Lyndon H. Larouche Jr.
Lyndon H. Larouche Jr.
Perpetual candidate for the U.S. presidency, far-out conspiracy theorist, Lyndon H. LaRouche remains one of the most controversial figures on the international scene.
In 2004 Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (1922–) made his fifth run for president of the United States. In that race he ran as a Democrat. In his first run for the presidency, in 1976, he campaigned under the banner of the U.S. Labor Party.
LaRouche is among the most controversial figures on the international scene. To his followers, he has the only ideology that will work in today’s world and he possesses economic theories that will turn America around. To his detractors, LaRouche is a mad conspiracist. In his book Conspiracy, Daniel Pipes states that the principal theme that has fueled LaRouche’s platforms for his many organizations, publications, and presidential campaigns is that “a single oligarchic conspiracy has been bedeviling mankind since the dawn of history. Its headquarters were first in Babylon, then in Rome, Venice, and now London.”
LaRouche was convicted on federal conspiracy charges in December 1988 and spent five years in prison. His followers condemn the trial as a “political show-trial,” comparable to the case of France’s Captain Alfred Dreyfus. On September 2, 1994, testifying before a commission investigating the same case, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark commented that the case represented “a broader range of deliberate cunning and systematic misconduct over a longer period of time utilizing the power of the Federal government than any other prosecution by the U.S. government in my time or to my knowledge.”
For years LaRouche’s critics have denounced him as an anti-Semitic, eccentric conspiracy theorist whose “cult” of followers borders on preaching fascist philosophy. They point to his claim that the Queen of England is “the number one danger to humanity,” his contention that the Beatles were designed and shaped by the British Psychological Warfare Division, and his belief that the Freemasons established the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith as a proslavery spy ring providing intelligence to the South before the Civil War.
At the same time, LaRouche believes that the “sovereign cognitive powers of the individual human mind” are validated by discoveries of physical principles that are “identical in nature with those responsible for the composition of metaphor in great compositions” in classical forms of poetry, music, and art. Science and art are both subjective, rather than objective, and new principles of science and new ideas are born as resolutions of metaphor. These, LaRouche explains, were the lead considerations in his cofounding of the scientific Fusion Energy Foundation during the mid-1970s and his support for his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s founding of the International Club of Life and the international Schiller Institute, devoted to the defense of the rights of all humanity to progress—materially, morally, and intellectually.
Matthew Lyons, coauthor with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, told Joe Ireland of the Portland State University Vanguard that since the early 1990s the “LaRouchites” have “promoted a kind of faked progressivism. They’ve opposed both Gulf Wars, attacked the death penalty, and defended social welfare programs and civil rights. But their underlying political philosophy is based on conspiracy theories, not a critique of systemic oppression.”
Lyndon LaRouche continues struggling against the grand conspiracy that in his opinion is made up of Zionists, Jesuits, Freemasons, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschilds, environmentalists, drug traffickers, fundamentalist Muslims, orthodox Christians, and the B’nai B’rith.