The Crazy Conspiracy Theories of Lyndon LaRouche

Right-wooing leftist cult wins conspiracy theory Oscar

FOR YEARS the right wing has had a virtual monopoly on far-out conspiracy theories. Compared to Birchite tales of “Insiders” and Nesta Webster’s much imitated “Illuminati Saga,” Marxist analysis often appears as the most boring intellectual exercise since the decline of gnosticism. No more! A soi-disant left-wing group has now materialized on various college campuses hawking pamphlets which promulgate a conspiracy theory to match the weirdest vagaries of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The mythology derives from the Campaigner magazine, a publication of the U.S. Labor party, whose chief is Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The brief summary here cannot possibly do justice to LaRouche’s hypothetical web in all its ramifications. It simply must be read to be disbelieved. (ILLUSTRATION: LaRouche and his ever-morphing organizations are still active today)

Like most such accounts of history, LaRouche’s is basically Manichaean — the age-old struggle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. The Sons of Light are humanists and city builders who are responsible for all that is good and fine and holy. The Darth Vader side of the equation is composed of “Inner Elites” and their assorted agents and stooges who keep mankind in the shackles of pre-industrial bondage. The founding fathers of the two opposing traditions, it turns out, are Plato and Aristotle, the former listed as a humanist, the latter as an elitist. LaRouche asseverates that Plato was the intellectual descendant of Ionian atomists and materialists, even though he devoted quite a few paragraphs to putting down Democritus and Leucippus. For those who missed it in Philosophy 101 (which has, of course, been taken over by LaRouche’s elitists), Aristotle was an “agent working for the joint forces of the Persian and Macedonian courts.”

We are then informed that Alexander the Great became an outstanding exponent of humanism only after overcoming the pernicious influences of tutor Aristotle and father Philip. By way of revenge it was “Aristotle’s agents who did, according to the authoritative sources of that time, finally assassinate Alexander.” Perhaps for reasons of space LaRouche does not identify these “authoritative sources.” It was also the express purpose of Aristotle’s philosophical adherents “to wipe out the human race’s memory of Ionian (i.e. Platonic) scientific methods …” Aristotelians, it seems, were committed to a policy of “suppressing urban-centered culture and technological progress in behalf of the rule of society by a landlord oligarchy allied to the monetarist bankers centered in Delphi and Mesopotamia.” To summarize the action during later centuries, the followers of Aristotle formed the “Black Guelph” faction in Medieval Europe. Finally, the conspiracy shuffled off to Albion where its headquarters remain to this day.

The outstanding theoretician of the conspiracy in the post-Aristotelian era was Francis Bacon, whose inductive approach was an attempt to purge simple minds of the true scientific method of the Platonic dialogue. Other elitist agents included St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke (whose specific assignment was to harass Johann Sebastian Bach) and French baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (who unknown to Col. Tom Parker was the father of rock music). The entire British Royal Society was also in on the plot, as were Sir Isaac Newton (who “made not a single useful contribution to scientific knowledge” ), David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Ernst Mach, T. S. Eliot, Karl Popper, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley. That Chomsky and Buckley are really part of the same conspiracy is the scoop of the decade, but then we are being given top secrets known only to elitists and Lyndon LaRouche. The latter is quite forceful in pointing out that the parties named not only propagated anti-humanist views, but were conscious and often paid agents of the Aristotelian-Black Guelph-British Imperialist-London School of Economics-Maoist plot. Yes, the late Chairman was also one of the elitists’ conspiratorial bedfellows.

There are good guys in LaRouche’s scheme of things — Kepler, Descartes, Spinoza, George Washington, Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe’s struggle against the Old Confederacy, which was bankrolled by British elitists, was just another phase in the age-old contest of Good versus Evil. What will come as a surprise is that Lincoln’s only humanist allies were Benito Juarez of Mexico, a faction in Japan that subscribed to the economic theories of Alexander Hamilton and that bastion of humanism, Czarist Russia.

At first reading LaRouche’s procrustean, or perhaps crustacean, account of history appears to be better suited to a Thursday night primal scream-in at the Beverly Hills Y.M.H.A. But beneath the surface a faintly consistent party line can be detected. Is it a mere coincidence that almost all the Russian rulers, past and present, are assigned to the humanist camp?

Perhaps the key to understanding LaRouche’s version of history is his overall philosophy, if it can be so described. His dialectics are little more than warmed-over Marx and Engels. Contending that his method can solve or at least show the way toward solving all problems, LaRouche is quite satisfied that he has disproved modern genetic theory by demonstrating that a “heritable change in a species can be induced ‘environmentally’ without genetic variation.” Here we have a fresh serving of Lysenkoism, the pet scientific theory of that great humanist, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Interestingly the name never appears in LaRouche’s tour de force although all Uncle Joe’s enemies are vilified.

LaRouche also claims to have unveiled the mysteries of the wave-particle complementarity that has befuddled the leading physicists of the day. It is somewhat of an anticlimactic breakthrough since we are told “this entire problem was already posed by Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes on inertia and otherwise anticipated in the broadest sense by Plato’s Ionian and allied predecessors.” The secret to the final solution of these hitherto troublesome problems is politicalization. “Political economy is the highest form of science, the crucial source of authority for scientific knowledge.”

Readers should not be too distraught over the sudden appearance of LaRouche’s myrmidons on various campuses. If you have an hour to kill and lack the wherewithal for a few games of pool at the student center, try talking to them. It’s one of the cheapest laughs in town. However, it would be interesting to discover where LaRouche gets the funds to crank out so much material and to afford the travel vouchers of his party organizers to widely separated institutions of higher learning. And why does an outfit which has such a soft spot for the scarlet-tinted Weltblick of the Kremlin dangle hooks baited for fish like the Birchers and other partisans of the dotty right? The U.S. Labor party, perhaps more by design than by principle, is dead set against drugs, homosexuals, rock, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve System and the Bilderbergers.

Those who disagree with LaRouche are contemptuously shrugged off as agents of the British elitist conspiracy, “a poor lot; short attention-spans, scatterbrained without moral mooring worth mention, easily provoked into loss of personal self-control, the majority downright louts, boors.” How then, we might ask, have such low-lifers so easily triumphed over the brilliant humanists? Well, they have relied on literature like the Septuagint, a piece of elitist mythology “produced in a variety of demotic Greek peculiar to such locations as the waterfront brothels of Egypt.” And then, of course, the elitists are the world’s foremost truth suppressors. Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Purloined Letter,” was really intended to inform the public about the conspiracy. Then the elitists got hold of Poe…

But you’ll have more fun finding out the rest for yourself. Just ask your local U.S. Labor party organizer.

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Source: Instauration magazine, June 1979