Chapter Twenty-eight

Babylonians Under Every Bed

LaRouche's conspiracy theory of history is not just a means of indirectly expressing neo-Nazi ideas. It is also a psychological device that serves to deepen the political paranoia within the NCLC and ultimately within the public the NCLC strives to influence. A paranoid belief system, if it is truly a totalitarian one, strives to explain all of reality, since any holes in it would be a potential escape hatch for the captive mind to liberate itself. The paranoid ideology, whether serving a cult or a totalitarian regime, must be a block of steel, not a slice of Swiss cheese.

This means that the conspiracy theory--the basis of political paranoia--cannot just focus on contemporary politics. Ideally it should extend into every field of thought and every period of history so that no matter what topic the captive mind thinks about, it can only think about it in paranoid terms of us versus them (with "them," of course, being infinitely evil).

LaRouche's theory of the struggle between two secret elites is perhaps the closest thing to a system of total multidimensional paranoia ever invented in the United States. It extends backwards in time tens of thousands of years, and also forward into man's future among the stars. It extends into every sphere of culture: music, art, poetry, philosophy, science--indeed, into every aspect of human existence. It descends into sexuality and the unconscious mind and even deeper into the genes and chromosomes, the level of racial struggle. It also ascends above history into a neo-Platonic supersensible realm. It has its source in the geometric structure of reality. If one is a LaRouchian, one's belief system literally cannot be escaped; the struggle is everywhere.

The lynchpin of LaRouchism, as of more primitive systems of paranoia, is the fear and hatred of an evil and secretive force. Although LaRouche calls this force the oligarchy, he really means the Jews. Given the total paranoia of the system, the fear and hatred veers into neo-Nazism. The latter is not an acceptable ideology in today's America and so must remain partially disguised to evade the "donkey censor." LaRouche's conspiracy theory therefore becomes a double system: First, it extends the NCLC's paranoia and hatred into every aspect of thought; second, it attacks the supposed forces of evil in a euphemistic manner. This dual nature of the theory should be kept in mind as we step by step "decode" the bizarre formulations in which it is couched.

If LaRouche had been a traditional anti-Semite, he might have based his conspiracy theory on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous forgery that purports to document a nineteenth-century conspiracy to establish a Jewish world government through various diabolical intrigues. But the Protocols is too narrow in scope for the purposes of total paranoia and also is too thoroughly discredited by scholars for practical use among most educated people. LaRouche hesitated, however, to reject out of hand one of the most effective Big Lies of the first half of the twentieth century. So he compromised: The Protocols, he said, has a "hard kernel of truth" but is only of limited significance--it represents only a small piece of the real conspiracy of the "oligarchy."

LaRouche's oligarchy makes the Elders of Zion seem mild. It supposedly has dominated the world for tens of thousands of years with unremittingly evil motives. Indeed, LaRouche accuses it of periodically killing off a large portion of the human race through famines and plagues. Today it is supposedly plotting a New Dark Ages, which will include nuclear holocaust, the massive spread of AIDS, Zero Growth, and total bestial heteronomy.

Why the oligarchs should want a return to the Dark Ages when they obviously could accumulate more wealth and live more comfortably under conditions of modern capitalism is not quite clear. But LaRouche assures us that they destroyed all past societies they captured, from Atlantis through Rome. Three thousand years ago their headquarters was in Babylon. After they engineered its fall, they shifted their command post westward to Rome, then Venice, and finally to London. Again and again their poisons and daggers have defeated their valiant opponents, the "humanists," who champion productive investment, science, technology, and "citybuilding."

Unable to stop humanist networks, led by Benjamin Franklin and Friedrich Schiller, from launching the Industrial Revolution, the oligarchs struggled to slow it down through their control of Speculative Capital, which allegedly feeds like a vampire on Productive Capital. But the oligarchs today are extremely worried because Productive Capital has begun to link up with the powerful streamlined humanist conspiracy represented by the NCLC.

It is unlikely LaRouche believes all this, but it provides him with the necessary all-encompassing framework for his anti-Semitic mythology, giving it, even in a disguised form, a virulence far more intense than if he had based it on the Protocols alone. As to the true identity of the oligarchs, this is revealed in LaRouche's "Solving the Machiavellian Problem Today": They are the "anti-human bestialists" and "parasites" who "cooked up the hoax called the Old Testament." In a subsequent article he openly calls them the "Jewish usurers"--a "continuous and often dominant element" in oligarchical rule from Babylon through the Middle Ages. (LaRouche then throws up one of his characteristic smoke screens. Some people, he writes, have misinterpreted this dominant role of the Jews in order to promote anti-Semitism. Although he does not wish to be a party to spreading such misguided views, he can't help it that the hoax is bolstered by the "fact" that "some of the worst poisonings of the Catholic Church were accomplished by converted Jews representing such families of usurers"!)

"The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites" is LaRouche's most thorough account of his version of world history. Apart from his schema of oligarchs versus humanists, this work and other NCLC pseudo-historical treatises appear to borrow heavily from the anti-Semitic "classics": Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-22), Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925-26), Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), and Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), as well as assorted British and American Nazi tracts from the interwar years.

LaRouche's attacks on the evil "Babylonians," for instance, strongly resemble theories found in Chamberlain, who claimed that the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity rose to great influence over their captors, and that Babylon rather than Jerusalem was the real headquarters of the ancient Jews. Chamberlain even remarked on the "Rothschilds" of Babylon. This theory is popularized for American white supremacists in pamphlets sold by the Louisiana-based Sons of Liberty--for instance, The Merchants of Babylon by Rev. Bertrand L. Comparet, which features a photograph of four bearded rabbis on the cover. When LaRouche denounces the "Whore of Babylon," the Ku Klux Klan knows exactly what he means.

LaRouche also rails against the "Persian Empire" and "Persian agents" who supposedly destroyed the ancient world. Again this is not new. Both Spengler and Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Persians were linked in a common conspiracy. Spengler said the Jews actually dominated much of the Persian empire, while Chamberlain described them as Persian puppets. In LaRouche's view the chief instruments of Persian-Babylonian infiltration of the West (Greece and Rome) were the Dionysian cults and Isis worship. (One LaRouche disciple wrote that modern Israel is the "Zionist bastard" of Isis.) Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's "philosopher" who was executed at Nuremberg, brooded over Dionysius and Isis in a similar manner sixty years ago. The Dionysian cults, he said, were "racially and spiritually alien" to Aryanism, encouraging a frenzy based on that of the "insanely possessed" King Saul of Israel. As to Isis, Rosenberg associated her with Africa, sexual promiscuity, and race mixing.

Approaching modern times, LaRouche shows more originality. In the Middle Ages the center of power moved to Rome, whose "merchant-usurers" were Jews or converted Jews. Led by the Pierlioni family, they supposedly seized control of the papacy and squeezed Europe dry. Next the Venetian oligarchy took its pound of flesh during the Renaissance, after the decline of the Vatican oligarchy but before the rise of the "British."

Throughout these long centuries, LaRouche teaches, the humanist forerunners of the NCLC fought back continuously. Many famous thinkers and poets were secret members: Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Franklin and Schiller. But most important were the warlord humanists, the champions of the Grand Design. Not surprisingly, most of them marched their conquering armies east. The LaRouchians praise the legendary Pharaoh Sesostris, who supposedly marched east to subjugate evil Babylon; Alexander the Great, who marched east to crush evil Persia; and Timur the Great, who carried out an early version of the Final Solution against the medieval descendants of the ancient Persians and Babylonians. LaRouche also expresses reverence for the memory of Hassan ibn Saba, the "Old Man of the Mountain," who headed a medieval cult of assassins. Hassan didn't march east, but he did live in a castle called the Eagle's Nest--the same name as Hitler's mountaintop lodge in Bavaria. LaRouche wrote in 1978 that if only the Old Man of the Mountain were alive in Germany, he'd mop up left-wing terrorists in short order.

Of special significance in LaRouchian mythology is Frederick Barbarossa, the medieval German emperor who marched east against the Slavs (and in whose memory Hitler named his invasion of the Soviet Union "Operation Barbarossa"). The Wiesbaden branch of LaRouche's European Labor Party evoked Frederick Barbarossa's memory in its 1978 manifesto calling for a new type of state in Germany--Der Rechtsstaat. The NCLC’s theoretical organ, The Campaigner, illustrated its translation of this document with a map of Central and Eastern Europe labeled "Frederick Barbarossa's Great Design." On the opposite page was a map of the entire area included in the European theater in World War II, with dotted lines going just about everywhere the Nazi armies went or dreamed of going. The caption underneath discussed the German Drang nach Osten (drive to the east), but identified it with the German emperors rather than Hitler. The dotted lines were said to be "European and Mediterranean Trade Routes."

LaRouche finds certain recurring patterns in history--the result of the oligarchs using the same strategy of control again and again. Ancient Babylon (dominated as it was by rich Jews) concocted the "synthetic" religion of the Old Testament, brainwashed the Jewish masses with it, and then sent them back to Judaea to serve as a strategic military colony. In the twentieth century, Britain (the new Babylon, also dominated by rich Jews) brainwashed the Jewish masses with the synthetic ideology of Zionism and sent them back to Palestine to serve as a garrison state.

Another case is the career of Alexander the Great, who was reared as a Persian agent but rebelled against his masters and took vengeance on them. Likewise, according to LaRouche, Hitler began his career as a "British" agent--and indeed, as the German correspondent for The New York Times--but rebelled against the British and drove them to Dunkirk. Unfortunately, he lacked Alexander's humanist resolve to finish the job.

A final example is the medieval Jewish usurers who purportedly used the Vatican as their cover. LaRouche says they charged such high interest rates that they drove Europe into utter penury. Weakened by starvation, the masses succumbed to the Black Plague. In the same manner, the London-controlled International Monetary Fund supposedly is driving the peoples of the Third World into starvation, causing them to succumb to AIDS.

In his gloomier moments LaRouche worries that Western civilization will suffer the fate of the Atlanteans, who supposedly showed great promise under the leadership of scientist-astronomers until their society was subverted and destroyed by the ancestors of the Babylonians--the evil magician-astrologers. Although LaRouche nowhere refers to the hapless Atlanteans as the "Aryan" race, he strongly suggests that this is what he means. They came, he says, from sunken lands in the North Sea, spoke a language akin to old Hessian, and roamed the Atlantic in "copper-sheathed" long ships. Alfred Rosenberg promoted a similar theory, only his blond and blue-eyed Atlanteans made their forays against the Untermensch in Wagnerian "dragon ships." (LaRouche does not offer, nor did Rosenberg ever offer, the slightest scientific evidence for the existence of this lost civilization.)

It can be said that LaRouche's version of history not only begins with Nazi and proto-Nazi ideas (the Atlanteans from the North) but ends with them. His theory of the contemporary struggle between parasitic bankers and productive factory owners is suspiciously similar to the views of Hitler's early economics adviser, Gottfried Feder. The latter likewise urged the crushing and expropriation of speculative capital on behalf of industrial capital. Oswald Spengler, in a somewhat different version, hailed the "mighty contest between the two handfuls of steel-hard men of race and of immense intellect--which the simple citizen neither observes nor comprehends." Like LaRouche, SpengJer claimed that the "battle of mere interests" between capitalists and workers is insignificant in comparison.