Part Four
Jim Bakker’s autobiography I Was Wrong includes a five page chapter on his impressions on his prison cell-mate (for a time) — Lyndon Larouche. It is a strange little chapter, as any chapter on that weird occurence would have to be. Bakker’s impressions on Larouche are eccentrically positive, albeit telling insofar as Bakker explained he didn’t really always have any idea what Larouche was talking about.
I soon learned a little-known fact about LaRouche: the guy is really funny. He was always upbeat, even when other inmates made fun of him, which they often did. And he always had plenty of jokes to tell. The only problem with his humor was that he was the only one who could understand most of his jokes. But I laughed along with him, because Lyndon’s telling of the story was hilarious, regardless of whether the punchline made any sense.
This sort of high-end “smile and nod” tendency is replicated in the prison’s “Current Events Discussion Club”, which naturally turned into — for a while — the “Lyndon LaRouche Hour”. One can only imagine what LaRouche’s jokes would be like, but the impression that another fellow cell-mate had with LaRouche probably gives a hint of where LaRouche was going.
Tom was convinced that Lyndon could not give a guy directions on how to get to the restroom without going back to the time of Rome to explain it.
Formulating an explanation for what LaRouche offers his followers to latch onto, this is where you begin and end. Recognize the subtitles for his pamphlets as akin to those parodies — and occasionally actual — titles for theses and dissertations. It is an ability or yearning to connect disparate topics and to always find historical antecedents for today’s events or cultural mores. The more antecedents the better: if you can slide in something from Ancient Greece , something from the fall of the Roman Empire, an item explaining the decadence of the French Revolution, and a reference to Hitler’s Germany you have a sure-fire impenetrable argument that will leave your opponent dead in his tracks. For example, LaRouche explains what is wrong with modern science (he truly is a man for all seasons, that Larouche) thusly:
In the 17th century, Bacon, DesCartes, and Galileo came and they reintroduced Aristotelensim into science science under the guise of empericism. They deliberately mystified science by denying the existence of the continuous manifold, the reality of the generations principle. They created the London Royal Society, which was a Baconian Society, as a branch of Freemasonry, as a Rosicrucian cult.
The baseline of LaRouche’s world-view, and what he imparts on his “LaRouche Youth Movement”, seems to come down to a supposed generation gap between Plato and Aristotle… of which Aristotle represents the wild unruly generations (the French Revolutionaries and the Baby Boomers) and Plato the rigidly classical. Plato’s famous quotation, “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” I think Larouche has extrapulated it into a centerpiece of a black and white good versus evil one side agains the other worldview.
LaRouche maintained what amounts to a shadow-government in his prison-life. Witness:
Although Lyndon had never been elected to any office that I knew of, the man was well connected to high-level information sources. While most inmates were still struggling to be fully awake each morning at 6:00 am, Lyndon received a daily news briefing by phone that kept him up to date on world issues. He also received daily, lengthy, computer-generated intelligence reports through the mail. I was amazed that at times Lyndon’s intelligence reports told of major news events halfway around the world several days in advances of their happening! Tom and I would often listen in awe as Lyndon would ramble on, speaking in German, on his long-distance phone calls. We couldn’t understand a word the man said, but he sure sounded impressive! Of course, many inmates said that about Lyndon when he was speaking English.
Bakker goes on to describe the daily briefings — focused on the Gulf War crisis and war at that time — as tending to be two days ahead of CNN. Say what you will about Larouche, the man has himself a sophisticated Intelligence network. The intelligence is filtered into Larouche’s peculiar ideological prism, and is passed on from there, but there it is. Sarcastically and cynically I will say that the “filtering into peculiar ideological prism” puts him on par with the world governments.
Piecing together the creation of LaRouche’s Intelligene network is mostly conjecture, though would help one understand Larouche’s small footholds into world governments. (And go back to my description of Larouche’s operation as a “shadow government”, from his perch in Leesburg, Virginia.)
I can piece together two facets. Firstly, realize the implications of this, from the New York Times on October 7, 1979:
The Party encourages its members to take jobs outside the party to assist the group’s private intelligence-gathering. For example, unknown to the Council on Foreign Relations, a secretary was an active member of the US Labor Party. Among the secretary’s duties last year was to attend the sessions of the Bilderberg Society. “I’m absolutely floored by this,” said William P Brady, who employed the woman for part of her time at the council. “It’s like the CIA getting an agent into the Politboro.”
I left out the explicator for the Bilderberg Group, mostly because I assume anyone reading this knows them, and also to explain them myself. It is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, because it is a meeting of world elites in various fields — in secret but in the tradition of Skull / Bones not terribly secret in that names are invariably leaked to the press — that indeed conspire in planning global economic trade and world policy.
A bit more germane in explaining LaRouche’s Intelligence Gathering probably comes through his advocacy and the symbiotic nature of politics. When one floats oneself out to a policy position, one tends to be brought right into the echo-chamber for that policy. And LaRouche sure advocated a lot of government positions. Hence, via David Corn of the Nation but probably from New American Fascism:
In 1984, two Pentagon officials addressed a LaRouche rally in Virginia. A Defense Department spokesman noted at the time that the Pentagon regarded LaRouche’s group, an early advocate of the Strategic Defense Initiative, as a “conservative group … very supportive of the administration.” During the first term of the Reagan Administration, several members of the National Security Council met with LaRouche. [When pressed on the matter], spokesman Larry Speckes blathered that the Administration was “glad to talk to” all sorts of American citizens, includeing LaRouche.
Today, LaRouche will tell you that he was an advisor to Reagan concerning the SDI program. Unless he needs to tell you that he advised John Conyers on Bush’s impeachment. He’ll tell you lots of things, you see.
So I believe his associates formed contacts with people in world governments, tend to be on the fringes of government agencies but that’s good enough, and from there you can exaggerate your place in the scheme of world politics. When LaRouche sought to get a foothold into mainstream political currents — away from “Lyn Marcus” and the world of Communist and left-wing politics — he created an anti-drug organization (thus gaining contacts to drug warriors, when you need an echo chamber), a nuclear power advocacy group, the “Schiller Institute” — aping and easily confused and blurred with any other economic think tank.
Understand that his business and intelligence publications were sold as highest end publications to world elites. I imagine this to be purely for show, but it could fool the best of them from time to time. Witness this from 1997:
In 1997, Philip Crane, a Republican Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Clinton Treasury Secretary questions alerted to him from the “Executive Alert Service” on being “very concerned that severe budget austerity, as presently enforced Maastricht Criteria in the European Union, and Japan’s new auterity budget, threaten to detonate a systematic financial collapse.”
So, Rubin scratched his head, provided a non-answer, and asked to be sent the magazine. You can guess what “Executive Alert Service” is. Interestingly enough, “Executive Intelligence Review” is congregated by Google News, which is a demonstration of Google News’s “all inclusive” weakness.
Witness, also, that In 1985, a Nicaraguan official told the Senate Intelligence Committee that LaRouche was sending Manuel Noreiga intelligence information on US Senators and congressional staffers — who voted to cut aid to Nicaragua. Of what reliability this intelligence had, I can only speculate.