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Lyndon Larouche, neo-fascism, coded anti-Semitism, and the

Jeremiah Duggan Case

 

Guest Publication by

Matthew Feldman

[photos added to enhance the text]

 

Jeremiah Duggan

Described by the current edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica as a "notorious antisemite" whose "international organization’ is today a "major source of ... masked antisemitic theories globally’, Lyndon LaRouche continues to be hounded by the unexplained death of Jeremiah Duggan immediately following a LaRouchite event in Germany.   

 

Evidence pertaining to the  death of Jeremiah Duggan further suggests that Lyndon LaRouche and his international network (hereinafter referred to as the ‘LaRouche Organization’) have repeatedly violated German and European Law regarding incitement to racism and extreme right politics.  In both German and European Union law, anti-Semitism, ‘extrem’ politics, and incitement to religious/racial hatred are illegal. 

 

Yet  even the brief summary below points appears to implicate Mr LaRouche a United States citizen, all of these activities; and also significantly,  the principal arm of his LaRouche Organization in Europe, the Schiller Institute (located in Wiesbaden, Hesse), in the global dissemination of neo-fascist propaganda and Holocaust revisionism.

 

These activities played an as-yet indetermined part in the death of 22-year old Jeremiah Duggan, a British Jew visiting Weisbaden, Germany, in the early hours of 27 March 2003; potentially more direct criminal activities took place on the night of 26-7 March, but serious investigation into the tragic death of this Parisian-based student has not been undertaken.

 

Furthermore, the investigation and handling of Mr Duggan’s wrongful death have been truncated, insufficient and riddled with mistakes. Five years after Jeremiah Duggan’s death, fundamental questions remain unanswered, despite worldwide media coverage and international calls for an inquiry into his death: his family continues to be denied justice while the LaRouche Organization continues to operate with impunity.

 

In demanding a full and fearless investigation into the wide-ranging circumstances surrounding Mr. Duggan’s death, this overview covers the following two points:

  • Characterisation of the LaRouche and LaRouche Organization as a neo-fascist political movement.

  • The role of the Schiller Institute in disseminating Holocaust ‘revisionism’, essentially coded anti-Semitic Holocasut denial, incitement to racial hatred, and radical right propaganda more broadly.

The underlying research behind these points – of which more shall be posted shortly – suggests that LaRouche Organization seems to be in flagrant and consistent breaches of the law – especially in terms of a thinly-veiled anti-Semitism emanating from a  what I argue below is a neo-fascist movement  operating out of in Germany. 

Indeed, it seems that mere hours after publicly declaring that he was Jewish – what one witness declared was a ‘brave act’ of standing up to racism –  at the Schiller Institute conference in March 2003, Jeremiah Duggan was later found dead on a Weisbaden autobahn, H.M. Coroner, Dr W.F.G. Dolman, noting on 8 April 2003 that the deceased ‘had earlier been in a state of terror’. 

This summary therefore urges the British and German government to cooperate in reopening the case of Jeremiah Duggan's suspicious death; to initiate a criminal investigation of the Schiller Institute in particular and the Larouche Organization generally; and to conduct a proactive and far-reaching investigation of anti-Semitism in contemporary Germany.

Lyndon LaRouche as neo-fascist and ‘coded’ anti-Semite

A convicted fraudster and legally-determined ‘small time Hitler’, Lyndon LaRouche has long operated at the margins of electoral politics, both as a failing 8-time Democratic hopeful for U.S. President, as well as through decades of local/regional activism across America and Europe.

Despite establishment credentials and the National Caucus of Labour Committees (NCLC) party, from his entry into politics under the nom de plume Lyn Marcus in the late 1960s, LaRouche’s political tactics have been demonstrably extremist. 

Examples of these activities range from the demonisation of enemies (typically with Jewish, or ‘Jewish-sounding’ last names) to a violent campaign against leftist individuals in America during 1973/4, codenamed “Operation Mop-Up”. Over the 1970s, as LaRouche’s political empire began to grow, so too did his anti-Semitism and cultic hold over his followers (for details see online: http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.BerlinVideo). 

Defamatory attacks were launched against a wide range of targets, as with the following example from 1978, a year of increased contact with Willis Carto, notorious anti-Semite and founder of the Institute for Historical Review: 

True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive “appropriate technology” for the employment of “inferior races,” a small fraction of the tens of millions of others – especially Slavs – who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn proposes today. 

Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists.  The point is that Adolf Hitler was put into power largely on the initiative of the Rothschilds, Warburgs and Oppenheimers, among other Jewish and non-Jewish financial interests centered in the City of London.  [….] The Jews who did die at the hands of Nazism were the victims of fascism, the victims of the Schactian form of “fiscal austerity.” 

The “Holocaust” simply proves that the failure of the Nuremberg tribunal to hang Hjalmar Schacht made the whole proceeding a travesty of justice.  The murderers of the million and a half or more Jews who died in the “holocaust” are any group, Jewish or non-Jewish, which supported then or now the policies advocated by Felix Rohatyn or Milton Freidman [sic].  Either you, as a Jew, join with the U.S. Labor Party to stop Rohatyn, Friedman the Mont Pelerin Society now, or you are implicitly just as guilty of the death of millions of Jews as Adolf Hitler. (New Solidarity, 8 Dec.1978, p.4)  A scanned version available online:

 http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.CultOriginsofZionism1

The above passage is but one reason that, already some twenty years ago the central anti-fascist magazine, started labelling LaRouche an ‘ultra-rightist’ and ‘extremist’ at the head of a ‘racist movement’ (Searchlight June 1988, p.18; and May 1988, p.14). Yet the LaRouche Organization actually may be better charaterised as a neo-fascist movement, led by LaRouche’s ideology, defined by Chip Berlet as ‘reinvented fascism’. 

1973 FBI letter suggesting operation against LaRouche

Another leading expert on LaRouche, Dennis King, argued in Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism – also now a generation old – such neo-fascism meant that ‘LaRouche was a man with a coherent program, subtle tactics, and—what is usually lacking in American politics—a long-range plan of how to get from here to there.

Both in word and in deed, he was a serious ideologue in the classic European fascist mold. His pendulum swing from left to right in the 1970s had followed the pattern of Benito Mussolini, who was a socialist newspaper editor before founding Italy's Fascist Party. Likewise, LaRouche's occasional reversion to left-wing rhetoric when useful fit the pattern of the early Nazi brownshirts, who, after all, fancied themselves as "National Socialists."

His synthetic ideology combined anti-Semitism with extreme militarism and the need for an authoritarian regime to rescue the industrial capitalist system from what he believed was an impending crisis.’ (Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, p.266; King’s biography available online at: http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org).     

Yet LaRouche’s excerpt above does not, at first glance, seem be of the same character as writings of Mussolini or Hitler, nor that of other notable fascists writing up to the end of World War Two.  This is by design. For after 1945, fascism could never gain power through paramilitary coups or anti-Semitic programmes.

Given the unprecedented racial and genocidal crimes committed by European fascist movements – not to mention the popular hostility to fascism throughout the Cold War – the overriding impulse for intelligent postwar fascists (“neo-fascist ideologues”) thus became one of retaining a fascist worldview on the one hand; while on the other, concealing this ideology through euphemistic and coded language. 

Both of these points can be easily obtained through scholarly studies of fascism. For example, Roger Griffin’s Fascism Reader defines fascism as ‘a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.’ Later in this book, a passage from a leading neo-fascist ideologue, Maurice Bardeche, demonstrates the significance of distinguishing fascist ideology from unpopular characteristics:

The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism, let alone the reactionary thrust of political alliances […] The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. More important than the mechanism is the idea which fascism has created for itself of man and freedom. […] With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living. (Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin, 1995, OUP, pp. 4; 321).

 

As Dennis King has shown, Lyndon LaRouche phrased this necessity even more bluntly in 1978: ‘It is not necessary to wear a brown shirt to be a fascist... It is not necessary to wear a swastika to be a fascist ... It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist to be one, it is simply necessary to be one.’ Wolves must appear to be sheep for this strategy to succeed.  

 

Interestingly, a recent, leaded 'Morning Briefing' finds LaRouche stating that ‘I’m a free spirit! I say what I think needs to be said. I don’t worry about who hears it. The more the merrier! I consider myself accountable for whatever I say. I’m pleased to be accountable for what I say. Not ashamed of anything.’ (http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showthread.php?t=11710&page=61) If this is indeed the case, LaRouche must then stand by the above statements. This would seem to rather end much of the debate over his extremism there.

In short, LaRouche is perhaps the most ingengious manipulator of hate-speech active amongst neo-fascists today.  Returning to LaRouche’s 1978 passage in New Solidarity, an article entitled “New pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism”, the following techniques emerge:

  • Holocaust Revisionism

  • Reciprocation: Calling others fascists and Nazis

  • Metonymy: Using individual Jews as shorthand for entire group

The aim of these techniques is three-fold.  First, it attempts to deny central aspects of the Holocaust: to marginalise suffering, relativise guilt, question facts, and shift blame away from the perpetrators of the Final Solution.

This is perhaps the most pervasive form of anti-Semitism in the world today. Second, it attempts to sanitise fascism by referring to one’s enemies as Nazis, fascists, mass murderers, and so on.  Fascism’s crimes are at once minimised and applied to perceived enemies. 

Third, using individual Jews as anti-Semitic code: reference to Rohatyn and Friedman, above, therefore, is a metonymy for Jews generally.  Thus anti-Semites deliberately disguise their attacks on Judiasm by singling out “bad” Jews – wealthy or powerful individuals, political supporters of Zionism and, of course, anything relating  to Israel. 

A number of other features are added to this conspiracy theory, derived from classic American fascist texts contemporaneous with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.  These include an idiosyncratic strand of American radical nationalism, traditional anti-Semitism, and extreme Anglophobia (exemplified by the British monarchy and intelligence services). 

As a result, actual fascist and Nazi actions – especially the Final Solution – are systematically trivialised; they return within the boundaries of normalcy.  Additionally, enemies are demonised: they are the ones considered to be conspirators and genocidaires; the very embodiment of evil.  These individuals are typically Jews prominent in public life. 

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

By rehabilitating fascist ideology in this way, the LaRouche Organization is able to simultaneously shroud their own pedigree, while rehabilitating many of the prior taboos associated with fascism. The two elements needed for this strategy is time and a steady flow of publications.  Since the 1970s, the LaRouche organisation has had both, retaining its call for a revolutionary ‘renaissance’ from the contemporary ‘dark ages’ at the Bad Schwalbach conference attended by Jeremiah Duggan in March 2003. 

As the headquarters of the LaRouche Organization’s European arm since it founding by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in 1984, moreover, the Schiller Institute in Wiesbaden is directly responsible for disseminating this reformulated fascist doctrine.  The very act of challenging the anti-Semitism and conspiricism inherent in this programme clearly helped to bring about Mr Duggan’s death. 

Although German law makes fascist and racist parties illegal, the LaRouche Organization’s easily-spotted concealment of their neo-fascist credentials is simply a case of hiding in plain sight.  This is a neo-fascist party, one that I believe unmistakably incites racial and religious hatred against Jews and others

The LaRouche Organization's attempted at ‘reinventing fascism’ should in no way deter German authorities from investigating the Shiller Institute’s apparent contravention of the German Penal Code.  Quite the contrary: the existence of ‘extrem’ neo-fascism in Germany today should be rigorously investigated.

-Dr Matthew Feldman

Senior Lecturer in History

Editor, Compass: Political Religions (www.religion-compass.com)

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright: 2008 Matthew Feldman   H.E.A.R.T

 

 
 
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