Lyndon LaRouche exposed

November 12, 2003
Issue 

Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Restyled for the New Millennium
By Helen Gilbert
Red Letter Press, 46 pages
Copies available for $7 from the Solidarity Salon, 580 Sydney Road, Brunswick, Victoria; send a cheque for $8, payable to the Feminist Education Association, to PO Box 266, West Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3055; or visit <http://www.RedLetterPress.org>

REVIEW BY ALISON THORNE

Helen Gilbert's Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Restyled for the New Millennium is a highly revealing look at the background and politics of the LaRouche movement, which is sure to stand candidates in the coming federal election under the name Citizens Electoral Council (CEC).

Dennis King, whose definitive book on LaRouche was published in 1989, has called the new publication, "Highly recommended — packed with vital up-to-date information to refute the egregious deceptions of LaRouche organisers".

This small, well-documented booklet from Red Letter Press reviews LaRouche's origins as a one-time socialist, who took a turn to the far-right in the 1970s. He instigated his followers to physically attack left-wing organisations and published hysterical diatribes against women, people of colour, Jews and gays.

In the US, LaRouchites actively sabotaged the labour reform group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and built a multi-million-dollar empire through political spying and the defrauding of senior citizens. In Australia, the CEC scapegoats Aborigines; in 1997 it published a pamphlet titled Aboriginal 'Land Rights': Prince Philip's Racist Plot to Splinter Australia.

As a perennial US presidential candidate, LaRouche is now taking a milder public tone, but Gilbert finds his essential message the same. She has studied current LaRouche publications and found a far-right agenda that combines racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic scapegoating with extreme hostility towards women and environmentalists.

LaRouche also promotes nuclear power and the banned pesticide DDT. He seeks to "save" the free market economy. Gilbert defines fascism as a mass movement that aims to preserve capitalism by smashing working-class gains and eliminating democratic rights. On this basis, she concludes that LaRouche is a peculiar variety of 21st century fascist.

Gilbert is a long-time feminist, anti-Nazi activist and socialist. She first became aware of LaRouche in the 1970s when he was actively threatening radicals and spouting conspiracy theories.

From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
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