So.  Anyone read Matthew Sweet’s Operation Chaos?  Not necessarily going to fly off the shelf, but I hope it’s got its niche.

The book begins thusly.    (And some events and figures covered at Larouche Planet here.)

The Guardian pipes in.  The American Deserters Committee was of course infiltrated by the CIA, as well as by the Swedish security services and presumably the KGB as well. The survivors Sweet has tracked down all believe they know who the spies were, and all disagree. Most of the explanations are plausible. Certainly they are far more plausible than the undisputed reality, which is that the core of the group who went to Stockholm fell into the clutches of an American fantasist and convicted fraudster, who built a cult that endures to this day.

Kirkus Review:  Unfortunately, the presentation is somewhat disjointed, as Sweet jumps among a variety of perspectives. Readers looking for a neat conclusion to the deserters’ story will likely be disappointed; the tale is ongoing, and the participants have gone in different directions. The shift from the antiwar story to the rise of the LaRouche cult, while implicit in the material, reads like an unannounced detour.

Well, okay…  Announce it: the book lands on having a Part one and a Part two.  I note Michael Vale doesn’t particularly come out smelling like roses with the Part One, running his own ego-stripping sessions on his cadre before they next land in the Larouche movement.

Bo Burlingham, on life in the ADC:  There was an awful lot of playacting that was going on.  I was part of that.  We were all sort of play acting, trying to be relevant.  Aware that these big events were happening, and wanting to have some part in them.    And then on to…

(pages 170 – 172) In a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, Michael Vale met Lyn Marcus for the first time.  A lanky figure in his early fifties, with thinning hair and a bow tie as prim and proper as his New England accent.  A pipe smoker, whose tobacco habit also gave him a useful rhetorical prop.  He smiled beneath a pair of dark glasses and welcomed Michael into the Labor Committees.  Michael accepted.  It was the biggest mistake of his life.
“Often, I don’t catch the signals of danger, or if I do I don’t heed them,” said Michael.  “But I saw this one coming.  It’s a pretty eerie feeling to be in the presence of a psychopath.”
[…] I knew the next part of the story, and the shadow that it had cast upon Michael’s life.  I knew the man he called Lyn Marcus, and had once regarded as a political ally, was the villain of his biography.  I also realized, as we spoke, that Michael Vale believed his old enemy was dead.

Stop right there.  That’s a pretty funny take away.  A common belief among people whose associations with Larouche are far more fleeting than Vale’s.

Read the next paragraph here.

“The enemies have changed a little,” he said.  “It used to be the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger, and me.”

Instead of, apparently, Zeus.  And I don’t know if this is a revelation or old news, but a quick comment.:

Molly Kronberg spent a peculiar few minutes on the line trying to stir the interest of the tv journalist Geraldo Rivera.

Regarding the new news that the grand world plot against Larouche (and it continues, as we see here)– well, follow the logic if you may… I may point out… wait a decade and Geraldo Rivera may just have bit, for roughly the effect Morton Downey Jr. gave him.

Matthew Sweet was apparently surprised by Bill Jones’s appearance at a White House Press Conference: EIR has been perched there for the past however many decades.  (As too other odd  figures… you had the Jeff Gannon “controversy” in the Bush Years — himself notably wound up in Larouchian conspiracy land as conspiracy theorists speculated back to the White House sex ring).  The Trump Administration has added skyped bloggers to lob some soft balls.  And, looking over the acknowledgements — in any future printings the sentence that thanks all the former Larouche followers who helped than lists a bunch of names of former followers… as well as Dennis King — could be clarified.

II.  All right.  The historical allusion and marker lands on another wacky candidate in Illinois, and so discussion turns to that whole 1986 election debacle.

What’s Alex Jones’ take on Lyndon LaRouche?
Slightly aroused.

Oh man, there was (is?) a LaRouchie stationed on the sidewalk Broadway near Wall Street for years and years. He looks exactly as you would expect.
Conspiracy nuts try to join them, but then wander off when they can’t understand what in hell their new conspiracy is about.

At the risk of being beaten to the asphalt of a parking lot, I liked his ideas on a high speed coast-to-coast train.

I remember 1986 in Illinois very well. I once wrote a soc.historywhat-if post about it where I noted: “It is in any event pretty clear that Fairchild’s and Hart’s votes did not reflect approval of the LaRouchies’ views of the world. (And they did not reflect any huge LaRouchie campaign, either–the LaRouchies claimed their total campaign expenditures were only in the hundreds of dollars!) The LaRouchie candidate against gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III for example got well under 10 percent of the vote. Likewise, whenever there was a three-way contest between the Democratic regular, a “respectable” opponent and a LaRouchie, the LaRouchie came in a poor third–which suggests that the LaRouchie vote was partly a protest vote by people who may not have known who the LaRouchies were but *did* know they were opposed to the regular candidate (contrary to the conventional wisdom that they didn’t know who the regular candidate was)…”

A bit of a bias here?  honorable Adlai Stevenson III.

ITEM NUMBER THREE:  Conspiracy reverberates.

It occurred while I was traveling the country to talk about my new book on Edward Lansdale, the legendary covert operative who in the 1950s helped to defeat a communist insurgency in the Philippines and then to create the state of South Vietnam. While Lansdale was once known as a pioneer of counterinsurgency, in recent years he has acquired notoriety among conspiracymongers who think that he was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

This astonishing claim was first made by the now-deceased L. Fletcher Prouty, an Air Force officer who worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. In retirement, Prouty became a prolific conspiracy theorist who was associated with the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and Lyndon LaRouche. He said that “the Churchill Gang” murdered FDR and that David Rockefeller stage-managed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ITEM FOUR:  Wait for it… from the anals of political positioning.

In a surprising action yesterday, the never-Trump (and always never-LaRouche) Washington Post…

Some agree with the positioning, I see.

The Republican Party’s head-first dive into breathless conspiratorial fantasies in defense of Donald Trump is a brand-defining moment as the Party of Lincoln morphs into the Party of LaRouche.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE:  A bit of a blip to show that, whatever else you can say, PANIC was dipping into some popular support.   From Trina Robbins’s Last Girl Standing — on editing an AIDS benefit comic book.  See here on Neal Adams.  (183-184)

Neal Adams really didn’t get it.  The page he submitted consisted of a large male face with an A on the forehead.  The lettering around the face explained that in some future time, AIDS had been eradicated by isolating people with AIDs in special camps (and to judge by the drawing branding the letter A on the foreheads!)  He was not being ironic!  The whole thing was so homophobic that I decided Robert should write the rejection letter, which he did: an amazingly polite letter, considering.  Neal sent a letter of protest to our publisher!  I thought this was akin to sending a letter of protest to the principal if the teacher fails you on a test.  His letter was pretty incoherent, and made references to “Nazi’s”.  I couldn’t resist.  I sent him a letter asking what it was that belonged to the Nazi’s.

ITEM SIX:  Erm.

President Trump’s historic trip to Asia last November is one of the greatest diplomatic achievements by any U.S. president in recent memory.
All very cooperative with China and Russia.  Follows off the heals of this, right?
Therefore, I support LaRouche’s Four Laws: 1. Re-instate Glass-Steagall; 2: Establish a National Development Bank; 3. Issue $10 trillion federal credit directed to create modern infrastructure; and, 4: Replace the war machine with a commitment to peaceful space exploration and fusion power development.
Trump supports none of those.  So goes Kevin Morgus to the Albany (OR) Democrat.

Others noted.

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