects. However, the statement also included something much nastier than usual–a suggestion that certain of the Boomers were so burned-out and worthless that the best solution for them might be to simply commit suicide.
Within hours after the briefing was sent by email to members of LaRouche’s International Caucus of Labor Committees (ICLC) worldwide, Kenneth Lewis Kronberg, 58, a Jewish member of the organization who had been in it for most of his adult life, drove to a highway overpass in Sterling, Va., exited his car, and jumped to his death.
Kronberg had been the owner and chief executive officer of PMR Printing Co., a firm that printed most of the cult’s propaganda as well as servicing many outside clients. LaRouche, who spent five years in federal prison (1989–1994) for conspiring to sell worthless securities to senior citizens, had indirectly controlled PMR for almost 30 years through his psychological and ideological domination of Kronberg and other ICLC members employed by the firm.
LaRouche makes Kronberg his scapegoat
According to former cult members, LaRouche’s special hostility to Kronberg had its roots in the early 1990s, when the organization’s National Executive Committee (NEC) made a decision, while LaRouche was in prison, to sell his luxurious Ibykus Farm estate near Leesburg in order to pay large debts incurred by PMR. (The NEC believed this sale was the only way to save a company without which the entire LaRouchian propaganda machine would grind to a halt). When LaRouche left prison on parole, he vented his anger over the sale of the estate–and at Kronberg for allowing the LaRouche supporters who worked at PMR and its typesetting subsidiary, World Composition Services, a degree of personal space not allowed to most other members of the LaRouche movement. (LaRouchian employees of PMR and World Comp received regular salaries and adequate health insurance, and had managed to start families and become active in local religious or civic groups.) But LaRouche did not move aggressively against Kronberg at that time–he needed him to churn out the publications devoted to depicting LaRouche as a former “political prisoner” who should be “exonerated” by then-President Bill Clinton.
PMR skirted the edge of insolvency for many years, both before and after its financial crisis of the early 1990s, because of the failure of various LaRouche-dominated political and publishing entities to pay their printing bills. Essentially, LaRouche was milking PMR to support his political aspirations. He was also milking ICLC-linked publishing and printing firms in Europe, and when the Boomer leadership of the ICLC’s German branch complained in 2006, LaRouche drove them from the organization. The pattern dates back over a quarter-century, to the days when LaRouche skimmed the profits from a computer software company in Manhattan to pay for his 1980 Presidential campaign (the owners of the firm, faced with bankruptcy, quit the LaRouche movement rather than acquiesce in further skimming).
PMR was able to survive up through the early 2000s because of lucrative outside accounts. But in the economic downswing after 9/11, the picture changed. PMR was able to continue in business only through desperate measures, such as not paying federal payroll withholding taxes for several years, resulting in a huge tax liability. Kronberg pleaded with the NEC to take steps to save PMR, which at that point employed about 40 people, including at least a dozen who had given decades of their lives to the LaRouchian cause.
The denunciations of Kronberg escalate
LaRouche responded to Kronberg’s pleas by scapegoating him as the cause of the firm’s difficulties, relentlessly denouncing him at NEC meetings, in memos, and in personal exchanges. The verbal abuse continued with no letup for well over two years before the issuance of the “suicide” briefing, several sources say.
The suicide briefing did not mention any individuals by name, but there can be no doubt that the primary target was Kronberg–not only because of LaRouche’s prior concentration of his fire on PMR’s chief executive, but also because the document cited Kronberg’s company (referred to as “the print shop”) as the “worst” example of Boomer treachery in the entire movement.
According to former members familiar with the ICLC’s internal distribution process, the briefing was written and sent out the previous night, to be available to members starting in the early hours of April 11. Kronberg and other LaRouche followers at PMR and World Composition Services, which shared the same facility, would have read the document as part of their morning routine, and even if for some reason Kronberg himself had not looked at it immediately, others would have promptly alerted him about it.
The singling-out of individuals, or an entity, for harsh criticism within the LaRouche organization, especially when the criticism is circulated to the entire membership, is always a matter of extreme concern for those targeted. They will inevitably fear that the criticism presages a decision to remove them from their positions of organizational influence, put them through the psychological wringer (LaRouche calls it “ego-stripping”), and send them to the LaRouchian version of hell: the telephone boiler rooms.
LaRouche’s youth “army”
The “suicide” briefing reflects a long-standing plan by LaRouche to transfer positions of authority in his movement to younger members (especially those recruited on college campuses by the LaRouche Youth Movement, or LYM, over the past decade) and thus guarantee that the movement will survive his death. Like several previous LaRouche pronouncements, the April 11 document urges LYM members to prepare for a battle to wrest control away from the supposedly unreliable and lazy Boomers, who, it is suggested, should either acquiesce in their own demotion, or die:
The leadership is among the 18–35 year olds. The Baby Boomer generation is politically dead, and can only be brought back by artificial insemination. . . .They can follow a trail of shit, but they can’t lead anything
. . . .The breakdown in fundraising is a symptom of a moral breakdown in leadership. . . .The disintegration began in the period of the 1990s to 2000, especially, in Leesburg, in 1992–93. When Lyn [LaRouche] came out of jail [in 1994], he presented his solution to the sales force in the very living room in which he spoke last night [the living room in LaRouche’s home]. People went screaming out of the room, and refused to change. This Boomer policy failure went on uninterrupted into Y2000...The print shop was the worst. . . .
Don’t go telling a Boomer to exert leadership. We’re organizing the country: namely the 18–35 year olds. How? Just like an army. . . .
We’re reaching the most active part of the younger generation. . . .We go to the Boomers: “We’re your boss.” “You? Who are you?” “We represent the youth, the leadership.” But you have to make it stick!. . . .
The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you’re in the real world, and they’re not. Unless they want to commit suicide.
Several sources say that this diatribe, although signed by Tony Papert, reflects LaRouche’s personal speaking style. Papert, they say, is known to merely transcribe LaRouche’s remarks in documents of this type–and that the suicide remark was made at the Tuesday evening (April 10) meeting at LaRouche’s home referred to in the portion of the document quoted above.
LaRouche on “virtual” suicide
LaRouche issued a similar but briefer statement in his own name later in the morning of April 11. Entitled “Controlling your rage!”, it was addressed, in its original form, to leadership bodies of the organization and alluded, like the earlier briefing, to suicide as a possible option for Boomers unwilling to get with the program.
The problem [of betraying the human race] exists even among us, as some among us are enraged not only at the immorality in the Senate and elsewhere, but among those in our own ranks who refuse to give up [their] Baby Boomer corruption. . . .Some among us with [sic] rather commit virtual suicide than admit I have been right on these matters.
Although this LaRouche statement was issued at 10:29 AM–too late to have been seen by Kronberg–it nevertheless provides evidence that the ICLC chairman had not developed second thoughts about the extreme language of the earlier briefing, and that he intended to continue ratcheting up the pressure on his Boomer scapegoat. However, when the second LaRouche statement was made available to the entire ICLC membership the next day (the day after Kronberg’s death), the wording had been changed: “virtual suicide” was now “virtual ruin.”
A culture of abuse and threats
The toxic language of the two April 11 statements did not come out of the blue. It was the result of a culture of harsh verbal abuse and threats that had built up over decades in the LaRouche organization. Indeed, LaRouchian publications going back to the early 1980s have included a number of sadistically-worded discussions of how to induce suicidal behavior in individuals hated by LaRouche (especially Jews, but also Gentiles regarded as allies of the imaginary international “oligarchy”). This bizarre feature of LaRouchian political warfare is described in the following paragraph from Chapter 17 (“Get Kissinger!”) of the present writer’s Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism,[FN 1] which cites articles from the early 1980s in LaRouche’s weekly newsmagazine Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) and his defunct semiweekly newspaper, New Solidarity.
The LaRouchian hysteria about Kissinger resulted in a strong indirect warning to him in July 1982. An EIR news brief quoted a prediction by an unnamed psychic that if any attempt should be made on the life of LaRouche, “a list of 13 well-known political figures, headed by Henry Kissinger, Nancy Kissinger, and Alexander Haig will meet sudden death by either massive heart attacks or strokes.”[FN 2] Death fantasies about the Symbolic Jew thereafter became commonplace in LaRouchian publications. When [Seymour] Hersh’s The Price of Power was published, New Solidarity reported that Kissinger was on the verge of a “potentially fatal coronary.”[FN 3] EIR boasted that, as a result of Operation Nuremberg [a LaRouche harassment operation against the former Secretary of State], Kissinger had become a “cardio-vascular risk” and might “choose [a] coward’s way out” (i.e., suicide).[FN 4] When Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koestler (the author of Darkness at Noon) committed suicide along with his wife in 1983, a New Solidarity editorial suggested various ways in which Henry and Nancy Kissinger and Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker (the arch-usurer in LaRouche’s eyes) could follow the Koestlers’ example.[FN 5] In what could be read as an allusion to the Holocaust, the editorial asked: “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?”
This stuff is so close to psychotic that it was almost certainly published at LaRouche’s direct instigation. It reflects in a roundabout way his fantasy of becoming Der Abscheulicher (the Abominable One)–the successor to the Old Man of the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) above Berchtesgaden–who would wipe out his enemies, and especially the Jews, if he ever came to power.
I use the phrase “roundabout way,” because LaRouche had (and still has) two problems in turning his fantasies into reality: first, he wasn’t/isn’t even close to seizing power; second, he knew/knows you can’t run around killing people in a non-LaRouche-controlled USA without eventually getting caught and sent to a really, really bad prison (far worse than the Rochester, MN federal country club in which he resided from 1989 to 1994).
LaRouche has chosen to express his fantasies via one of the few methods safely open to him in a society based on the rule of law. He has constructed a scenario for induced suicide by which he apparently believes he can cause the deaths of his perceived enemies without any fear of prosecution–like the villain pursued by Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Curtain.
Traffic signs and “controlled aversive environments”
Insofar as the idea of induced suicide is directed at Jews, LaRouche is not the first fascist to recognize the possibilities. David Clay Large reports, in his history of the 1936 Olympics, that on some roads in Nazi Germany “the speed limit markers on dangerous turns included explicit exemption for Jews, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves.”[FN 6] However, LaRouche’s approach–as evidenced by the above-cited EIR and New Solidarity articles and various other documents of the LaRouche movement–involves something far more elaborate than traffic signs. The basic tactic
is to develop psychological profiles of persons such as Kissinger whom LaRouche hates and fears, and then, based on such profiling, to construct a “controlled aversive environment” around the targeted individual and exert insidious and ever-escalating psychological pressures that will hopefully cause the person to commit suicide (or that will increase the person’s stress level to the point at which he or she will die from a coronary). One might call it psychological terrorism–or death via mental judo.[FN 7]
In the early 1980s, LaRouche assigned dozens of cadres around the world and spent millions of dollars in an attempt to create a controlled aversive environment around Kissinger. As documented in Chapter 17 of my book, the campaign included stalking and threatening Kissinger, impersonating him, playing malicious pranks on him, distributing massive propaganda about him in several languages (including a flier entitled “Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry”), disrupting his public appearances worldwide, and in general accusing him of the most vile personal indecencies that LaRouche could concoct out of his own obsessed brain.
It is difficult to conceive of any reason for this campaign other than LaRouche imagining that he could drive a famous Jew to suicide (or at least a mental breakdown) with impunity, thus demonstrating to various international fascist networks that he, LaRouche, was the man to follow.
Of course a proper Hero of the West must go after leftists as well as Jews, and LaRouche focused–simultaneously with the campaign against Kissinger–on the late Petra Kelly, founder of the Green Party in Germany and an outspoken supporter of nuclear disarmament. (See [FN 8] for details.)
Kronberg’s terrible bind
One could argue that such harassment campaigns lack the punch, in spite of their nasty language and intent, to really induce suicide. Indeed, the underlying idea appears never to have come even close to succeeding until LaRouche tried it on one of his own followers, Ken Kronberg.
Why did it work on Kronberg? When I read the briefing memo that triggered his suicide, I immediately remembered the LaRouche organization’s carefully crafted Get Dennis King campaign in 1980–and what I had felt when they delivered their coup de grace: a phone call from one of the women in the organization’s then national headquarters in Manhattan asking, “Dennis, haven’t you committed suicide yet?”
The shock I experienced from this phone call and preceding events quickly turned into anger and outrage, but this might not have been the case if I had faced the terrible kind of bind that Kronberg would face 27 years later. The suicide suggestion to him came not from an anonymous member of a group he disdained–as was the case with me–but from a man he had regarded with great reverence for over 30 years and from the organization that had been the center of his life during that entire period. Thus, I suspect, he could not turn his feelings outwards against his tormentors very easily, and his outrage and pain rebounded upon himself.
This is something that many people experience at one time or another, and it often results in a temporary mental breakdown or a period of depression. In Kronberg’s case, the shock of the morning briefing, coming as the culmination of years of psychological bullying and denunciations by the leader of the organization to which he had devoted almost all of his adult life, appears to have been more than he could withstand.
What might have been
It is a pity that Kronberg could not recall, before he embarked on his final ride, the 1983 article about inducing suicide in Jews that his own company had typeset for LaRouche (“Koestler Takes His Own Advice; Kissinger to Follow?”; quoted above). If he had remembered this article, or if someone could have shown it to him that morning, he might have begun to realize just how cynical and contemptible LaRouche’s suicide rhetoric really was. I’d like to think he would have turned the tables on LaRouche and Papert by suggesting that they be the ones to jump off a bridge. Indeed, I imagine him giving them a little nudge in that direction by immediately driving his car to the nearest FBI office with the account books of PMR–to show how jailbird LaRouche and his thuggish inner ring had conspired to loot the company and defraud the IRS.
However, Kronberg didn’t remember that 1983 article, and probably none of the cult members who worked closely with him would have remembered it either. LaRouchian cadres are often worked so hard for such long hours that they don’t have time to read the publications (aimed mostly at outsiders) that they produce or raise the money for.
A replay of the Jewish Doctors’ Plot?
LaRouche’s return to the induced-suicide theme in 2007 should be understood in the context of his planned purge of the Boomers, a large percentage of whom (in contrast to the LYM members) are Jewish. LaRouche is now an embittered old man who knows he only has a small window of time to guarantee the survival of his movement. Like the aging Stalin in the early 1950s, LaRouche sees himself surrounded by unreliable aides who may be plotting against him or, what’s worse, plotting to sell out the movement after he dies. And thus his paranoid rage kicks in, and we get the Jewish Boomers’ Plot as a weird sort of replay of Stalin’s Jewish Doctors’ Plot.
My assumption here is that anti-Semitism is at the core of LaRouche’s personal world view. True, he has expressed extreme bigotry towards many other ethnic groups–Irish, Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican and African-American–as well as towards lesbians (and indeed the entire female sex), gays, British aristocrats, Catholics, Protestants (especially Episcopalians), Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox believers and New Agers. But he always returns to conspiracy theories dating back thousands of years and centered on “the Jew”–the only target of his bile that he suggests is a separate evil species outside the human race.[FN 9] LaRouche really, really hates the Jews, following in the footsteps of his father before him, and this hatred gave him a special bond, during the ICLC’s heyday, with various neo-Nazi and old Nazi allies such as Willis Carto and Krafft Ehricke. (Most ICLC members were never granted the dubious honor of meeting with these “co-thinkers” of LaRouche.)
The fact that LaRouche has so many Jews in his organization actually bolsters my interpretation. There are few better ways that a Hitler type without state power (and without even a large-scale Brown Shirts’ movement) could express his malignant anti-Semitism than by recruiting Jews to a totalitarian cult based on a topsy-turvy form of Jew hatred, and then exploiting them and stifling their personal aspirations for decades on end while their helpless parents and other family members just...suffer.
Trashing Kronberg’s memory
LaRouche’s sadistic attitude to his Jewish followers is illustrated by his reaction to Kronberg’s death. He did not attend the funeral, and he waited a week before sending what was supposed to be a a href=“http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/insult.htm”>condolence letter to Kronberg’s widow, herself a long-time member of the LaRouche organization. Several sources say that top LaRouche aides pressured him to write the letter because they believed it was essential to helping limit the damage to the organization’s morale (news of the death of Kronberg had spread like a shock wave among former and current LaRouchians, especially in the Leesburg area, with both groups attending the funeral in large numbers).
However, LaRouche, who reportedly was reluctant to write the letter at all, ended up producing a singularly nasty missive. He suggested that Kronberg’s sole significance as a human being had resided in his service to LaRouche’s cause. He asserted flatly that Kronberg had been “struck down by a sickness,” as if LaRouche himself were in no way responsible. He crassly advised Kronberg’s widow that “[w]e either cling to that dedication of our living, or we were no more than virtually beasts.” By using the past tense “were,” LaRouche managed to artfully suggest that Kronberg, by abandoning the struggle, had proven himself to be just another subhuman. By using the word “virtually” he defiantly reasserted his April 11 statement about “virtual suicide.” LaRouche then stated: “The ugly, horror-stricken moment must pass,” thus suggesting that Kronberg’s death was of only momentary significance to him, and that he really didn’t care that this tragedy would affect Kronberg’s widow, son, and relatives not for a “moment” but for the rest of their lives.
LaRouche and his followers have expressed a similar crudeness and insensitivity towards other grieving families as well; see [FN 10].
The “fantasy Hitler”
In 1984, ADL fact-finding director Irwin Suall described LaRouche on NBC’s First Camera as a “small-time Hitler.” LaRouche sued, but a jury found the phrase to be not libelous. Suall’s remark aptly described LaRouche’s role as the leader of a small ultra-right movement that devotes much of its energy to anti-Semitic propaganda; however, I think the term “fantasy Hitler” might better express LaRouche’s personal psychology. The ICLC chairman reminds me of the Hitler in an alternate universe in Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream who emigrates to America as a young man, becomes a science-fiction writer for the pulps, and pens a really awful repressed-homosexuality-drenched novel about fictional bully boys in gleaming jackboots who attempt to take over Germany in yet another universe.
Spinrad’s Hitler did not have the opportunity to be anything more than a pulp writer with political fantasies, because he was living in the wrong country in the wrong 1920s-1930s timeline. LaRouche has never had the opportunity to be much more than a cult leader with political fantasies, because the post-war period in our universe has not been characterized by the social instability necessary to bring a fascist within striking distance of seizing power.[FN 11] (LaRouche did have an opportunity to expand his base significantly in the 1980s, but characteristically he bungled it.) The movement LaRouche actually runs is only a pale and distorted imitation of the real thing–like the shadows on the wall of the cave in Plato’s Republic.
Third Reich vs. Fantasy Reich
Indeed, let’s examine, point by point, how LaRouche’s shadow-Reich stacks up against its original:
Hitler physically stripped the Jews at the entrance to the gas chambers; our fantasy Hitler merely ego-stripped them.
Hitler herded them into concentration camps; our fantasy Hitler recruited them into a cult that for the past 35 years has been their concentration camp of the mind.
Prior to launching the gas-chamber mass exterminations, Hitler starved many Jews and other targets of his wrath to death in the camps or let them die of disease. Our fantasy Hitler pays his followers such paltry stipends that they must subsist on the cheapest and most unhealthy foods, and when they get sick it’s not his problem. (The fundraisers and others at the national headquarters do have medical insurance nowadays–but with huge deductibles that render it of very limited value for persons already living on the edge.)
Hitler put some of the Jews to work in slave labor facilities (like the underground Mittelwerk V‑2 factory run by Arthur Rudolph, hero of LaRouche’s now-defunct Fusion Energy Foundation). LaRouche puts “his” Jews to work in telephone boiler rooms 16 hours a day soliciting fraudulent loans from little old ladies.
Hitler would, if a Jew survived a slave labor camp, eventually send him to be gassed. When one of the ICLC Jews becomes burned out and no longer useful (or is perceived as some kind of threat), our fantasy Hitler screams at him and suggests that he commit suicide.
That the fantasy Hitler’s message to Kronberg (in essence: Go kill yourself, you worthless subhuman) is not an aberration is made clear by certain remarks the fantasy Hitler addressed to the cult’s Jewish members back in 1978. The remarks are included in LaRouche’s notorious article that year on the alleged cult origins of Zionism in which he claimed that only 1.5 million Jews had been killed by the Nazis, none of them in gas chambers.[FN 12]
“Narrow bestial ethnic loyalties”?
In this extraordinary screed, the LaRouche Jews were told:
Forget your narrow bestial ethnic loyalties! Instead ask yourself: “What is a Jew good for? What can a Jew contribute to humanity generally which obliges humanity to value the Jew?”
And the fantasy Hitler warned them of the consequences of not giving their all to his movement:
You have no right to hide behind the whimpering, morally degraded profession of [excuses]. . . .Either you take responsibility for the ultimate consequences of your conduct or you have no moral right to complain against whatever evil the world’s developments bestow upon you.
As of April 2007, the “world’s developments” had not given LaRouche the power to bestow the “whatever” form of evil on his Jewish followers–even though he sensed they were beginning to go soft (i.e., to hide once again behind “whimpering, morally degraded” excuses) and were even rediscovering Judaism. So he simply suggested that they bestow the evil on themselves.
Although it worked with Ken Kronberg, it is unlikely to work again. The appalling suicide message in the April 11 morning briefing has been seen by most members of the organization and has circulated widely in the outside world. The fact that LaRouche sadistically hounded Kronberg for years prior to the latter’s death is known by most ex-members and many current members of the LaRouche organization. The ex-members are outraged, the boomers still inside the organization are upset, and the “yutes” (LaRouche Youth Movement members) are confused.
Former members with ties to persons still
trapped on the inside say that the Kronberg tragedy couldn’t have occurred at a worse time for LaRouche, since the ICLC’s financial problems have forced many of the Leesburg Boomers (including some who harbor explosive secrets about the cult’s history) to obtain jobs in the world outside their accustomed “bubble.” This ongoing exposure to the real world, coupled with the shock over Kronberg’s suicide and the cruel words that triggered it, is causing some profound soul-searching by current members, the ex-members say.
Leakage from the bubble world
On July 23, a former member writing under the user name “Eaglebeak” posted the following observations on a Fact Net message board where present and ex-members of the LaRouche organization debate with one another:
Things have changed in Leesburg. From what I am picking up, members are challenging, complaining, muttering.
The place leaks like a sieve, because members and non-members fraternize like crazy now–something that never happened in the past to this degree.
The insulation and isolation that was preserved so effectively in the past is eroding beyond repair because so many [LaRouche followers] in Leesburg, including NEC members, now work. . . .“Outside” contact–whether ex-member friends, non-member friends, outside jobs–is popping the bubble.
That means that there is potential for constant leaks, uncontrollable, and also for unrest in the ranks.
When LaRouche issued the fateful briefing on April 11, he appears to have inadvertently opened a Pandora’s Box. According to Eaglebeak and other ex-members, this plague of troubles is spreading inexorably by way of the numerous unauthorized conversations between LaRouchian Boomers and people in the outside world. The Washington Monthly will soon publish a major article on LaRouche, PMR and Kronberg–the product of months of digging by investigative journalist Avi Klein–that may accelerate the exodus of Boomers from the cult, encourage former top members who know about offshore bank accounts and past links to Latin American death squads to come forward, and trigger a new federal probe of LaRouche’s criminal activities.
This may be the end game, folks.
[2] “Briefly,” Executive Intelligence Review, July 6, 1982.
[3] “Mental Health Report: Is Henry Going Off the Deep End?” New Solidarity, June 10, 1983.
[4] “Dr. K’s Career Takes a Turn for the Worse,” Executive Intelligence Review, January 4, 1983. The author of this article, LaRouche follower Mark Burdman, later committed suicide.
[5] “Koestler Takes His Own Advice; Kissinger to Follow?” New Solidarity, March 14, 1983.
[6] David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
[7] If, as New Solidarity stated, suicide is a “coward’s way” of escaping LaRouchian harassment, then LaRouche’s suicide-induction fantasy–if he had ever succeeded in carrying it out on Henry Kissinger–would have been a “coward’s way” of committing a homicide.
[8] Another target was Petra Kelly, the late Green Party leader in Germany. Sensing that Kelly was psychologically fragile, the LaRouchians made a serious attempt to invade her personal space and create the desired aversive environment. Among other things, this included the distribution, at public meetings she attended, of smear articles calling her a Communist, a fascist, a terrorist, a witch and a “whore,” and describing her alleged love affairs in lurid language. LaRouche’s followers even published in 1982, in the German language edition of New Solidarity, a journalistic version of their Petra Kelly psychological profile. The article speculated that her alleged relationships with older men were the psychological result of her abandonment in childhood by a supposedly “shiftless” father. Mirroring the LaRouchian articles on Kissinger, the profile of the Green Party leader claimed that she suffered from a “heart condition,” with the implication that the harassment campaign would hopefully worsen this health problem.
Kelly sued the LaRouchians in U.S. federal court. Her attorney, Ramsey Clark, said they had engaged in a “vicious campaign that made it difficult for her to appear in public. The campaign became physical at times. They cornered her on a train, they shoved her grandmother around. . . .They abused her most fundamental rights of privacy, dignity, physical integrity, and reputation.”
At Kelly’s deposition, the LaRouchians took delight in asking all about her sex life, then published an article based on her responses, boasting that she had been “reduced to a frightened infant” and “seized by prolonged fits of paranoia.”
Although the LaRouchians did not, in the articles I have examined, suggest that Kelly take her own life, they were clearly out to psychologically destroy her–and if they had succeeded, the outcome might well have been more serious than a brief stay in a mental hospital. In 1992, several years after the LaRouche campaign against Kelly had ended, she and her longtime partner Gert Bastian were found dead in their home of gunshot wounds: the German police concluded it had been a double suicide.
The LaRouchians quickly tossed their hostility to Kelly into an Orwellian memory hole (just as Ramsey Clark had vaporized his own past support of Kelly and become a LaRouche defender). The line now was that Kelly and Bastian had been murdered by nefarious forces and that the German authorities should be pressured to conduct a more thorough investigation. This would not be the last example of LaRouchian dodging and weaving on the issue of life and death in contemporary Germany: When Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish university student from the U.K., died while attending a LaRouche cadre school in Wiesbaden in 2003, the LaRouchians claimed it was just a suicide and strongly opposed the Duggan family’s efforts to trigger a criminal investigation.
[9] Examples of LaRouche’s equal-opportunity bigotry, and of his obsessive idea that the Jews are a separate “species,” can be found in Chapter 30 (“The War Between the Species”) of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.
[10] For LaRouche’s crudeness towards the family of Michael Gelber, a long-time follower who died in 1994, see http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/gelber1.htm. For the ICLC chairman’s attacks on the family of Jeremiah Duggan (see [FN 8]), as well as more details on LaRouche’s insulting attitude towards the Kronberg family, see http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/insult.htm.
The LaRouchian sadism towards families that have suffered a tragic loss comes out most clearly, however, when the person who died was someone the cult regarded as a clear-cut enemy–an agent of the international “oligarchy.”
In 1986, when the LaRouche organization was supporting Panama’s cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega, whom LaRouche depicted as a progressive and humanistic leader, the country’s leading spokesperson for human rights, Hugo Spadafora,
was seized at the Costa Rican border, tortured for hours in an unspeakable manner by Noriega’s thugs, and beheaded. (For the details, see Guillermo Sanchez Borbon, “Hugo Spadafora’s Last Day: A murder in Panama undoes a regime,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1988; also see R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.)
This created a huge scandal in Panama, and Noriega had to sack his own puppet President, Nicolas Barletta, after the latter suggested setting up a commission to investigate Spadafora’s murder. The LaRouchians instantly jumped to the defense of their favorite dictator, claiming that Spadafora was just another “dead terrorist” who had worked for left-wing drug traffickers while Noriega was waging a heroic fight against drugs.
After Spadafora’s brother and sister engaged in a peaceful protest in Panama City to urge a full investigation, LaRouche’s EIR (March 7, 1986) published a cover photo of their action with mocking commentary on the editorial page: “Our photographer . . . caught the brother and sister of Panamanian terrorist Hugo Spadafora . . . in their cultish protest . . . over Spadafora’s unsolved murder.” The editorial suggested that the two siblings were in league with the “Gnostic fraternity of Panama,” which supposedly had “put out newspaper ads announcing they would form a ‘mental chain’ until ‘justice’ was done in the Spadafora case–meaning the overthrow of the Panamanian Defense Forces by the drug-terror mob Spadafora worked for.” EIR went on to fulminate about “an underworld run by the Gnostics, with their hatred of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and their bizarre sexual rituals” and even roped into the conspiracy the “Israeli cultist and hooligan Ariel Sharon.”
The LaRouchian trashing of Spadafora’s memory by calling him a terrorist and drug trafficker was based on a cover story concocted by Noriega’s G‑2 military intelligence unit, according to 1988 U.S. Senate testimony by Jose Blandon, Noriega’s former consul general in New York, who also stated under oath that “Mr. LaRouche works for Mr. Noriega.”
In fact, the cover story spread by the LaRouche organization was a complete pack of lies. Far from being a narco-terrorist, Spadafora was a valued ally of U.S. policy in the region who only days before being slain had met with a DEA official to provide information about Noriega’s cocaine trafficking.
After the downfall of his regime, Noriega was taken to the United States, tried on drug and racketeering charges in 1992, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 1995, a Panamanian court found the former dictator guilty in absentia of conspiracy to murder Spadafora, and sentenced him to 20 additional years.
Lyndon LaRouche was never prosecuted for serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign power in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
[11] LaRouche’s consolation prize is that the science fiction TV series “Sliders” depicted him as dictator of the United States in a parallel universe (a curious inversion of Spinrad’s theme). But LaRouche cannot savor this honor since he’s locked into the theory that science fiction is an evil invention of the unspeakable Fabian oligarchist H.G. Wells.
[12] LaRouche, “New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism,” New Solidarity, December 8, 1978.
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