LAROUCHE UNDER THE ULTRASCOPE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706000001-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 7, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 26, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706000001-1
ON PAGE '!C ....o
WASHINGTON TIMES
26 March 1986
LaRouche under
the Ultrascope
JOHN SELLER
Who the heck is Lyndon
LaRouche, the guy
whose followers last
week ambushed the
Democratic Party in Illinois?
The Chicago Tribune calls Mr.
LaRouche a "right-wing extremist",
and an "ultraconservative." The New
York Times dubs him "an eccentric
far-rightist and anti-Communist."
And The Washington Post labels his
followers "far-right." These names
come from news stories, not edito-
rial page broadsides.
By posting Mr. LaRouche on the
extreme right of the political spec-
trum, these newspapers accomplish
two things, consciously or uncon-
sciously. They taint Ronald Reagan
and other conservatives long
branded "ultraconservative." And
they absolve liberals and Democrats
from their current, unwanted
LaRouche connections - perhaps
hoping to get their friends out of a
mess. But such continued confusion
only compounds the problem, as I
shall explain later. Again, who the
heck is Lyndon LaRouche?
Over the years, Lyndon La-
Rouche's political stance has gy-
rated wildly. Yet the fact remains
that Mr. LaRouche has always been
an extreme leftist, who uses tech-
niques first outlined and practiced
by his idol, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Mr. LaRouche is no conservative -
"ultra" or otherwise.
True, Mr. LaRouche supports the
development of laser "beam" weap-
ons to knock down:CBMs. But so do
Mikhail Gorbachev and (presum-
ably) Deng Xiaoping, neither of
whom is a conservative. More, Mr.
LaRouche's followers have de-
nounced Gen. Daniel Graham, head
of High Frontier, the main group
supporting just such a space de-
fense, and one of the main influences
on President Reagan's decision to
build the Strategic Defense Initia-
tive.
It's also true that Mr. LaRouche
makes a big deal of the current AIDS
epidemic. But so do the Soviets. whg
lame the disease on CIA biological
warfare experiments gone awry. (in-
deed, Mr. LaRouc e s biological the-
ories rival in bizarreness those of
late Soviet biologist Trofim Ly-
senko.)
Mr. LaRouche also declares that
the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bal-
anced budget act will hurt the poor,
and so should be repealed - a
clearly liberal position. Yet neither
should we go to the opposite extreme
and label Mr. LaRouche a "liberal."
Other definitions are needed.
W riting in National Review in
1979, a former LaRouche
associate reported that the
LaRouche-affiliated National Cau-
cus of Labor Committees has ties to
Soviet officials. And a Heritage
Foundation report concluded that
Mr. LaRouche takes positions
"which in the end advance Soviet
foreign policy goals.... In the worst
case, [the LaRouche group] may well
be the strangest asset for the KGB's
-disinformation effort." We're getting
c oser to a definition here. Tribune
columnist Mike Royko refers to Mr.
LaRouche as "ultra-weird." But even
this accurate epithet misses the
point.
Lyndon LaRouche is in fact a
Leninist-Trotskyite, with a dash of
anti-Semitism thrown in. This takes
a bit of explaining.
According to a report on Mr.
LaRouche released in 1985 by Mid-
Atlantic Research Associates
(MARA), "In 1948 ... LaRouche
joined the Trotskyist Communist So-
cialist Workers Party (SWP), the U.S.
section of the Brussels-based United
Secretariat of the Fourth Interna-
tional, and then adopted the 'party
name' Lyn Marcus" - a play on the
names Lenin and Marx. The MARA
report adds: "LaRouche/Marcus left
the Socialist Workers Party in 1957,"
but "remained in Trotskyist Commu-
nist circles."
Tb understand Mr. LaRouche, one
must therefore understand both Le-
ninism and Trotskyism.
A s Arnold Beichman wrote in
this newspaper last month,
"Leninism is a theory of
power, how to grab it, how to keep it,
and how to concentrate it in an
oligarchy anointed by a sacred and
presumably immutable ideology."
Mr. Beichman calls Leninism "the
only new political idea of the 20th
century," with its central apparatus,
"the totalitarian party."
Both Mussolini and Hitler readily
molded their respective Fascist and
National Socialist parties on the Le-
ninist model; and Hitler openly ad-
mired Stalin's adept use of Leninist
political technique. And though
these tyrants appealed to nationalist
sentiments, they were no more
"rightists" than the Soviets are today
when they appeal to the Soviet "fa-
therland." Likewise, Mr. LaRouche's
anti-Semitism stands up although
Trotsky was Jewish, as are even
some LaRouchists; one doesn't ex-
pect consistency from the "ultra-
weird."
'Trotskyism is a kind of hyper-
Leninism. In a memo penned in 1921,
Lenin insisted that "revolution con-
sists of a series of accelerations,
sudden brakes, attacks, truces, and
periods of relative calm, during
which the power of the revolution
reinforces itself and prepares itself
for final victory. ... " Such delays
were too slow for Lenin's revolution-
ary army commander, Leon Trotsky,
who always pumped for instant
world revolution. The best example
of Trotskyism in action was Mao
Tse-tung's policy of continuous rev-
olution (since superceded by the
gradualism of current Chinese dic-
tator Deng Xiaoping, a true Lenin-
ist).
Let's see how Mr. LaRouche meets
these two definitions.
First, his political group clearly
fits the Leninist model. Mr.
LaRouche has concentrated abso-
lute power in himself and top organ-
ization leaders. His political pro-
nouncements are declared
immutable, even though, like Lenin,
Mr. LaRouche frequently changes
them. As Mr. LaRouche has demon-
strated in Illinois, he is very adept in
the methods of grabbing power. And
as any good Leninist party should
have, Mr. LaRouche has developed
targets of intense hatred, most of
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706000001-1
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706000001-1
them actually conservatives: Wil-
liam F. Buckley Jr., Gen. Graham,
Information Digest publisher John
Rees, The Heritage Foundation, the
editor of this newspaper, Arnaud de
Borchgrave, and Queen Elizabeth II
of England.
Second, the LaRouche group's
Trotskyite nature is equally clear. In-
deed, Mr. LaRouche's call to instant
revolution better fits the United
States - the country of instant cof-
fee and microwave ovens - than do
the dull pronouncements of the
stodgy old Communist Party, U.S.A.
The FBI's 1974 annual report said
that Mr. LaRouche's National Cau-
cus of Labor Committees is "a
violence-oriented organization
which has described itself as an 'or-
ganization of revolutionary social-
ists' . .. While the efforts of the or-
ganization to weaken other
Communist, Trotskyist, and socialist
groups through physical attacks on
their members at gatherings have
all but failed, the impact of these
attacks,has bolstered its contention
that it is necessary to use violence to.
achieve socialism."
This leaves one question: does Mr.
LaRouche still hold to these beliefs?
He seems to have shifted to the
right - or so the national media re-
port. In fact, as far as I can tell, Mr.
LaRouche has never renounced his
old oeuec ui extreme socialist poli-
cies. Presumably, he still believes all
the old Marxist economic whim-
wham taught by both Lenin and
Trotsky. A President LaRouche
would seize all business concerns,
and organize agriculture around
huge collective farms. We would see
an American rerun of Chairman
Mao's Great Leap Forward of the
late 1950s. And as Trotsky was al-
ways big on advancing Bolshevik
culture, we would probably see a re-
run of Mao's 1960s Cultural Rev-
olution as well.
As I mentioned, liberal Demo- -
crats may hope to confuse things by
labeling the LaRouchists "ultra-
conservative" But in fact this only
compounds the Democrats' prob-
lems. Mr. LaRouche is a passing phe-
nomenon, a political Halley's Comet.
Even the LaRouchists' violent acts
have been, and will be, taken care of
by the proper law enforcement
agencies.
But the Democrats' current my-
opia on political extremism will, ap-
parently, continue. Democrats are
now applying their foreign policy of
ignorance and appeasement to
American national politics - a kind
of domestic moral equivalence. And
this means more losses at the polls.
Illinois Democrats are now
learning what happens to the politi-
cally complacent. It may take a simi-
lar shock to teach national Demo-
crats the same lesson.
2,
John Seiler is a member of the
editorial staff of The Washington
Times.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706000001-1