Black people as animals, 1973 version: LaRouche's followers circulated this pamphlet in Newark and elsewhere while engaging in street battles with black nationalists.
Updated, June 30, 2011.
LaRouche's outbursts against Obama in April 2008 and in webcasts thereafter are not something new. They are consistent with ideas he has advocated, and rhetoric he has frequently used, since the early 1970s. Through the links below, visitors to this website can easily explore LaRouche's racist viewpoint about people of color around the world, his connection to white supremacist and neo-fascist groups, his support for death squads that have been active against indigenous people in Mexico and Central America, and his relationship with South Africa's former apartheid regime. Also included in the menu is disturbing evidence of LaRouche's access over the years to many African-American politicians and religious figures in spite of his sinister history.
We hope that many of the ministers, state legislators and others in the black community who've worked with LaRouche--and also the white liberals such as Ed Asner who've become enamored of him--will look at the evidence compiled here. If they do, we think many if not most will agree that it's time to sever all ties with LaRouche and his deceptive network.
1. The text of the speech, its immediate inspiration and other recent LaRouche outbursts
2. LaRouche's long record of racism against blacks, Asians, native
Americans and the indigenous peoples of Latin America
3. The weird beliefs behind LaRouche's hatred of Obama's mom
4. LaRouche's deceptive attempts to win support from black leaders (too often, he's succeeded)
5. The LaRouche cult's exploitation of its black members (including a 96-year-old woman)
6. LaRouche's ties to Klansmen and other white supremacists
7. LaRouche's support for apartheid South Africa
8. How LaRouche taught his followers to hate: The 1973 anti-Baraka campaign References to monkeys and chimps
LaRouche delivers racist rant (April 12, 2008) against Senator Obama, slams Obama's mother for race mixing. "If you chase his [Obama's] family tree, everybody's climbing and swinging from the branches....Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him."
Is this what triggered the specific language LaRouche used in his speech? An Obama delegate in Illinois got into trouble for telling the two small sons (eight and nine years old) of a black neighbor to "quit playing in the tree like monkeys" when she observed them climbing a tree next to her house. This was widely reported in the press between April 7 and April 12; LaRouche gave his speech about Obama, monkeys and tree-swinging ancestors on April 12. LaRouche apparently knew that the particular words he would use had already been branded as "unacceptable" by the Obama campaign. It thus would appear that his remarks were a deliberate racist taunt. (For the final resolution of the Illinois tree incident, read here.)
LaRouche compares jazz musicians to monkeys (2006). This is pretty much what he said about Obama in 2008, but employs raunchier and more insulting language.
LaRouche and top aide joke about "chimpanzees" in the White House (2011). When asked by his boss where a chimp goes to vote in U.S. elections, EIR senior economist John Hoefle answered right on cue.
LaRouche compares Obama to a trained monkey or a zoo creature (2009). "And we have a dictatorship in the United States, which is in the direction of a Nazi dictatorship, under a President who doesn't have much conscience, because he doesn't have any brains. He's trained to talk like a trained monkey, or something out of a mechanical zoo..." (From the transcript of "Down with the British Empire!," a Sept. 8, 2009 webcast address by LaRouche; see page 3 of PDF (page 6 of EIR).)
Direct and indirect racist threats and incitements against Obama
LaRouche's chimpanzee and monkey jokes are pretty low-key in comparison with his hate-drenched webcasts and other attacks on the Obama Presidency. This Lyndon LaRouche Watch press release describes two 2010 rants by LaRouche: first, a Jan. 2010 speech saying it's time to "take out Obama"; and second, a March 2010 speech suggesting that Obama should be brought down via an Ides of March (assassination of Julius Caesar) type event.
LaRouche plays the indirect threat game. In a Sept. 2009 press release issued by his political action committee, LaRouche says that Obama should back down on health care "or he might be hung." And then he addresses his words to Obama directly: "You've lost, Mr. President....You are a damn fool. You need to listen to people who are smarter than you. Face it. You are a terrible failure. I am trying to save you, Mr. Failure."
Racist death threats against the President? In this January 30, 2010 speech (transcript provided here with highlighting of key passages), LaRouche claimed that Americans were thinking about lynching Obama. LaRouche suggested that they were moving in the right direction--that it was time to "take out Obama." LaRouche also stated that the President was good only for "kindling"--a comment that, in the context of the lynching remark, appeared to refer to how racist mobs burned black men at the stake, or burned their lynched corpses, during the Jim Crow era.
LaRouche suggests that Obama be removed from office via an "Ides of March" type event. In this March 13, 2010 webcast, LaRouche uses the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC as a code phrase for discussing what perhaps the far right should do to Obama. The speech was posted on video-sharing websites under the title "Obama is Going Down." The transcript here, with key passages highlighted, is from LaRouche's Schiller Institute website and is illustrated by a picture of Caesar being stabbed to death; the caption underneath predicts that "[a]s with Caesar, time is running out for Barack Obama..."
This ultimate fascist rant includes a gruesome description of Obama being removed "screaming" and "shrieking" from the Oval Office by "silent-faced, grim" avengers. Basically LaRouche is calling for a coup d'etat against the lawfully elected President of the United States. Although most people would regard such a suggestion as outrageous, LaRouche sees Obama as only the "President of the United States, so-called" (read first page here) and as really just "a Nero" (see the Jan. 30, 2010 speech above).
LaRouche has repeatedly referred to Obama as "Nero," "a Nero" or "the Nero in the White House." Followers of LaRouche will doubtless argue that the missing "g" is not really missing--that the word is just being used to compare Obama to the Roman Emperor Nero. And indeed they have placed on their websites a picture of Obama in a toga. But think a second: the nation's first African-American President is being referred to, out of all possible comparisons, as the Nero in the White House. The Roman Empire had 147 emperors up through 395 AD, and thereafter another 23 in the West until the fall of the Western empire. Granted most of them are not as well known as Nero, but LaRouche--if he wanted to avoid sending a racial message--could easily have chosen Caligula (also well known from Hollywood movies and historically a worse figure than Nero). Or LaRouche could have picked some non-Roman historical figure (of which there are many who are both as villainous and as notorious as Nero) to make his purported comparison.
The issue here is not one of politically correct nitpicking. If a newspaper editorial from a legitimate newspaper would compare Obama to Nero, the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, nobody would see anything wrong with that. But when the word is used in a variety of contexts, with or without the articles "a" and "the," by a notorious bigot who also refers to the President as a "monkey," a "chimpanzee," a zoo creature, kindling wood and a potential target for lynch mob justice, well, the choice of the word "Nero" can hardly be regarded as innocent. "Zombie Killers Out of Control" (June 1974). The rhetoric of this LaRouche leaflet is almost indistinguishable from that of the Ku Klux Klan: "This summer you will be walking down the street with your family and a cruising car will pull up beside you. A group of young black men will jump out of the car and surround you. As they close in, you may notice that their eyes show no emotion, their pupils are pinpoints. Your throat will be slashed, your wife will be stabbed, your children's heads will be smashed against the pavement. The attackers will be grinning or laughing."
LaRouche is really not fond of black mothers. In "The Politics of Male Impotence" (1973), he writes: "What is the sickness inside so many of our members whcih [sic] causes them to awfully admire the image of the Black Ghetto mother? Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Chetto [sic] mother?" Note his use of "anything" rather than "anyone."
Cleansing the continent of "miserable" and "bestial" cultures. LaRouche says it was "absolutely" correct for the "American branch of European humanist culture" to grab all the land from the "miserable, relatively bestial culture of indigenous Americans." (Note that he lumps hundreds of tribes, language groups and ancient peoples into a single undifferentiated culture.) And the same thing goes for those miserable Mexicans after the War of 1848: "We do not regard all cultures and nations as equally deserving of sovereignty or survival." (The page image is from The Case of Walter Lippmann, LaRouche's 1977 prescription for fascism in the United States.)
"Drunken Indians"? In this page from "What Happened to Integration?" (The Campaigner, August 1975), LaRouche argues that the assimilation of "backward" cultures into a modern industrial economy results in "a significant diminution of the paranoid tendencies--those same paranoid tendencies which cause the notorious wildness of the 'drunken Indian.' It is not the primitive individual's genetic disposition which makes him pathetically susceptible to effects of alcohol in that way; it is the relative paranoia characteristic of the primitiveness of the culture in which he was matured."
Subhuman orientals? LaRouche claims (in "What Happened to Integration?" The Campaigner, August 1975) that (a) the Chinese peasantry represents a paranoid personality type rooted in cultural backwardness; (b) the "paranoid personality and lower forms of animal life share a parallel general form of fundamental distinction from actual human personalities"; and (c) persons from paranoid cultures, such as the "oriental village commune," tend to "[approximate] the lower animal species" and to that extent are "incapable of sustaining a stable guiding moral structure for [their] behavior."
"Monkeys and baboons"? LaRouche lashes out against African-American Congresswoman Barbara Jordan re her civil rights-oriented speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention. Calls her views "bestial" and "hideous." Says that in a LaRouchian "republic" the law would be "hostile to those kinds of distinctions among human beings which would be proper to the classification of varieties of monkeys and baboons." (Excerpted page is from The Case of Walter Lippmann (1977), available today on the website of the LaRouche Youth Movement, where it is described as a "classic.")
Mayan beast-men and Amazon zoo people? This is Chap. 11 of The Plot to Annihilate the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America, a kind of Mein Kampf for Latin American military officers and death-squad supporters published by the LaRouche organization in 1994 in both Spanish and English. Filled with artfully worded racist descriptions of indigenous peoples in Central America and the Amazon basin. Claims the Mayas today represent a "failed" civilization that was "saved" from the consequences of its failure by the arrival of the enlightened Conquistadores. Suggests that the ungrateful wretches are now plotting to stab the nation-states of the region in the back and dismember their territories. Says that some Mayan leaders today are also attempting to promote a "bestial concept of 'Indian religion.'" Calls Brazil's Yanomami reserve a "zoo," and expresses indignation that a British museum with the backing of the Human Genome Organization intends to preserve frozen samples of the tribe's gene pool.
If they get uppity, kill 'em. Since the early 1980s, LaRouche's organization has encouraged the violent assaults by rightist death squads on indigenous peoples in Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere. Here are numerous examples of the sadistic and racist propaganda of LaRouche and his followers that may have had an effect in unstable countries where Spanish-language LaRouchian propaganda is widely circulated and LaRouche's private intelligence apparatus has long been active.
Subhuman music? Here are selected pages (with highlighting) from "The Racist Roots of Jazz," which appeared in the Sept.-Oct. 1980 issue of The Campaigner. Although author Peter Wyer, who later left the LaRouche organization, appears in this article to sincerely regard himself as opposed to racism, the delusional ideology he embraces leads him into making absurdly bigoted judgments. Basically this article argues that jazz and the blues were invented by an evil Jewish-British cabal using black prostitutes and drug addicts as its puppets. The underlying assumption, although never directly stated, is that black people lack the creativity to develop a valid form of music on on their own. Wyer believes that black musicians should have worked exclusively in the European classical tradition (he grudgingly concedes there is some merit in Scott Joplin's work because Joplin "studied with an old German musician" in Texas). Wyer also expresses scorn again and again for individual jazz artists; for instance, he refers to the "psychotic honkings" of saxophonist John Coltrane which supposedly represent "yet another step towards truly un-mediated psychosis in black music, in the name of black rebellion." Wyer calls the relationship between blacks and Jews in the popular music industry a "grotesque spectacle of individuals and sections of the pop music business competing in racialist self-identification, tribalist genealogy, and racist psychosis--the psychological truth of the affair being perhaps best summarized in the racist and anti-Semitic adage of the old South, 'Jews are only Niggers turned inside out.'" Note that in spite of his use of the adjectives "racist" and "anti-Semitic," Wyer is basically endorsing the old South (i.e., Ku Klux Klan) adage. And note also on p. 39: "Hideous as they were, the black musical festivals around the institution of slavery and the revivalist movement were paled by the nature of those around the abolitionist movement, where the bestialization and degradation of American blacks was generalized as the cultural policy for the entire American population." This odd attack on abolitionism is a carbon copy of LaRouche's line on World War Two: The Nazis may have been bad, but the British were far worse.
The full text of "The Racist Roots of Jazz" can be found at the LaRouche Youth Movement website here. "The Racist Roots of Mad Melvin." This article by Joe Conason (The Village Voice, Sept. 28, 1982) includes a summary of the LaRouche organization's peculiar ideas regarding African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, and a description of its support for the South Boston anti-busing movement in the late 1970s.
Why Lyndon LaRouche hates Margaret Mead and Obama's mother. Here is a LaRouche article from 30 years ago ("The Witchcraft of Christians Who Are Not Christians," The Campaigner, Nov. 1978) that bears comparison to, and is certainly no less demented than, what LaRouche said on April 12. Obama's mother was not yet on his radar screen, but her supposed forerunner Dr. Mead sure was. In "The Witchcraft,", LaRouche calls her a "long-standing British intelligence agent-of-influence" and "a priestess of the evil, pagan goddess Isis, a priestess of the Whore of Babylon." LaRouche traces the influence of the ancient Isis cult to the present day "through a secret cult within Judaism associated with usury-practicing families of the Mediterranean." Involved in the plot as of the late 1970s--along with Mead and the anthropology community in general--were the House of Rothschild, the Scottish rite Freemasons, the Knights of Malta, the Hari Krishna sect, the Israeli army, the feminist movement (e.g, LaRouche's first wife and her friends) and anyone who liked to watch professional football.
Isis worshippers! Evil Phrygians! Satanic rites! Whore-goddesses out of Babylon! Jews! Is LaRouche's hatred of Margaret Mead and Obama's mother rooted in weird Nazi theories about ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cults polluting the well of Western civilization? See the comparison here of passages from LaRouche and from Hitler's "philosopher," Alfred Rosenberg re the Isis cult and other matters mentioned in the Mead-is-a-witch article above.
How LaRouche fooled black and white politicians and activists into treating him as a legitimate Democrat. In the wake of LaRouche's speech comparing Senator Obama to a monkey, it is instructive to examine the printed proceedings (only selected pages here) of the "Ad Hoc Democratic Party Platform Hearings" sponsored by LaRouche in Washington, D.C., June 22, 2000. LaRouche was able to entice a number of African-American state legislators to participate--along with farm activists, health care advocates, death penalty opponents, a United Auto Workers official, etc.--in what was essentially an attempt to provide legitimacy for LaRouche's own 2000 Presidential campaign. Among the panelists was Coy Pugh, a colleague of Obama's in the Illinois state legislature who is now supporting Obama for president. For some reason former U.S. Congressman Mervyn Dymally (who had strongly opposed LaRouche in previous years) agreed to participate by phone. Most of the proceedings were very low key (even LaRouche, in his keynote speech, only implied that he was the new FDR). The panelists for the most part presented standard liberal or populist ideas--although the NOI's Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad claimed that AIDS was created in a test tube to kill off people of color (and that the Bulgarian doctors and nurses languishing in a Libyan dungeon were part of the plot). From this pamphlet one would never guess that LaRouche was a convicted felon still on parole, that his organization had continued during the 1990s to reach out to white supremacists, that he still harbored an ideology of hate (as would be revealed in his tirade against Obama in 2008), and that far from being an opponent of the death penalty he had often suggested its use against bankers, Zionists, environmentalists, leftists, etc.; had published quips in his newspaper about the need for vigilante lynchings of Teamster Union dissidents, Federal Reserve Board members, and others; and had unabashedly supported death squads in Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina and Spain. Furthermore, one would never guess that Debra Freeman, the LaRouche aide who so graciously welcomed the panelists, had lent her name to some pretty scuzzy hate literature herself (read here). A LaRouche for President ad in the back of the pamphlet includes the famous quote from Lincoln that begins, "You can fool some of the people all of the time...." That portion of Lincoln's statement appears to hold true for many if not all of the panelists at these bogus "Democratic Party" hearings. What in the world was Conyers thinking? Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) speaks at LaRouche PAC meeting in Detroit (2005). And how did the president of UAW Local 849 end up addressing this meeting?
A politician who should have known better, but didn't. Statement by Pennsylvania State Rep. Harold James endorsing LaRouche in the 2004 Pennsylvania Democratic primary. In 2008, James would endorse Barak Obama.
African-Americans for LaRouche: The Mann-Chestnut Hearings (1995). With the help of Rev. Bevel and others, LaRouche enticed civil rights attorney J.L. Chestnut and former South Carolina congressman James Mann into heading a bizarre private commission to exonerate LaRouche, Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim and several black elected officials busted for bribery. Manuel Noriega sent a letter from his prison cell asking to be included on the list. LaRouche makes bid for African-American support during Presidential campaign trip to St. Louis (2003). Article describes an apparently well organized series of events, and claims that LaRouche's tour had backing of sorts from several politicians in the black community.
Rev. James Bevel attempts to introduce LaRouche as a guest speaker at a Nation of Islam sponsored gathering (1996). LaRouche is booed by the audience at the National Convention of the Oppressed in St. Louis and has to be escorted from the stage.
"No Compromise with Racism" (Columbus Free Press, 1997). Dr. Manning Marable traces the history of LaRouche's racism and criticizes the LaRouche-Bevel-Farrakhan alliance, noting its similarity to the NOI's dealings with the KKK in the early 1960s.
LaRouche and Sheila Jones. An ex-LaRouchian recalls Lyn and Helga LaRouche's cynical, decades-long exploitation of a black woman who was among their most fervent disciples.
LaRouche and Amelia Robinson. Example (2007) of LaRouche's manipulation of civil rights veteran Amelia Robinson, who was 95 at the time. This is a relationship that Rev. James Bevel earlier helped to facilitate. (The LaRouchians also tried to get Rosa Parks into their orbit.)
More on Amelia Robinson. LaRouche's ICLC takes time out from its Labor Day conference to celebrate Ms. Robinson's 90th birthday. To anyone with experience of cults, it's easy to read between the lines and see how she's being manipulated.
Amelia Robinson tours Italy for LaRouche at age 94. Why have civil rights leaders never spoken out against this blatant exploitation of a heroine of the Selma struggle?
LaRouche's token blacks: manipulated, intimidated, treated as pawns. Recollections by a former member who knows plenty.
LaRouche and the Ku Klux Klan. LaRouche had Klansmen on his payroll long before he hired Rev. Bevell in 1992 to help him gain entre to the civil rights community. Details on this Klan connection are from "Night Riders to the Rescue," Chapter 21 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.
Praise for LaRouche (1984) from Klan leader and anti-busing bomber Robert Miles. "He [LaRouche] has jews, blacks and other minorities in a varied command and troop level within his organization. Yet he is White Racist to the core....He has done more to split the ranks of the jews than most groups labeled as NS [National Socialist] or Klan could ever do....Good show, Lyndon!"
Arch-segregationist and neo-Nazi J.B. Stoner claims (1977) that the LaRouchians approached him about forming a political alliance. Also alleges they were working with members of the Klan and white citizens' councils "throughout" the South (the latter claim may have been an exaggeration--many white supremacist groups were suspicious of LaRouche because of his leftist background and the fact that his cult included black and Jewish members).
LaRouche's security staff spied on anti-Klan conference. You can be sure that a dossier containing the information from this March 3, 1981 Investigative Leads (and probably with further details) was circulated by Roy Frankhouser--the Pennsylvania KKK grand dragon who was serving at the time as a paid LaRouche security operative--to violent white supremacist groups around the country.
Leading neo-Nazi Robert Miles hails LaRouche as an "instinctive" white supremacist (1986). "He [LaRouche] is a racist, unconsciously to be true. His glorification of European culture, morals and histories is instinctive. It is sound. It reflects an inner genetic memory. He mixes his forces, having blacks and jews in his ranks. But then, so did every conquoring [sic] army in history...including the SS!" The page reproduced here is from Miles' "From the Mountain" newsletter and also promotes the Order--a neo-Nazi terrorist gang (now defunct) that was heavily influenced by The Turner Diaries. The latter tract, disguised as a science-fiction novel, basically advocates the worldwide physical extermination of all blacks, Latinos, other nonwhite people, Jews, gays, white liberals--and even white conservatives, if the latter fail to get with the program.
LaRouche's EIR (intelligence newsweekly) supports the old apartheid security forces and their schemes during the transition to majority rule (1994). Says the "destruction of South Africa" looms. Supports the maintenance of apartheid's "bantustans" (fake tribal homelands). Backs the Inkatha Freedom Party that had been armed by the old security forces against the African National Congress (ANC). Claims the ANC is controlled by the KGB (hello? the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991...) and raises the spectre of "Pol Pot-style democracy." Following the article is an interview with Maj. Gen. Tienie Groenewald--a former head of the apartheid regime's military intelligence and, as of 1994, a leader of the Afrikaner Volksfront (a white separatist coalition). Groenewald says, "We are very close to a shooting match." He also says--regarding the ANC's takeover of the infamous Bophuthatswana bantustan (in the wake of an abortive coup there by neo-Nazis affiliated with Groenewald's Volksfront)--that it is "the greatest travesty of justice I have seen in my life." Groenewald would later be indicted for his alleged involvement in sponsoring Inkatha Party death squads (a plot that resulted in the mass murder of women, children and a priest in Natal), but the charges were dropped for lack of sufficient evidence. Note that the interviewer alludes to previous contacts between the LaRouche organization and Groenewald ("In the past, when we have discussed this [the threat of majority rule] before..."). Here we apparently see the same LaRouche pattern as in Spain, Guatemala and Mexico--get close to angry far-rightists in or around the official security services and egg on their violent propensities.
LaRouche's EIR weekly supports apartheid regime military strikes against the African National Congress (1986). Claims the ANC is part of a Soviet plot to take over Africa; calls the ANC's tactics "barbaric"; slams the international anti-apartheid movement for "legitimizing terror."
LaRouche's followers disrupt a Catholic bishops' press conference against apartheid (1984). According to the National Catholic Reporter, "shouting by self-described journalists who work with fringe politician Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.--whom the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith has referred to as a 'small-time Hitler'--then broke up the press conference and prevented questioning by genuine reporters."
LaRouche's relationship to apartheid South Africa's Bureau of State Security (1979 article). Did LaRouche and his followers ever bother to tell Amelia Robinson and Rosa Parks about this?
More on LaRouche and the apartheid regime (1979). LaRouche sought the endorsement of Dr. William Banks and the Prince Hall Masons for his 1980 Presidential candidacy--but didn't inform them about his support for the South African government.
LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation announces a conference (1978) to promote economic development in South Africa. This event was clearly aimed at countering the anti-apartheid movement's campaign to stop U.S. corporate investment in the apartheid economy.
LaRouche's weekly newspaper hails South African Prime Minister John Vorster's Oct. 19, 1977 crackdown on "nearly every organization considered part of the country's 'black consciousness' movement." Quotes LaRouche as saying that the goal of the ANC and other resistance groups is "not to aid oppressed blacks, but to dupe blacks into aiding in the imposition of World Bank policies..." Slams the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus chairman, Rep. Parren Mitchell (D.-Md.), who had called for the Carter administration to take a stronger stance against the crackdown. The author of this article, David Cherry, served at the time in the Africa file of LaRouche’s intelligence apparatus and is still a LaRouche follower today; indeed, he is listed as one of three authors (along with LaRouche) of the April 12, 2008 Daily Briefing that included LaRouche’s Obama-is-a-monkey rant.
LaRouche's street war against Amiri Baraka. The NCLC leader directed his followers to go after Newark community organizer Baraka in 1973. They targeted him in racially inflammatory articles, leaflets and pamphlets, while also attempting to forge an alliance with Newark's infamous white-ethnic leader Anthony Imperiale. The propaganda offensive resulted in several violent clashes between black activists and LaRouche’s followers. LaRouche worked himself into a rage over Baraka and even attempted to recruit a teenage gang to escalate the violence in a deadly fashion. ("The Beethoven Gang," Chapter 5 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.)
The "Papa Doc Baraka" pamphlet cover (1973). Why should anyone be surprised that in 2008 LaRouche compares Barak Obama to a monkey swinging through the trees? Thirty-five years ago, LaRouche blithely depicted Amiri Baraka as a slobbering hyena with racially stereotyped lips and cannibalistic tendencies. When LaRouche's followers tried to circulate this pamphlet to black people, they inevitably met with an unpleasant reaction. LaRouche then cited such incidents as proof that the CIA was backing Baraka and urged his followers to redouble their efforts.
"Destroy Baraka!" (front page editorial in New Solidarity (Aug. 17, 1973). The LaRouche movement's call to arms for a giant nationwide campaign against "Baraka-fascism." In this and other 1973 documents we can trace how LaRouche worked out the problem of getting his young associates, who were still nominally left-wingers and regarded themselves as staunchly opposed to racism, to engage in activities more appropriate to a Klan klavern. First, he selected Baraka to be the Symbolic Evil Black Man that the LaRouche organization would end up attacking (almost unwittingly) as a surrogate for black folks in general. Baraka was, from LaRouche’s standpoint, the perfect choice--he was a controversial personality (who had made statements almost as offensive as those LaRouche himself would make), he was conveniently located just across the Hudson River from LaRouche's Manhattan headquarters, and he was formerly linked to the Beat Generation (a movement that in LaRouche's mind was redolent of the "Dionysian" degeneracy that he was teaching his followers to fear and hate). Second, LaRouche built up Baraka and his alleged CIA controllers into something so evil that his followers' critical faculties were dampened (how can one be a skeptic in the fight against absolute evil without being seen by one's comrades as a collaborator with that evil?), and he told them that the salvation of America and the future of the Revolution depended on destroying this evil force and all of its poisonous works. Third, LaRouche sent out his followers to black communities to circulate inflammatory literature that he knew would trigger a reaction, thus confirming the Baraka-CIA conspiracy theory in their minds (every time their posters were ripped down, they would see the hidden hand of the cabal) and deepening their hysteria regarding the Symbolic Evil Black Man. The result was that the LaRouchians began to spew more and more racism and to contemplate an expansion of the campaign to target the likes of Jesse Jackson (in other words, to make the war on Baraka a war against the black community in general--and all in the name of stopping "fascism"!). The projected broadening of the anti-Baraka struggle never materialized (LaRouche lacked the troops for it), but he had accomplished his main purpose--to prepare his deluded followers for the alliances to come with Klansmen and other rightists, and for the adoption of a fascist-in-all-but-name political program. Furthermore, the demonizing of Baraka would serve as the pattern for LaRouche's subsequent demonization of Henry Kissinger (the Symbolic Evil Jewish Man), which was a key mechanism in introducing an all-encompassing anti-Semitism into the LaRouche movement. LaRouche to white workers: "Soon, you will lose your job--probably to a ‘welfare loafer,’ a...dope fiend...some gang member brought in from a ghetto neighborhood." This editorial from LaRouche's newspaper (March 19, 1973) warns a hypothetical white working class reader that "the era of post-war capitalist prosperity is ended" and that he or she may soon be "turned into an animal like Newark's fascist Leroi Jones Baraka" and that, "like Baraka, you will eat your neighbor in the name of 'Community Control'...You will burn your neighbor’s house to warm yourself. You will be a vulture. Like Papa Doc Baraka, you will eat carrion, think carrion--AND BECOME CARRION." Note the succession of racial stereotypes here: animalism, rioting and burning down cities, a voodoo dictator, cannibalism--and again animalism (or this time, buzzard-ism). The passage even bears the subhead "The Dionysians"--a term used in Nazi German propaganda to designate subhuman behavioral and cultural traits (read here). But note also the bogus "anti-fascist" rhetoric and the sweetening of the pill by including, on the same page as this editorial, an article attacking neo-Nazi activity in Philadelphia.
Internal memo of LaRouche group (Aug. 10, 1973) lays plans for a "mop up" campaign against black activists. In the context of calling for a "ruthless national campaign" against Baraka and his supposed national network of inner-city "Papa Doc machines," the memo states: "The only way we can carry out the necessary 'mop up' type retaliation [against inner city residents who had forcefully objected to LaRouche's racially offensive literature--DK] without having massive frameups and arrests is to drive this issue into the ghettoes, the plants, the schools." The reference is to "Operation Mop-Up," a campaign of violent attacks by numchuka-wielding LaRouche street fighters earlier that year against the Communist Party USA--to prevent it from holding public meetings anywhere in the northeast U.S. Since these attacks had resulted in the indictment of several of LaRouche's middle-class cadre, LaRouche hoped this time to use teenagers from the Outlaws, a New York City street gang, as his cannon fodder.
Internal LaRouche memo (Aug. 16, 1973) calls for setting up "intelligence-gathering operations" against Baraka and other black activists. "Investigation...must be made with caution. Try to set up meetings with INDIVIDUALS of Baraka type and pump them for information. Either pose as an innocuous radical or interested sympathizer. Other methods can be employed....We can destroy the disease before it spreads." The author of this memo, one Paul Goldstein, would hook up two years later with Pennsylvania KKK grand dragon Roy Frankhouser and thenceforth serve as LaRouche's liaison with Frankhouser and other white supremacists as well as transmitting intelligence data (much of it a fabrication) on both black and white activists to police departments across the country.
"LC Punishes Baraka Goons for Newark Disruption Attempt," New Solidarity, Aug. 10, 1973. First, the LaRouchians provoke black activists by calling press conferences to smear them and putting up racially offensive posters about them; second, when members of the black community inevitably protest either by shouting or by physical assaults, or by simply tearing down the posters, the LaRouchians launch preplanned counterattacks. And gloat over it: "They [the so-called Baraka hoodlums]...fled the hotel to a waiting car, leaving a trail of blood in the lobby." And: "three Baraka thugs were left beaten and bleeding, their car partially destroyed." (I suspect the LaRouchians were exaggerating their own prowess here.)
"Barakaites in Armed Attack Flee Boston Mtg. Bloodied," New Solidarity, Oct. 5, 1973. Article in LaRouche’s newspaper describes a Labor Committee (LaRouchian) forum on the Harvard campus where LaRouche’s mop-up squad fought with members of the Mau Mau, a local group regarded by the article’s author as part of the alleged Baraka-CIA conspiracy. According to the article, the LaRouchians won hands down: "Most of the suddenly terrified thugs followed their leader's advice [to exit the room], leaving the remaining Mau Mau to be knocked down and beaten senseless as they crawled around on the bloody floor begging for mercy." (According to ex-LaRouche followers, the Labor Committee had set up the Harvard meeting as an ambush and brought firearms into the room--one former member who participated in the ambush has described how a rifle was held to the head of a black activist while he was being pummeled.) The article also describes a forum at Rochester University in upstate New York where "10 thugs from Baraka’s Emikago pidgin-Swahili school" came to disrupt but were driven off. Again, the meeting appears to have been a blatant provocation: the LaRouchians had plastered the black community beforehand with their inflammatory anti-Baraka posters.
1. THE TEXT OF THE SPEECH, ITS IMMEDIATE INSPIRATION AND OTHER RECENT LAROUCHE OUTBURSTS
2. LAROUCHE'S LONG RECORD OF RACISM AGAINST BLACKS, ASIANS, NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF LATIN AMERICA
3. THE WEIRD BELIEFS BEHIND LAROUCHE'S HATRED OF OBAMA'S MOM
4. LAROUCHE'S DECEPTIVE ATTEMPTS TO WIN SUPPORT FROM BLACK LEADERS (TOO OFTEN, HE'S SUCCEEDED)
5. THE LAROUCHE CULT'S EXPLOITATION OF ITS BLACK MEMBERS (INCLUDING A 96-YEAR-OLD WOMAN)
6. LAROUCHE'S TIES TO KLANSMEN AND OTHER WHITE SUPREMACISTS
7. LAROUCHE'S SUPPORT FOR APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
8. HOW LAROUCHE TAUGHT HIS FOLLOWERS TO HATE: THE 1973 ANTI-BARAKA CAMPAIGN
