By Richard Norman

A great article on what hopefully is the demise of the Lyndon LaRouche movement. For those unfamiliar with LaRouche, a couple of hours of research on him might be worthwhile: this is the story of how deep and encompassing conspiratorial delusion can be. The man will surely go down in the footnotes as one of America’s great political freaks with his work best categorized as "classic autodidact paranoid delirium." I first made the acquaintance of members of the LaRouche Youth Movement when I was walking down Friedrichstrasse in Berlin in early 2005. They were holding up posters denouncing Bush/Cheney and looked like average ragtag college-age protesters. Then they handed me some literature: Children of Satan III (click here for a summary). Then two of the members began to describe to me how Keynes had been trained by Heinrich Himmler and instructed to create the Bretton Woods system to enslave the world. (And how Allan Dulles had arranged for Kennedy’s assassination with the help of ex-Nazis.) This is only the tip of the iceberg. From well-sourced Wikipedia:

Journalist and LaRouche critic Dennis King wrote in his book "Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism" (Chaps 28-30), that LaRouche focuses his critique on a supposed "oligarchical" elite–an age-old conspiracy based on usury, tax-farming, banking swindles and the like, that is depicted as unremittingly evil. LaRouche identifies the ancient incarnation of this elite with "the anti-human bestialists" and "parasites," "Babylonians and other non-Jews" who "cooked up the hoax known as the Old Testament." He associates the elite’s medieval form with Italian banking families, primarily Jewish ones, that he blames, according to King, for poisoning Popes and causing the Black Plague. As to the modern elite, LaRouche has connected it with a cabal of mostly Jewish banking families in London. According to King, LaRouche has described this elite in many of his articles as an alien race hostile to the human species.

This sounds a lot like another of my favourite political theorists, David Ickes, who believes the world’s elites are a species of reptilian alien. X-files meets Protocols of the Elders of Zion? What makes Larouche different from other maniacs is his longevity and indefatigableness. He has been doing this for four decades. He’s run for president eight times. His theories and conspiracies have built upon one another (if that can be said) thoughout the years to a point of total convolution and impenetrability. But with the suicide of his printer earlier this year, and his lack of Internet presence, and his age (85), this Washington Monthly article suggests LaRouche’s ideas may soon be relegated to wherever it is they put the refuse rejected from the dustbin of history. -Richard