JULY 24, 2005
Ex-members of the neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche cult are so disgusted by its complicity in the death of Jeremiah Duggan (a Jewish youth from the U.K. who was struck and killed by a car on an autobahn in Wiesbaden, Germany, in March 2003 while fleeing in apparent terror from a LaRouche brainwashing program) that they are beginning to break their silence and come forward with fresh information about the cult's history and practices. Much of this material can be found at the website http://justiceforjeremiah.com. Some is also being sent to this blog site.
An email we received last week from a former longtime LaRouche follower whose information has proven reliable in the past, gives some new details regarding a murky sexual incident surrounding the LaRouche organization's smear campaign against Michael Dukakis during the 1988 Presidential race. Political news junkies from that era will recall how LaRouche's weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), concocted a story that the Democratic candidate was a former mental patient. The allegation was picked up by the Republicans at a point when their candidate, Vice-President George H. W. Bush, was behind in the polls--and President Reagan proved willing to play along with the charade. Asked about the mental patient charge by EIR reporter Nick Benton at a White House press conference two weeks before the Republican convention, Reagan quipped, "Look I'm not going to pick on an invalid."
Our informant writes: "One of the briefs I am sending you is the EIR special report on the mental history of Michael Dukakis. I also have the EIR issue with a lot of Dukakis material we used to screw him royally. There is also an issue where the headline blares that an EIR reporter who exposed Dukakis was attacked [near the Republican Party's convention at the New Orleans Superdome] as part of an operation against LaRouche. The truth, as I found out, was different.
"We were told that EIR Reporter X was attacked by a professional team of thugs who attacked him for exposing Dukakis. Within the same week, I was told by a very close friend who was very close to security [LaRouche's armed and superfanatical security staff] that what happened in New Orleans was quite different. It seems that EIR Reporter X meandered off by himself and was rolled by some robbers after finding a hooker. What my friend told me a week later was that it is even more embarrassing as he was seeing a male for a sexual liaison. EIR Reporter X was rumored to be Gay, but since we were crazy about gays and AIDS was in the news, who the hell would admit that? My friend said that Lyn and security decided the best thing to do was to blame it on the same plot that is targeting Lyn.
"I do not know if this was known at first, or if EIR Reporter X admitted it later, or what else was going on. But it is a good example of [the LaRouche cult's] type of chicanery."
One wonders how the purported gay EIR staffer must have felt in 1986 when LaRouche launched his campaign to "spread Panic, not AIDS" by sponsoring a ballot proposition in California aimed at quarantining AIDS victims. (The LaRouchians collected over 700,000 signatures for this sinister proposal, which almost certainly was inspired by Hitler's call in Mein Kampf to quarantine victims of syphilis. It was defeated at the polls, but over two million Californians voted for it.) One also wonders what went through the EIR staffer's mind in 1987 when LaRouche issued his infamous call for skinhead violence against gays (including Turner Diaries-style lynchings) to save Western civilization from a New Dark Age.
But the purportedly gay LaRouchian would not have been the only political schizophrenic in the cult. Jewish members had for years tolerated (and some had even taken the lead in promoting) LaRouche's claims that "only" 1.5 million Jews were killed in World War Two (and none of them in gas chambers), that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a "factual" document, that wealthy Jews run the international narcotics traffic, that Nazi war criminals such as Kurt Waldheim are really patriotic anti-communists, and that Simon Wiesenthal and other Nazi hunters are subhuman beasts and KGB agents.
The LaRouchian recruitment and indoctrination regimen twists the individual's thinking inside out so that Jews become defined as Nazis, and Nazis become defined as anti-fascists (as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which war is peace and freedom is slavery). This "newspeak" partially explains how young people--and people not so young--end up joining LaRouche and turning against their own families, religion, etc., but it should not be regarded as an excuse for what is ultimately a personal decision to embrace the dark side. A moral person can always say "no" to the intellectual seduction of someone like LaRouche (as even some Germans said "no" to Hitler--and he, unlike LaRouche, had a Gestapo with the authority of the state behind it).
Jeremiah Duggan was a moral person and strongly resisted the LaRouchian indoctrination, as is known from eyewitnesses to the events he attended in and near Wiesbaden, the notes he took at various sessions, and his communciations with his mother and his girl friend in the hours before his death (he called both of them and said he was getting the hell out of there).
I conclude with a moral (if not "logical") syllogism which I suspect will not be popular with those shrinks and exit counselors who regard ex-members (even ex-leading members) of political cults as pure and simple "victims" who should be encouraged to get on with their lives by going back to graduate school and forgetting about the people they victimized during their years in the cult.
1. Jeremiah Duggan told the LaRouchians to shove it.
2. Jeremiah Duggan ended up dead.
3. All those individuals who, unlike Jeremiah Duggan, failed to resist LaRouche's blandishments and even once they left the cult (after years or even decades of participation in criminal activity and hate-mongering) remained silent, should now come forward and atone for their actions by helping the Duggan family win justice and closure.
Hey, and maybe EIR Reporter X, if he's no longer in the cult, should finally say "I'm sorry" to Michael Dukakis and even issue a public apology to the gay community for collaborating in LaRouche's 30-year campaign of hate against gays and lesbians.
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