At least it’s a first hand account of the German anti-cult conference. That’s worth something, isn’t it?
Question: Is this anything? I will let you ponder that question. I say it is something — pure noise signifying not much, perhaps, but someone (Alan Osler, I suppose) sat at a computer keyboard, logged onto his internet website blog, and typed this out. To begin with:
Some of Larouche’s work has merit – he writes well about the economy, and predicted the crash that we are seeing now accurately several years ago. He also knows a thing or two about classical culture.
That’s a hoot, really. To paraphrase this by quoting Homer Simpson, “Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.” I have an imagined realm of people who take “Lyn Marcus” with some amount of legitimacy — surfing the arena of paranoid discontent round about Alex Jones and Jeff Rense and various websites which scrubbed out some material on the Y2K scare and replaced it with 9/11 conspiracy. Where this hits is with the constant drum-beat of doom regarding the economy, the classical culture does not figure much. Unique, at least.
But that’s undermined round about the observation regarding Chip Berlet’s fashion sense and his “penis bulgeâ€. I’m sure Socrates would be proud — or, for that matter, Schiller. Additionally the fine Acronym of an organization, “C.U.N.T.S.” — who indicates the Larouche Organization’s cultural refinement with And this fascist conference was another desperate attempt at slandering LaRouche. That british MP is a cunt. Everyone should call his office and call him a cunt.
On these other gutter-dwelling creatures I need not say a word, except to remind those who read this that these people will be remembered in history as total cunts. Bravo. All of this is fine and appropriate, because Chip Berlet used the word “Bastard”. (Incidentally, the last time I saw that word used as an acronym, someone had signed a federal form to form a pac “Citizens United Not Timid” as a very crude anti-Hillary Clinton organization, geared up for the general election. The word resurfaced with a t-shirt regarding Sarah Palin, which was the central focus of John McCain’s rebuff to John Lewis and others’ cries regarding intolerance expressed at McCain / Palin rallies.) But the use of the word here is as much to avoid any accidental possibilitty of someone sympathizing with his cause as anything else.
Chip is holding up one of LaRouche’s more entertaining magazines, the “Children of Satan†special. I have read it – it is interesting, but, well, “Anti Britishâ€. Chip says it is “antismiticâ€, and points to a picture of Dick Cheney (who isn’t Jewish – or even Arabic). […] Everyone is saying LaRouche is anti Semitic, even though LaRouche blames the British for everything, including stuff that everyone else blames on Israel. The Simpsons and Futurama take the piss out of LaRouche because he is an oddball. These people here are as bad as the old man.
I have that basic feeling with this frequent comment, “There is no anti-semitism here — it’s anti-British!”, which is “Have it your way.” That is an even more insane proposition. But, first off, the purpose of this event as stated by the Org:
At a time when the collapse of the global financial system has propelled American economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, once again, to the center of international politics, a propaganda campaign, organized from Great Britain, is scheduled to take place in Berlin, Germany, for the purpose of attacking Mr. LaRouche and targeting his wife …
The conspiratorial worldview is one pointed inward: the Larouche Conspiracy is the pointless task of convincing a few hundred individuals that their man is someone of any import.  The statement goes on to express the history of the politicos acting on behalf of Jeremiah Duggan to stop Larouche as he had become the most major critic of the lead up to the Iraq War. Comfortably you slide into this as a tact against the British Empire. Anecdotally, I can point to two people who agree with the “code language”. This evangelizer of the cause at the leading neo-nazi website, explaining to his fellow White Supremists how to properly understand Larouche in the battle against ZOG. The other one is Mr. Ossifur, the leader of the Larouchian Cryonics Movement (???), who is at constant battle with the Jewish Cryonics force — basically because they take the subject seriously and hence don’t take him seriously. Alan Osler is completely right about Futurama, it appears.
It is a little off to say that the accusation is that Jeremiah Duggan “was targetted” because he was Jewish. I believe it runs more along the lines of he “was targetted” because he was Jewish and was calling out the anti-semitic blusters.
I am expected to play that game of Equivalency in reading this blog post. The Larouchians are spouting conspiracy theories — the anti-Larouchians are spouting conspiracy theories. (You know… the critics?  But to link that is a false equivalency on my part, of course: History won’t remember Larouche, or will as a rather odd footnote — ’tis already forgotten him anyway. I’m having a hard time picturing this conference as anything but sparsely attended — after all, it concerns freaking Lyndon Larouche, goddamnedit. <i>late edit: reportedly from 100 to 150 through the day being in the room. And I don’t really have any basis to judge that. Reports will trickle in, I’m sure.</i>) So we get this:
She [Molly Kronberg] just said that LaRouche was responsible for her husband’s suicide 18 months ago, unaware of how oxmoronic she is being.
“I have proof. It is in printâ€.I want to say “well, where is it then? Did the dog eat it?â€
She has, for reasons best known to herself, decided not to share her “proofâ€. No one thinks this is strange. More conspiracy theories with no evidence.
Start with the memo of April 11, 2007 and we can go in various directions from there. I went through a rather bizarre interchange back then with members of the organization on this blog. The Game of forcing an Equivalency is going to get you every time.
I imagine this conference did some good. It is enough to match the following two items together: The Untimely Death of Jeremiah Duggan and The Lyndon Larouche Movement under various names. The lesson is merely: do not follow them into Wiesbaden. Or into a basement dwelling. It is with that that I do welcome a first hand account from whomever — even this thing. And it is with that that this blog post plays a small role with that task.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Okay, I admit it. I was there.
An account is forthcoming–actually, several accounts–which will report who said what at greater length.
Also, a full-length video is coming.
Meantime, as to the depressing Mr. Osler–I like especially the reference to Molly Kronberg’s being “oxmoronic.” I think he meant “oxymoronic,” don’t you?
I could be wrong, though–maybe it’s a neologism.
If Osler had been looking around the room, instead of at other men’s crotches, he might have found the proof of what Molly said. There were huge quantities of factsheets and handouts, posted on boards and available at the entrance to the hall.
But the fact is, Molly did not go into detail on Ken’s death. Instead, she went into detail on LaRouche’s brainwashing techniques, describing his “Beyond Psychoanalysis” series from 1973-74, and his infamous Saturday night sessions with the NEC in 1973 and following.
She also went into detail on the financial relationship between the U.S. and European organizations, the point being, I think, not to let the German government get away with saying “oh, well, it’s a U.S. organization run by an American national, so what can we do?”
Former member Yves Messer, who worked in Paris and in Wiesbaden, Germany, spoke on the anti-Semitism of the organization, and the mind control techniques whereby it managed to keep so many Jewish members even when it was obviously anti-Semitic.
Another point the insufficiently observant Osler failed to notice is that there was a huge amount of material in the hall about the anti-Semitism of LaRouche.
The third of the three former members to speak was Aglaja Corleis, who back in the mid-1990s wrote a book describing her life in the org. She too spoke about the brainwashing features of the LaRouche org.
Our Mr. Osler doesn’t seem to have figured out what the point of the event was–that brainwashing, mind-controlling, anti-Semitic sects can get into a passel of trouble in Germany, especially when they have some connection, however murky at present, to the death of a young British/Jewish student in the middle of one of their conferences.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:06 am
I neglected to point out, though I meant to, — almost in passing, — the anti-semitism part with regards to German law. A tad bit strict by relatively civil libertarian American law standards on that account, coming out of a rather bad spate of German history.
October 21st, 2008 at 8:30 am
Just a quick word about oxymoronic, to follow up on Rachel’s post:
I think it’s painfully clear to even the most ignorant reader that Mr. Osler intended to write “oxmoronic”, a word whose meaning is derived from a combination of the Chinese character “丑, or ‘ox'”, representing one of the years in the Twelve Year Cycle of the Chinese Calendar, and the Greek “Moros”, meaning dull. The fact that Ms. Kronberg did not realize that she was being a dull year-in-the-cycle is so obvious as to be opaque. If only one could think of a good example of an oxymoron…
Further, Mr. Osler could not possibly mean that her comment was “oxymoronic.” Allowing that he captured her statement correctly, no easy feat what with the wine, saying that someone “was responsible for her husband’s suicide” is certainly not oxymoronic. For that, she would have had to say that someone, “suicided” him or some such thing.
Mr. Osler is a man obsessed with correct use of language, as is evidenced by his posting. He is determined to stamp out the use of the word ‘Anti-Semitic” in its common connotation, because not all Semites are Jews, and to this end he is fearlessly dedicated, going so far as to change substitute a new word in a quote from Chip Berlet: “Chip says it is ‘antismitic'”. One can only hope that the world follows him, for we can all agree that antismitism is an evil thing.
I will close this post with a quote from Mr. Osler himself, on how one should treat someone given to misspellings: “I’ve just glanced at a green photocopied handout by “Ada Waterfordâ€. She spells Dick Cheney as “â€Dick Cheyneyâ€. She has just lost all my trust.”
October 23rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
Another good point, which I thought when reading that blog post. If I could go back, I’d wedge this in my blog entry: The definition of “Semitic”. Yes, it is a bitter irony that the Palestinians and Israelis fight with such great animosity when they are so closely related. But, for these purposes, an exploration of epistomology of “semite” just has to be side-lined and we just have to force ourselves into the ugly by-world of “Common Usage”.
An item from the Guardian, Oct 17, 2008, Hugh Muir “Comment and Debate: Diary” — which is sort of a “news and notes” bullet-point of miscallenia.:
As the presidential candidates battle on, another headache for Lyndon LaRouche, the American former convict who leads the shadowy Schiller Institute and who has had eight notably unsuccessful tilts at becoming president. The electorate never seems to think much of him, and neither do campaigners who continue to link the organisation to the death in 2003 of Jeremiah Duggan. The London student went to a LaRouche event unaware that his host has been condemned by leading Jewish organisations as an anti-semite. After six days in this fine company and in circumstances that have never been fully explained, Jeremiah was found dead after being struck by two fast-moving vehicles in Wiesbaden. There was a fairly shoddy inquiry by the German authorities, a UK inquest that ruled out suicide and a lot of fuss from campaigners, and then things went relatively quiet, which was much to Schiller’s liking. But today in Germany, former disciples, experts and politicians from Britain, the US, France and from Germany itself meet to brainstorm about the group’s activities. Simon Hughes, Lib Dem president, will be among them. Perhaps Lyndon will swing by. He’d be very, very welcome.