Old Business.
Well, I’m in this for the long haul, so bear with me anyone who doesn’t care.
OLD Business. There is a difference between commenters Steve and Dianne Bettag. Dianne Bettag appears to me an autotron. Steve seems a decent sort, misguided but aren’t we all? I’m referring here to some people who have commented in the past. Dianne Bettag threw out the canard about Dennis King and High Times, an item that seems to have come from on high from Larouche. Steve furthered it, but once I rebuffed it, moved on with original thoughts on the matter of Dennis King. I was not in any position to say anything about King. I finally have read some items from his website, and I at least know the reference to this…
P.S. I originaly wasn’t going to go there about Denis King, but I have to. When King’s book first came out, not wanting to buy it, I read large portions of it sitting in the bookstore. I finally quit in disgust when I got to his claim that LaRouche considers “Bronze, Silver and Golden souls” as biologically determined. Anybody that has even minimal competence in the study of LaRouche’s views would know that he has consistently been implacably hostile to any notion of the biological determination of the human personality. So by characterizing LaRouche’s notion of golden souls as representing a biological type, King shows himself to be either dishonest, or at the very least incompetent in understanding his subject.
I feel myself rummaging through into an area that looks ultimately meaningless to any larger picture. If I could get my hands on a physical copy of King’s book, I would be in better shape. My time online is short, and I tend to multi-task while online. I’m not apt to read a 300 page book online. But the interview that King posted online delves into the matter, and I see that he picked it up… somewhere. (Probably a matter of looking at the footnotes of his book to see what publication Larouche discussed colors of souls.)
It seems to amount to code language that slides him with Adolf Hitler. I don’t know what to make of it as of yet, and I don’t even know if I want to bother with the effort to make something out of it. It doesn’t strike me as terribly interesting. I can analogies between Hitler and Larouche without pondering his views on predeterminism and free will. (The joke I will come back to: fill in the blank — BLANK Youth Movement. I wish to point out to the Steves of the world that may be reading this: that is roughly the first impression the average person, especially college student, has when met with this organization.) As the interview rolls on, we are brought back to the policy initiative on the California ballot in 1986 and 1988. My first thoughts when reading through them, and some campaign literature of the time, fully independent of Dennis King mind you? Hitlerian, thank you very much.
There is a certain hysterical effect I see with King’s comparisons on Larouche and Hitler in terms of “breathe a sigh of relief once he goes to prison, but then…” Comparing the post-prison career of Hitler and Larouche: okay — Hitler became the DIctator of Germany and overrun half of Europe. Larouche? Saw his momentum stop, struggled through a difficult decade unable to get his movement back on foot, before finding new targets of recruitment with a renewed strategy and clearer focus and a scape-goating of his old followers for his difficulties. Two different paths entirely.
Whatever the faults of Dennis King, I assume that he has tracked Larouche’s money trail to a tee. Which makes his admission, and I find it difficult to imagine that this has changed in the nearly two decades since this interview, that he can only speculate on where his start-up funding came from, one of those mysteries that unraveled will show us … the real conspiracy. Larouche has, simply put, manipulated the seedy world of Global finance that he’s hewed on about for the past four decades for his personal aggrandizement. It is one of those profound ironies.
I think a cutsey Freakonomics-like lesson can be made of the Economic rules of the operation of Larouche’s, which I will pursue a bit … in a later post.
P.P.S. I continue to find more to respond to. LaRouche’s pro-technology views. He does not advocate technological without regard to environmental consequences. What he is against is the “environmental movement” which has been dominated by the idea that industry is somehow intrinsically bad for the environment and should be shut down or at least severly restricted. He sees this viewpoint as being promoted by those who oppose industry on other grounds - for example the question of industrializing the third world which would totally shift the financial balance of power worldwide.
Mercy me! This is one of the lynch-pins of Larouchism, and at the heart of how he has managed to travel the ideologies around from a psuedo-Trotskyism to a psuedo-Reaganism to — um — “FDR-Kennedy-Mackinley-Lincoln-Hamilton-Franklin Democrat”… Simply put, he likes big, shiny objects. And he likes the idea that he might oversee the construction of these big, shiny objects — and control the lives of the masses. (Statist is he.) Larouche is taking credit, and backing, this largely universally panned proposal. It is an insane proposal, the undersea channel across the Bering Strait connecting Russia with Alaska. It is a way to appear relevant for the strange man in Virginia to his followers, but in terms of ideology… well, we can fully develop and develop and develop the Earth without any environmental impact statement because… we will building moon bases. Limitless imagination!