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Detractors: 2nd Snider target (Andrew Cohen) runs cult retreat...
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Detractors: 2nd Snider target (Andrew Cohen) runs cult retreat...
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| LaRouche Movement Lyndon H LaRouche Schiller Institute Larouche Youth Movement LaRouche Movement Lyndon H LaRouche Schiller Institute Larouche Youth Movement |
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#2441
07-01-2009, 12:35 AM
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You are right about how the Boomers will still be around after 25 times of hearing all of this, but their ranks are being thinned and this is a very popular site. I do not think that people write big resignation letters any more, they sort of fade away. What I do have to thank you and Penzept for is this curious world of CODE and where it leads to. This is what has always bothered me and can never be answered unless you seriously ask questions of just what was taking place in the LC at a particular time. There are many moments where a member has to ask why something happened and for what reason. The nature of the LC and Lyn is that what you did from where you were often had nothing to do with where Lyn was. In thinking and thinking of the events surrounding 1978 or so and the inclusioon of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Lyn's Holocaust numerolgy and the Zionist Campaigner, I can only say the following. I never heard a single NC or NEC leader address the membership with a reason why The Protocols and Lyn's Holocaust centerfolds were an integral part of our mission and campaigns. In other words, we had Fusion, the presidential runs, Iranian hostages, Jimmy Carter, a bad economy to organise around. In a convoluted way, the excuse was that we were going after people who ran Dope and that included some Jewish Mobsters and banks and some families. In retrospect, I can't remember big meetings discussing the death counts of Jews. We more or less were campaiging against Nazi Economics using Gus's Campaigner about Hjalmar Schacht. Even that was with Schacht being German and the Rockefellers copying that. So why does this still bother me today? Because at that time in the LC, I had no idea of the extent of the work we had going with Carto and now I find I am still shocked with the CODE revelations. A few nights ago I was watching TV when I came across a National Geographic Special called Nazi Scrap Books from Hell it will be repeated a few times this weekend http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/tv-schedule Fri Jul 3 10PM Sat 4 1 AM Sun 5 1 PM Fri 10 6 PM In the first 5 or so minutes of the program, one of the scholars described how in 1978, two CIA analysts reviewed some aerial pictures of Auschwitz which have not been seen for decades and analyzed. http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/auschwitz/aerials.html http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell...holocaust2.htm When these photos were released, I do remember that this stirred up a problem with the Holocaust deniers movement since very few photos of Auschwitz existed of an intact camp. When I was growing up in a city with few Jews, it was common for people to talk about the Holocaust and talk about how could the Germans kill so many people so fast. To uninformed teenagers back then, the hate groups at the time would leave small pamphlets around local High Schools which often said that the Holocaust was a myth or an exageration since there are no photos of crematoria or dumping grounds of residue. My exit counselor would tell me that he saw the LC and Lyn/Helga going down a very bad path by rewriting German History and being very stupid about the death counts. In his words, "The Germans were able to do everything with incredible precision and efficiency in their entire history according to Lyn and Helga, except in killing Jews. ###### I was around during the Nazi trials, they bragged about how good they were and it is mind boggling to think about how that efficient mind designed that system of death". Watch that show if you have a chance, you see things which will startle you with how non chalant life was in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands. What this all leads to in my mind is how much more is there to uncover about the realtions Lyn and security have had with Carto and CODE people in being part of something which doing PR work for Nazis and eventually blaming The Jews for their own deaths! David Irving seems to show up in CODE if I am reading this correctly. http://ftp.nizkor.org/hweb/people/f/...ng-05.01.shtml Quote:
This is so close to Lyn's world that it truly scares me and bothers me that I had anything to do with this lunacy WTF was I thinking? I often write here that in the LC one never saw Nazi Swastikas on the walls, but we did do PR work , rewrote history and had people crack Jew Jokes to Jewish members. I can not help but think that there is far more to why Lyn wrote what he did and what else may have been going on at the time. If another public figure was running for office and did exactly what we were doing, how could they not be associated with Nazis and anti semitism by Jewish groups? The excuse of saying that the LC was organising them and trying to change them is quite foolish and for the members when Lyn and the LC are now writing and using their propoganda at the time. xlcr4life@hotmail.com Last edited by xlcr4life; 07-01-2009 at 12:38 AM. 
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#2442
07-01-2009, 08:34 AM
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There is a website that will be unnamed that has a headline about some recent La Rouche lunacy attacking "Jewish boomers" of the LC. At least that's the headline. But when you read the text -- which I did -- there is no mention of "Jewish boomers" but of "boomers." Again, why do the "critics" think they have a right to fictionalize history and not get called on it? Any thoughts about why this is so? If you do, you might direct them at the fabricators who come from all points of view. It is a TOTAL LIE to imply that the people who pushed the Carto crap were all Gentiles of a presumably Aryan bent and all who resisted were Jews. In fact, politeness restricts me from a lengthy discussion of just who was responsible for first pushing the "British" line and the dominance of "the City of London" in the NO as they also were not secret Nazis and got out. But here is a hint: They weren't from the Fiji Islands. I told them at the time that their line was very much in line with far-right propaganda. Security/the America sector in the form of Bob C. actually resisted the change in line because his fantasy creation was the Rockefellers and he couldn't let go. But his psychosis was overruled by LaRouche's psychosis. I lived through it all. Although the Protocols appeared in 78, I don't remember anyone telling me to read the Protocols as true or to promote Holocaust Denial. The line explicitly given to me by an NEC member in a private conversation when I started to grumble was that this was a "Hitler-Stalin pact" deal and we were Stalin. The "Jew Jokes" wer used as a loyalty test to intimidate anyone from objecting from the Left. The same was true about why we couldn't attack WerBell and Frankhouser. We would be accused of being part of a murder plot against LaRouche. So the objections all had to go underground. Everyone knew this. I'm sure the Hitler-Stalin pact line was given out privately to other members as well. Some bought it; some didn't. But Security knew they were playing with dynamite and that's why so much of this was back-channel. I think it might even have been worse in Germany where LaRouche spent so much time. The real answer is I just don't know what happened because much still remains opaque. What I do know is that no one inside the LC that I knew thought they were conscious Nazis trying to put one over on everyone else. To me this is a Labor Committee way of thinking. On the other hand, the LC did terrible things and its propaganda included horrible anti-Semitic stuff which you didn't need to "decode." I mean LaRouche engaged in Holocaust Denial in the pages of New Solidarity in the Fall of 1978 even before Dope, Inc. was published. Some of the stuff they wrote about Brandt was mind-boggling and Helga really made truly disgusting statements after the Holocaust TV series was shown in Germany. But the tricky thing is that we are dealing with a cult coming out of a Leftist Lenninst model. We are also dealing with the "Golden Souls" concept which meant that there was the philosopher king and Golden Souls (the people closest to LaRouche), silver souls (presumably every one else in the org) and all the rest of humanity who were still semi-human but reachable (bronze souls) and Satanic masters of evil -- the Zionists, the Oligarchy, the Queen of England, the IMF, Jimmy Carter, the environmental movement, etc. But the philosopher king/"Golden Soul" line was simply the reconstruction of the old arguments against "centrism" only now LaRouche was Plato and not Lenin. But it also meant he could further justify running the NCLC as an absolute monarchy. After all, Plato said so. It also seems pretty clear that many NEC members were kept in the dark on certain issues. Key things were compartmentalized. The thing I don't like about the "party line" group hug offered by some is that I just think it is false to claim that the LC consisted of secret Nazi brown shirts who really were out to re-enact the Holocaust while using code words to the rubes. To take an example chosen utterly at random: I could argue that anyone who was a member of PLP was a genocidal manic out to kill millions of people and their admiration of Joseph Stalin or Mao as fighters for the world's working class was really "code" for PL's real intent which was to establish a ghastly totalitarian dictatorship with death camps and gulags across America with PL as the supreme leaders exactly like their heroes, Stalin and Mao. Hence the "inner elite" of PL members talked in "coded" language about working class revolution when they were really talking about imposing a horrible totalitarian tyranny on America. Therefore the individual members of PL put out "coded" references about liberation when they were secretly a group of Stalinist butchers. (And in fact this is what the anarchists pretty much claimed at the time about PL.) The guy they HATED the most was Nikita Khrushchev, who put an end to the gulag and the Stalinist lie machine and wanted to encourage "peaceful co-existence" as opposed to horrible Third World War where both sides would use atomic, biological and chemical warfare. PL's big hero Mao used to say that because China had so many people a nuclear war between Russia and America that would really have plunged the world into a New Dark Age really wasn't all that big of a deal. And I could go on and on citing PL publications. And maybe for some people in PL it was true but I really doubt that Jake Rosen or Fred Jerome thought of themselves as mass murderers. But if you look at PL publications the references to the great Joseph Stalin and Mao (pre-Cultural Revolution Mao anyway) are all there. But this would in my opinion be an utterly fictitious way of describing members of PL, why they joined , and why they stayed. In short, it would be awful history. The same could be said for Max Shachtman's Workers Party. After all they were the Trotskyists (many of whom were not from the Fiji Islands) who argued all throughout World War II the "third camp" line that the working class shouldn't fight the Nazis because it was an inter-imperialist war. So clearly anyone who was in the Workers Party was objectively a Nazi and their attempts to relativize the differences between the NSDAP and Winston Churchill's Tory Party were consciously part of a plot to give aid and comfort to the Nazis objectively. (And this was more or less the argument the CP made.) But would this view speak to the truth of the motivations of the individual members of the Workers Party and what they thought they were doing? With the LC it is even more complicated because neither PL nor the Workers Party were cults. They were highly ideological political organizations but not cults. (At least PL in the early days; I don't know what happened to it in the mid-70s.) But the LC was far more a CULT and not a normal political organization, even a highly ideological one. It had become a cult by 73-74, it had a massive mind-fu-k operation in Beyond Pyschoanalysis, it had a hierarchy that made all kinds of back room deals that the members never knew about or were debated. To claim that the people in the cult rationally understood that they were trying to re-introduce Nazism into the world is ridiculous and even a little bit crackpot. Until we know more about the full history, we are very much still like the people in the cave looking at the shadows. CODE/Marchetti is just one attempt to see more clearly. The sad truth is that the people who stayed are still chained to the wall looking to the shadow play. To say that they are really conscious agents of a master plan to relaunch the Third Reich -- or some similar construct -- replicates the conspiratorial mindset the LC imposes about ITS enemies. ("Barak Obama is consciously carrying out Nazi genocide through his health care reform ideas.") The LC is is a "political" salvation cult that thinks that as long as "Father" (LaRouche) is somehow in charge the world will be saved. To the extent the world is not run by LaRouche, it is plunged into Darkness. This is what they really really believe. LaRouche isn't a surrogate or code word for Hitler. They worship Lyn not Dolf. Lyn worships Lyn not Dolf. I mean how profoundly stupid (or arrogant) do you really have to be to be incapable of understanding the obvious? Since the LC has been a failing sect for so long and no one but us really cares about it you can make any claim you want and it won't have any impact on the real world. The LC is a total joke and trying to "sex it up" with extreme claims about the danger it allegedly represents to make the critic look like an important person won't make it any less of a joke. The most destructive things that the LC has done in its history have almost overwhelmingly been done to its own members and not the Queen of England, the Rothschilds, or Barack Obama -- all of whom seem to be doing just fine the last time I checked. In a way, it's sort of karmic payback for our being idiots and cowards. That's the real secret of the LC and of cults in general. If there is any tragedy or profound lesson to be learned it is here. The people who are still in today are still getting karmic payback for their folly and they will remain in bizarro land getting karmic payback until either they finally grow up or die. This is also why I'm not much for salvation appeals to the old guard. In many ways, I think they are getting exactly what they deserve by staying although obviously I think it would be better if people left if only to spend at least a few years of their life living like real adults. But at this stage, I'm not sure it is possible for many of them to do so. Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-01-2009 at 09:13 AM.
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#2443
07-01-2009, 09:36 AM
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ok...
This is a discussion that is important: HH and XLC. I dont think that the main reason behind the problems the LC has today to recruit is the revelations about the contacts Lyndon and the LC-jews had with Liberty Lobby 30 years ago, or some quotes 30 years ago, written by Steinberg and others, that Catholic sects and Jewish sects were behind dope-trade (Dope Inc. Dont forget that the nasty quotes are NOT from the protocols!), or some 35 year old statements by M. Burdman, Jeff or Lyndon about the number of murdered during the holocaust... Yes, a lot of people are scared away by linking the LC to nazis, but in the recruitment process that has ALWAYS helped the organization to recruit. That is one of the tragedies behind the failing Justice for Jeremiah campaign! The attempts to say that Duggan was murdered because he was a jew BACKFIRES! I agree that the LC is antisemitic in many ways. But I want it to be clear that the only way one can mention this is while saying that the LC at the same time likes jews, wants to recruit and cooperate with them and praises the jewish tradition and hates antisemitism. Any mentioning of antisemitism in the LC without mentioning that this also is the case, is disasterous! This sounds ridiculous to many... But the fact of the matter is that the LC first and foremost is a CULT, and cults are not logical. They do these kinds of things all the time. They can be for and against at the same time! Cults have weird logic of their own. And that has to be shown. BECAUSE THE LC IS A CULT, a political cult, THE CULT CAN BE BOTH ANTISEMITIC, AND WANT TO RECRUIT JEWS, HAVE JEWISH LEADERS, PRAISE THE JEWS, AND WORK AGAINST ANTISEMITISM, AT THE SAME TIME! To say it otherwise. The thing that matters for a cult is not the 998 that shy away because the cult is descibed as antisemitic or nazis, but the two that ask the question: "but you have jews, how can you be antisemitic", or "but why do they say that you are nazis, you work to save Africa and you have LOTS of coloured people as members". It is the last two that are "recruitable" to the cult. (The pattern is the same for all cults) And in their case the LaRouche=nazi is a disaster! It is especially tragic since the 998 would shy away from the cult even if the rhethoric was a bit different! The coloured LEADERS of the cult and the JEWISH leaders OF THE CULT, AS WELL AS ALL THE ORDINARY MEMBERS, AND THE SO CALLED WORK TO SAVE iSRAEL AND aFRICA, are good arguments to use when recruiting a new member. And this is not only some Potemkin Sceme. The fact is that the organization, despite all bull**** it spreads, is POSITIVE To coloure people and jews! That is why one cannot use the same polemics against nazis and antisemites as against LC! And the thing HH mentioned about "new attacks on Jewish boomers"... It is a joke!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Almost as disasterous as some of Dennis KIngs writings on "coded language". The stuff on Liberty Lobby, CODE (Still there are no evidences that there was a close cooperation, though!), and the attacks on Catholics and Jews in the famous chapter on the protocols, and all attacks on jews. This is all important. But lets not call names! And lets be VERY conscious that the LC, AS ALL CULTS; are not simply a black-and white thing. Lets not simplify! /T Here are three ironies for you all! HH is saying something important about the "holocaust jokes"... The two people I heard tell them were J. Cohen and Jeff Steinberg. I also know the same thing HH knows... David Goldman also told these jokes to people, that is NO secret! There are many internal LC stories about these people telling these jokes. There is one about when Jeff told it to Germans in Germany and all were just silent! Do you see the irony? There is another side to this irony... In 1978 when the Dope Inc was released with its chapter claiming that the Jews and the Catholics were behind the dopetrade, the organization also initiated its work for peace in the middle east. Do you see? The protocols of Sion and the quotes from the secret Catholic order in Dope Inc. was used to recruit Israeli jews in the peace process!!!!!! Thats irony number 2... The third irony is that the LYM has many jewish members! The person that probably wants to take over the EIR when Lyndon dies is Jeff, the jew... The organization can still be said to spread a lot of antisemitic bull****, but it nevertheless has a jewish tradition and heritage! That is the third irony! Last edited by European; 07-01-2009 at 09:53 AM.
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#2444
07-01-2009, 11:28 AM
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I feel like I'm fighting a pointless two-front war -- one against the exaggerators who try to make LaRouche a Nazi and one against minimizers like you. Your post on this issue is utterly unconvincing. The George Soros as villain stuff, the Felix Rohaytn as villain stuff is a direct continuation of the policies that began in 1977-78. And it is extraordinarily important that they minimize the Holocaust and work with CODE for the simple reason that they have never refuted any of it. Don't pander to the cowards who left after Duggan's death and use Dennis King as a bogey man to cover up their lack of actions. You are being used if you do. To be direct: On this issue you sounds like you are still somehow stuck within the world view of a member trying to argue against some college freshman at a card table who read some Watchdog thing on the Internet that claimed that LaRouche is the new Hitler. Also the "LC as Nazi line" was very effective in making sure that only 2 of the 100 join. But no one is joining and it is collapsing. So all your worries are not really accurate for today. Maybe they have 50 people in Europe? But if you think they are a real threat if only for the two, surely you would be more useful convincing the higher ups from Germany to be honest for a change and really gut the organization by telling what happened? [And just so so you know in the United States no white person for the past thirty years uses the word "coloured" for black people. Here it's considered racist. In movies if you want to show a backward white person from the South like in the famous 1960s movie In the Heat of the Night they will say something like "now what's all this I hear now about all them colored people?" Also "colored folks." Sometimes black people will refer to themselves humorously as in "it's just us colored folks" but it is always meant to be funny in a folksy way or as a put-down of whites as in "I guess they think colored folk don't know any better." Maybe Bevel or Amelia R. used it in that way in Europe. But in America for a white person to use the word "colored" sounds odd. I know this is an issue of a person writing in a non-native language and not understanding cultural nuance.] Anyway I am so tired of wack-a-mole. I feel like on the one hand I have to deal with the exaggerators and on the other the minimizers when it comes to the LC's obvious antisemitism. And you are head of the class when it comes to the minimizers. This doesn't mean that the LC isn't a cult and that you do have to understand to way language is used for cult purposes. Also as I have already said, I know your native language isn't English so things you say that might be clear in Swedish can really come off with a different effect in English. "LC-Jew" is a perfect example. First it sounds like there is a special category of "LC Jews" vs. everybody else. No such category ever existed that I'm aware of. It's a fantasy whatever political spin someone wants to put on it. Again I think this is really in part a language problem and not being able to write at the level of nuance in English. But it is also in part a conceptual one. But if I were you, I would takes the antisemitism of the LC seriously rather than trying always to act like a lawyer for the accused and pleading "mitigating circumstances." LaRouche hasn't blamed the Catholic Church or the Jesuits for decades for the drug trade, BTW. He hasn't attacked the Pope as the Whore of Babylon for decades either. But he continues to attack "Jewish banking interests in the City of London" and Wall Street. He does it all the time. News Flash: He's an anti-Semite and anti-Semitism is key to his entire world view and economic ideas. Marx was also an anti-Semite but it didn't dominate his economic ideas. With LaRouche it does. That's why it is so central to him. Tactical blunders over the Duggan issue one can argue about. None of it negates a vast track record of LaRouche-patented anti-semitism. But the problems the Duggans ran into have far more to do with the complexities of German and English law than anything else. They always had a difficult road once the initial investigation showed that there were no eyewitnesses who reported that he was pushed into traffic or that he had been killed first and then dropped into traffic. This was and still remains the real issue legally. But speaking of Duggan: if the former high-ranking members in Europe ever want to be free of the LaRouche stigma, they should come forward and tell us what they know at a minimum about Duggan. Their constant hiding behind Dennis-King phobia makes them look guilty by omission. Plus given his genetics, LaRouche could go on for another 10 years and they will still be stuck with his legacy. Surely they must know this and also know that the best way they can "de-LaRoucheify" is to discuss what they know about the Duggan affair. If they can throw in something about CODE, that would be icing on the cake. Personally I'd settle just for news about Duggan. What you write only helps them further rationalize a policy of silence by making them think they are the victims of sinister outside forces. It allows them to rationalize not doing the decent thing from a basic moral standpoint blindingly obvious to a six-year-old much less a sixty-year-old. So why do it? Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-01-2009 at 11:46 AM.
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#2445
07-01-2009, 03:12 PM
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Sorry for the last post, that perhaps was a bit too unsensitive...
It is just that I am a bit extra ****ed off right now, because of a mail exchange I had recently with another one of these "experts" that claims that the members of the LaRouche-cult read Mein Kampf and has portraits of Hitler on the walls, something he "knows" because all say that LaRouche and the LC are nazis... (a local Scandinavian "expert") The basis for my arguments is this: that I want to challenge the things the cult uses as arguments against its critics, and against these posts on the factnet. The things that I wrote about in the last post are also a part of the "reality" of this cult, and of our past. It is at least a definite part of the arguments it uses! /T And thanks HH for the correction about coloured vs black... Last edited by European; 07-01-2009 at 03:19 PM.
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#2446
07-01-2009, 06:51 PM
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Also with "colored people" -- language is really strange because in English it is actually very PC to say "people of color" but not "colored people" because "people of color" means everyone who is "non-white" however you define "non white." So Latinos are "non-white" "people of color" even if some Latinos look "white." But if you are writing in English as a second language the distinction between what is PC and what is not PC must seem really bizarre.
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#2447
07-01-2009, 06:58 PM
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The nmf half-time show: On knowing what we don’t know
Part one of the New Mole Files (NMF) traced the emergence of the Labor Committee from LaRouche’s 1965 series of SWP internal discussion papers through the ACFI, Spartacist League, FUNY, West Village CIPA, SDS, the WSTU and ultimately onto the campus of Columbia University in the months before the strike.
[And speaking of these early days:A useful text is Stanley Aronowitz’s memoir, “When the New Left Was New” first published in Social Text, 9/10 (Spring-Summer 1984). And a big tip of the hat to the research wizard who provides this remarkable reference: “Spannaus, Ed, "The Welfare Rights Movement and the Guaranteed Annual Income,” The Braille Monitor (Ink print ed.), April 1968, pp. 957-962 (reprinted from _GAIN_, Jan. 1968).”] Part two of the NMF will complete once and for all the examination of the early origins of the NCLC. Although the most interesting section is the period surrounding the group’s activities in New York from the fall of 1968 into 1969, reference will also be made to a few of the events surrounding Operation Mop-Up. More specifically, I will show that the reference in the Old Mole Files to the Spartacist paper leaking internal NCLC “Beyond Psychoanalysis” documents during the midst of Operation Mop-Up was correct. I will give the citations for their publication as well as the Spartacist take on the organization since we now know that the Spartacist leadership in New York was well acquainted with LaRouche personally. THE RETURN OF THE BAVARIANS In this introduction to part two of the NMF, I think it is useful to list some of the questions and areas of research that I have no ability to examine and that will remain unanswered. The most important unanswered question, by far, is the emergence of the “Bavarian tendency” under Steve Fraser. As suggested by the Old Mole Files and other postings, there is something just plain weird about the faction fight. I think at the deepest level the reason the debate seems so strange may be ascribed to the fact that by 1969-1970 it still was not at all clear just what the Labor Committee really was. To the Trotskyist Left, the Labor Committee was seen largely as a kind of technocratic take on social democracy. But it seems fairly evident that the LC hadn’t yet coalesced into any one fixed organizational “mold” but still represented a grouping very much in flux. In 1975 former NCLC member Dan Jacobs wrote the first major study of the NCLC (“A True History of Lyn Marcus [Lyndon LaRouche] and the Labor Committees”). Although it was published in kooky Fred Newman’s journal Critical Practice, Jacobs pulled together a serious study of the group from a partisan leftist perspective. Discussing the “Bavarians,” Jacobs states: “With the ebb and flow in the student movement highlighted by the crack-up of SDS in the summer of 1969, the Labor Committee went through an identity crisis from which it was never successfully to emerge. A factional crevice began developing (especially in New York) over the basic question of what kinds of activity were appropriate for the young organization in the new period. One group composed of younger college recruits from the Columbia and CCNY campuses – many of them former PLP members (Papert, Sober, Hecht, Milkman et al.) -- placed heavy emphasis on active, programmatic intervention into the more burning political issues facing New York’s population (e.g., open admissions and the State Office Building [S.O.B.] pork barrel), and were constantly sniffing out upcoming “mass strikes” that would both revive the student movement and facilitate a massive united front socialist intervention. "The other group, led by the ‘seasoned’ members out of West Village CIPA (Marcus, Johnson, Ed and Nancy Spannaus et al.) emphasized cadre development and theoretical consolidation (concentrating on ‘Marxist philosophy’), urging mainly propaganda interventions to build up the Labor Committee membership, as well as organizational centralization to get beyond the loosely federated situation that prevailed with the various locals.” As the super-activists burnt themselves out super-activating and the theoreticians theorized, Jacobs continues: “A weird factional situation began crystallizing at the January 1970 national conference when Papert and Steve Fraser, a leading Philadelphia member and former PLP comrade of Papert’s, delivered their National Report proposing a tactic on the LC’s orientation toward the emerging popular-front ecology movement in the U.S. Papert read the report, which had not been previously distributed to the confused membership, at a rapid-fire clip. The report was sharply criticized by Marcus and Co. for opportunistically pandering to scientists, engineers, etc. who would be participating in the ecology movement, and for essentially proposing that the LC dissolve itself into the ecology movement.” The conference that Jacobs referred to took place on 4 January 1970 at the Beacon Hotel in New York. Apparently the idea of the LC entering into the ecology movement (“a French turn”?) seems linked to another project that sounds equally strange. In December 1969 the LC put forward a proposal apparently to the rest of the American Left for the establishment of a new “national paper” that would presumably replace the National Guardian, which had fallen apart during a series of bitter internal struggles. (By mid-January 1970. there were actually two rival versions of the Guardian being published, The Guardian and The Liberated Guardian.) The proposal for a nationwide paper was co-signed by Martha Levittan (later of the SLC) in New York and Phil Rubenstein, then living in Seattle. From the conference aftermath, there emerged a truly hard-to-comprehend faction fight that lasted basically a year! As Jacobs puts it: “Even for a patient historian of the movement, it is all but impossible to slosh through the arguments, counter-arguments, cross-fire allegations, lies, distortions, and evasions hurled up on both sides of this debacle and make some sense of it all.” At least one part of the debate seems to have gone to the core of what the LC should be since Jacobs reports that LaRouche attacked the Frasier group’s “’ultra-democratic,’ anti-centralization bias, which saw them resisting the transition of the Labor Committee from a federation of autonomous local chapters to a national cadre organization.” Clearly then, the fact that the NCLC spent almost an entire year crippled in a largely incomprehensible factional dispute holds great relevance to the organization’s history. However it is a saga that remains beyond this author’s grasp. WE HAVE FILES . . . Equally important for anyone interested in tracing the history of the NCLC has to be the thousands of pages of declassified government files that now exist regarding the group’s history. The FBI files run into thousands of pages by now. The FBI files – and related local FBI and police intelligence files in key cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore – would be very important for any seriousl history of the organization. PLP Yet another untold story is the spread of the NCLC not just into Columbia but into the main campus of CCNY (still then the “Jewish Harvard”). While quite a lot is known about the NCLC’s role at Columbia, almost nothing is known about the group’s activities at CCNY. (Later one would also have to look at other campuses such as Rutgers, Queens College, and Stony Brook.) Another massive blank chapter in the early origins of the NCLC intimately linked to its early development both in New York and Philadelphia is the way the “second wave” of the NCLC emerged from the orbit of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). PLP was beyond any doubt one of the most influential organizations inside the American Left in the 1960s. Much hated by the “new working class,” “counter-culture” and National Office SDS leadership, PLP nonetheless played a remarkable role in the saga of the Left in the 1960s even though it is almost completely ignored in writings about the New Left today. With the Labor Committee in general, and both New York and Philadelphia in particular, some key members of PLP left it to join the LC. Equally worthy of note, some of the ideas held by PLP also show up in the early Labor Committee. For our purposes, one of the most important ideas is the notion that “local control” with regard to the New York school system was a kind of “counter-insurgency” doctrine developed by ruling class institutions like the Ford Foundation to deliberately divide the working class along racial lines. [Unfortunately there is to this day no real study of the history of PL even though there is one book on PL in the New York garment center (Leigh Benin’s The New Labor Radicalism). But the larger history of PL remains unwritten as its presence has been virtually blanked out of academic writings on the New Left. So the project to place the emergence of the second wave of LC recruits from the New York branch of PL (and the Fraser-Papert group in particular) is yet to be written.] UP AGAINST THE BLACKBOARD WALL: FROM THE PROTO-WEATHERMAN TO THE NEW WORKING CLASS Also virtually unwritten is the history of the pre-Weatherman Rudd faction in New York SDS as well as the way it was influenced by the anarchists. Recently however, Osha Neumann’s memoir Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker has been published and a few articles on Ben Morea – the leader of UAW/MF – have surfaced as well. But, again, much of the history of the anarchists and Rudd grouping has not been documented. Finally, to understand the NCLC in the prism of the New Left, one must also understand the “new working class” debates inside SDS, a polemic that greatly engaged the early NCLC. Some years ago (former SDS national leader) Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman published A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism that provides an overview of this tendency’s ideas. However the way the “new working class” line was promoted in New York (including by David Gilbert) remains largely off the radar screen even though it consumed a lot of the early polemical writings of the LC. These then are just some of the issues that any historian of the period would have to take into account. The LC’s polemics also emerged in part out of a seemingly endless series of debates held between the different factions at the Columbia Liberation School in the late spring and summer of 1968 in the wake of the Columbia Strike and they reflect one of the many currents inside the New York New Left. THE TEACHERS STRIKE Yet in a way far more important to the understanding of the LC in this early period in New York has to be the epochal New York City Teachers’ Strike. In the fall of 1968, the AFT strike against community control further inflamed tensions between the black and Jewish community in particular. The fact that the Labor Committee was almost unique in offering critical support to the teachers union will be referred to in the New Mole Files. But what can’t be recreated is the incredible sense of crisis and feeling of a potential impending race war that ran through New York that fall. In November of that same year, Richard Nixon was elected President. Meanwhile inside the New Left in general, political arguments were turning more and more into shouting matches and fist fights as the concept of the “beloved community” went up in smoke. Ultimately these divisions would culminate in the disastrous SDS National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969. So we are talking about a dark time when the first feelings of discovering a new world that fueled the rise of the New York New Left from 1965 to Columbia ’68 had begun to ebb as it now seemed as if the war in Vietnam would never end. So these are just a few of the issues and problems that anyone wanting to study the early history of the NCLC would have to address. I, however, only want to mention them here precisely because the New Mole Files can’t wrestle with any of them in any serious fashion and won’t try. Again, the purpose of the NMF is to put some historical bread crumbs into the electronic ether so that anyone interested in pursuing further research will not have to start the search from square one. With all that in mind, let us now complete part two of the New Mole Files and in so doing bring our twisting shambolic ramble through the early history of the NCLC to an end. Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-01-2009 at 07:04 PM.
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#2448
07-02-2009, 07:16 AM
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Well.. In Europe it would be an insult to call someone black!
 )Language is a difficult thing sometimes. /T Quote:
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#2449
07-03-2009, 01:40 AM
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HH your description of the joint work between Security/Lyn and nefarious Carto type people as being called "Hitler/Stalin with us Stalin" in the National Office is something which never made its way to the regions. The way some of this was explained was by calling these people "Yahoos" for being right wing conservatives and even that did not include the level of Holocaust numerology earlier placed into NS centefolds by Lyn. Those centerfolds were usually quietly read and not discussed. The first edition of Dope Inc had a humurous site of an odler Jewish member who would read the Protocols and tell people about "those perfidous Jews".
In the regions , daily telex reports would be sent with sales figures and local intell along with somehting for OPS about what was selling. You would read about how an issue of NS or Fusion or The campaigner was selling with the idea that by informing OPS about sales trends, we could influence what was being produced. Most of the lit was the cheap newsprint Special Reports, NS and Fusion which sold. What this means to me in the region is that I can not ever remember a single report where we told OPS that the NS centerfolds about the Holocaust and Lyn or Helga's rants about Jews or Nazis were such great conversation starters that we demanded bigger and better runs of that in street selling lit. To me, I look at the limited view I had and still have of this era and see a combo of Lyn's anti semitism, the cult of personality having to control his Jewish members, Helga being German all wrapped and swirling around Lyn's delusions of being annoited for the Liberty Lobby in the same silly way as taking over the left. You are correct in that there is still going to be more to be dragged out. This is all so kooky because one of the things which happened in the region was to find the local Liberty Lobby people and the various hate groups with the idea of trying to rasie money from them as well as sending the info to Scott T in security. At our end, we were sending info about hate groups to Scott at first withthe idea that these were all operations under the Rockefellers. Later, after the first contact with Roy was made in Pa and we learned about it, these people became much better in our eyes. At the local plant gates, we used to avoid these sort of workers who would asssult the left, later, we sort of looked to find them . In any event, it really is the case that what European was posting about someone claiing that the LC was reading Mein Kampf and had Hitler pictures on the walls or was part of a secret Nazi org is rubbish. If it is a secret, it sure was to all of the members who believed that they were in an anti Nazi org since Lyn said so. As a cult, you can get away with a lot of things like printing the Protocols and crazy holocaust centerfolds and Nazi rocket scientist promo work since the structure is to be a cult and not a secret Nazi org. To anyone who does some basic research into the LC however, you can't fault them from viewing Lyn as a small time Hitler when you see how it appears to the outside world, something we always forget to think about since the Polemical Method was going to take over that world. Up next we will sort of do an "around the horn with Lyn and see just what 300 million dollars and 4 decades of work has accomplished this past week. xlcr4life@hotmail.com
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#2450
07-03-2009, 07:41 AM
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Quote:
Xlcr, the view from the National Office wasn't different. In the National Office the overwhelming idea was that we were dealing with a bunch of right-wing rubes. Same as the regions. The only difference was that semi-marginal types like me did our own research and saw that Carto was a Hitler fan and not a JBS-like rube. So in order to personally shut me up and offer a more sophisticated rationale, I was taken aside and given a "higher" understanding -- namely, it was 'Hitler-Stalin pact." But that was only meant to appease me. There was no general understanding at all in the NO. Things were just like in the regions. And I suspect other people who questioned the alliance were told the same thing. I think the NEC member who told me about the "Pact" believed 100% what he was saying; he wasn't trying to fool me. To him, this was the argument that allowed him in his mind not to protest. It was a common belief as well among people who saw the Hitler-Stalin Pact as a logical move by Stalin against the Western powers who wanted Hitler go to East, not West. But there was never any public debate over this either in the NO or in the regions. Again you are just saying what I've been saying forever and that is that the average LC member never had any idea that we were dealing with Hitler fans like Carto much less that we were really Nazis! This was a total vest-pocket operation run out of Security. That's why I could never find copies of Spotlight in the NO. But by the fall of 1978 in particular, LaRouche was caught in a bind. On the one hand he wanted desperately to tody up to Carto. But he had a problem in that he had an organization filled with leftists. So he created the minf-fu-ck line that Hitler was a creation of the Anglo-American financial elite with the Rothschilds and Warburgs playing a leading role so Hitler was a pure creation of Anglo-American capital. And if anyone challenged it, they would be ego-stripped. (Hence the "Jewish jokes" were one device to detect potential objectors as a loyalty test.) It was a very bold move on his part and he more or less got away with it. I'm sure he was delighted that marginal types like me left as it was one less potential hassle to deal with. However during the Gus debacle, some of the submerged resentment by people who stayed did surge up. So it's a ridiculous lie to claim that we were "Brownshirts without swastika" who were secretly into Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg. It is just a lie as your own statement attests. (As for the other cite/site you are talking about, I don't know what you are referring to.) The 1978 "1.5 million" stuff was exactly like LaRouche announcing Operation Mop-Up. It was yet another insane "turn" and he dared anyone to publicly dissent. And anyone who did dissent publicly knew they would be totally destroyed. But this is 1,000 times different than the grotesque claim that the LC was a group of facist goons eager to kill Woody-Allen-like timid Jews. This is total fantasy. Again, I think it is a fiction to say that the use of the Protocols was to "control the Jewish members"? I guess this means you think the non-Jewish members wouldn't have a problem with Holocaust Denial because they weren't Jewish? Again, this is total fabricated nonsense and rather bold nonsense come to think of it. To me this is really outrageous at many levels. Here is the real story as far as I know about the "small time Hitler" stuff. If it were just used as a put-down, I wouldn't have any problem with it. I call LaRouche a nut and I don't worry that I'm not a psychiatrist. Using such comments about a public figure like LaRouche is fine and they underscore his anti-semitic outlook and are no big deal in the lively give and take of American politics. I mean I called Nixon a conscious mass murderer and the GOP has no problem accusing Obama of being out to murder millions of grandparents. It's robust polmic, let's put it that way. The problem is that when this fantasy is promoted as historical truth. First, does it make any sense to call Hitler "a big-time LaRouche"? To ask the question is to answer it. Here is some of what you need to know -- and of course I say this as my personal take on reality so keep that in mind as well and read what follows as critically as you would read anything else. But given that caveat, this is what I THINK was going on based on the evidence and my "read" of things. In the 1980s there was a BITTER fight between the ADL and King-Berlet (K-B). The ADL decided early on more or less to treat LaRouche as a total nut and crackpot. The ADL believed that by making a big deal out of him, they would be giving him the attention that he craved and only feed his ego. Plus they thought he was a nut and not a threat. So while they were highly critical of his anti-Semitic crap, they never took him seriously as an ideologue. Anyone who met Irwin Suall at that time knows that he saw LaRouche as a total crackpot, not as the new Hitler. Quite frankly, Suall couldn't even understand 20% of what in the hell LaRouche was talking about. He just didn't take LaRouche seriously. He saw him as a crackpot leading a nutty cult, a cult that included a high number of equally nutty Jews, some of them from very well respected families. He also saw the LC as yet another horrible leftist product of the kookie 60s. Other people from the same SDUSA/New America circle that included Suall, however, did take LaRouche much more seriously but NOT because they thought he was a Nazi but because they thought he must have been sponsored by the KGB! So already we can see how absurd things were. King and Berlet did take LaRouche seriously in a political sense as well. However they never tried to argue that LaRouche was really a KGB agent since that would again put him on the Left, something that seemed absurd just on the face of it. Because they came out of the New Left, they were inclined to take political sects seriously since they either had been in one -- King -- or currently were in one -- Berlet's Albanian CAFA. They wanted to highlight the political danger from the right they saw in LaRouche. So instead of merely laughing off LaRouche as a nut, they wanted to portray him as a sinister figure who people should take seriously. So if the ADL view was that LaRouche was loony, their view was that he was potentially part of a wave of "new American fascism." Throw into the mix the people who also took LaRouche seriously because they believed he was most likely straight-up KGB. Now the plot became even more convoluted because King and Berlet didn't like the fact that the ADL was so pro-Reagan. Add to that the fact that the ADL was spying on the Left big time (the famed Bullock scandal out of San Francisco which Suall was intimately involved in). So they thought that the ADL wanted to downplay LaRouche's ties to the Reagan Administration because the ADL didn't want to embarrass Reagan but instead to earn brownie points with the Gipper. Recall that the K-B tendency included work by others that the Reagan Administation was working with death squads in Latin America via WACL, was supporting South Africa and calling Mandela a Commie, and even the argument that the Reagan Administration's "ethnic outreach" program to "Reagan Democrats" had an alarming number of ex-Nazi collaborators from the OUN and other sundry organizations in its ranks. So they said that the ADL was not just covering for LaRouche but for really real Nazi collaborators. This also seems to have overlaped people in the office set up by Congress to investigate ex-Nazi collabortors living in America called the OSI. If you wanted to fight fascism and prevent a new Hitler, write your checks to PRA and not ADL. In short, there was a left challenge to the ADL's hegemonic position as Watchdog Central -- a position now held by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- a far far more professional and reliable source than either the ADL or PRA in my own view although the PRA has its moments as well. (The ADL seems to have abandoned the field of the US far right perhaps partly in the wake of the Bullock debacle to the SPLC.) So their view was that the Suall view was really irresponsible and that Suall was more worried about feeding the Reagan administration information about pro-leftist groups like CISPES who weren't anti-Semitic but pro Castro than taking on LaRouche who was an anti-Semite. But there were also Suall critics who said the ADL was screwing up by not really going after the potential LaRouche-KGB link that really worried them. I think Suall in his heart of hearts thought that the idea that LaRouche was a proto-Hitler was crackpot as well as the idea that LaRouche was KGB was equally crackpot. Quite simply, I don't think he could imagine any serious poltitical tendency or self-respecting intelligence agency of any sort sponsoring arguments that seemed more or less incomprehensible to the average educated person. More importantly, no one could produce any hard evidence to make him change his mind. To him, LaRouche was a big joke, a nasty joke, but a big joke. Suall took the Liberty Lobby far more seriously. However, in order to promote the idea that LaRouche was a potential serious threat -- which they believed -- K-B had to convince everyone else in the worlds of journalism and watchdogery. In a way they were like any leftist putting great stress on the KKK or George Lincoln Rockwell, etc. King in particular -- I don't think Berlet ever really promoted this view -- had to create a version of the LaRouche new boogy-man to make people take LaRouche seriously. So now it turned out that LaRouche "really" didn't believe all that he wrote about. Instead, LaRouche now used secret "coded" language to promote Hitlerism - including an Aryan plot to place the swastika on the moon apparently. I believe personally King was encouraged in this by one of the Yippies -- who in turn sponsored Mordecai Levy -- a really strange character who had his own long-standing obsession with Nazis. But of course if King was saying that the LC was "secretly" a group of "Nazis without brownshirts" how was it then possible that so many members of the LC were themselves Jewish? Since King could never answer this obvious question, his views of LaRouche and the danger he represented even in theory were never taken seriously. He fell into a fiendish trap fashioned not by Paul Goldstein but by himself. And to make it even more absurd, the one group that really did see LaRouche as a danger was that wing of the future neo-cons and professional Red Hunters like John Rees and self-appointed KGB-foes like John Train who believed LaRouche was dangerous NOT because he was a Nazi but because he was KGB. They saw things like the FEF as part of a clever KGB probe into U.S. national security operations. They never bought the idea that LaRouche was a Nazi. They saw him as engaged in some kind of deception operation that would make James Angleton smile. After all, the KBG was pretty active in the Arab world as well and also retailed plenty of "anti-Zionist" crap there. So for them. LaRouche fit perfectly into their already pre-existing template. This is why Roy Godson -- for example -- openly claimed LaRouche was working for Moscow. This was the general view in the rightist think tanks as well. Alas, there was just one minor problem with this theory: They didn't have any proof. So out of this mix, King developed the beginnings of what to me now has reached pure mythology. King's book on LaRouche flopped because it took him so long to write -- for one reason there were tons of documents coming out of the court cases that he had to incorporate before going to print -- that by the time it finally appeared LaRouche and many other LC members were off to the hoosegow, Therefore his argument that LaRouche was a great threat now really seemed ridiculous. Plus it all was yesterday's news. Yet for me, this period of the 1980s was King's heroic period. I personally admire him tremendously for what he did. He really had a lot of guts and he worked like a demon on a really difficult story. The fact that when his book finally was published it was overlooked because LaRouche was in jail and he never got the accolades he deserved within journalism is a real disgrace. He was writing real investigative journalism at real personal risk when the mass media was producing total fluff. Despite his "theoretical" take, there are really tons of things in the book that I never knew about and it is well worth reading. Also King may have made some very understandable mistakes. I think his idea of the spiral galaxies as covert Nazi symbolism is comical. But it may be that King didn't know that the LC had a big thing about vortexes dating back to the debate over Leibniz and Newton and that as far back as the mid-70s, Poe was being promoted as a great scientist for his writings about whirlpools. This was centered around FEF-style arguments about complex patterns in natural phenomena that show evidence of neg-entropic development against the ideas of randomness and Second Law stuff. (In a way, I think it was an early reflection of "chaos theory.") Anyway, to the extent that I understood any of this -- which is to say almost not at all -- that was the idea. And in a way it sort of smacked of "dialectical mysticism" from the outside. My own take was that since I didn't know anything about math or physics I would just take the worf of Moe L. or Steve B. that it all had some scientific basis as I'm sure it did. And as you can see it did when you look at the earlier debates in the Newton/Leibniz tussle. Now it may be that King had no idea of the LC interest in vortexes and such and made a total misread but one not driven by malice. So I can give him a pass. BUT what I DO know is that today King must have by now talked with dozens of former members from all levels inside the organization. I am certain that NO ONE told him that he or she really thought of themselves as secret Nazis trying to implement the dreams of Hitler. I know it isn't true, your know it isn't true, eaglebeak knows it isn't true and I have not met a single former member who thinks it is true. I even think Chip Berlet doesn't believe it either because Chip Berlet has a far better historical understanding of the 100 and 1 varieties that anti-Semitism comes in from the 19th century onward. His writings more often than not locate LaRouche within this far broader tendency and not as Hitler's copycat. So maybe King should work out a more sophisticated approach to the NCLC? His stupid argument not only makes him rather despised by former NCLC members who know what he says is false historically but it also invalidates his own research. Plus it also gives those who want to avoid confronting the true ugliness of what LaRouche really said, a convenient psychological justification to avoid so doing. Personally, I think on a pretty obvious psychological level, King holds on to his pet theory because he knows it makes many members and ex-members irrationally angry. It is his way of inflicting psychic pain and thus getting mental payback for all the suffering Security put him through. So he says what he says because it makes him feel good. Plus he has now built this massive edifice and maybe if he thinks if he moves away from it even slightly, it will be used to discredit all his other work. But whatever is the case, I thnk his argument is largely driven by his need for psychic payback and working out his anger. But that doesn't mean that I have to be his emotional enabler either. Frankly, if you want to play in the big leagues, you shouldn't use twisted arguments as a way of making yourself feel better even if it is true that you can inflict psychic pain on your enemies (real and imagined) knowing that clearly some of them fall for it time after time after time. To me this is real amateur hour stuff. Also at the end of the day who in their right mind really wants to mimic the psyche of Lyndon LaRouche? Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-03-2009 at 08:33 AM.
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#2451
07-03-2009, 01:14 PM
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Feedback for HH
Hylozoic,
Just for the record, I want you to know that your recent posts about King's LaRouche-is-a-Nazi line are the most truthful and insightful analyses written on this subject. Many of us have taken stabs at this, but only you have situated with precision what LaRouche was doing, the role of Security in this, what members knew and didn't know and how and why Dennis King has been full of it. Most interesting is your account of why King still insists on his line after he was told the true facts by former members that he interviewed. You ought to be thanked by all of us.
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#2452
07-03-2009, 06:07 PM
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Quote:
King has posted here and propbably has his own comments about all of this. One thing to think of about King and his book is that this was in the pre internet era. I too will have some objections over certain issues, but for the body of the book, I sure learned a lot more after leaving and reading it then I knew while in the LC. The current age of the internet allows almost instant commentary and focus on something like the cult which is the worse thing which ever happened to Lyn. In the olden days, all we had to do was just sit out an article which had a limited shelf life and basically ZERO after publication date circulation. You had to go out and physically find the article where as now, looking uo the cult is so easy and Lyn can not hide from himself, which is sort of Pythonic funny as he is his main enemy. HH WHen King and some were warning about the threat of the cult in the 1980s, I think you had already left. This was during a time period where we spent lavishly on 1/2 hour TV spots, did many dirty tricks for people, had a thousand or so candidates on ballots across the country, had Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild win a primary in Illinois, were meeting with officials in the Reagan govmnt and were printing and selling hundreds of thousands of copies of our publications. Couple that with our being at basically every big city airport with FEF card table shrines and we were at our peak. There have been other people who ran as third party candidates, but this was unique in having a cult of personality with a mad man at the helm for the time. I can think of a few burps in politics over the years, but none who had as wacky a history as Lyn had. Moon just spent hundreds of millions on a DC paper. Dennis King has a new entry in his blog about David Goldman worth reading. http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/goldman.htm See how much of this entry is based on what has appeared here on factnet.org. Goldman sometimes has posts about himself and his Larouche days on his Spengler forum. I do not know him personally, so I find that my views about his "confessions" is different then many people here and I do understand why. What is pretty interesting is that people who have left the LC generate more news, comments and far greater interest then the entirety of the LYN/LYM/LC world empire of tattered cheap printing, web casts and millions spent via LPAC combined. Bob Zubrin has one of the most viewed articles in "Roll Call" this week about the Cap and Trade bill passed by the House. http://www.rollcall.com/news/36393-1.html Bob Dreyfuss had a lot of interest in his blog at The Nation during the Iranian demonstrations. I do not have them with me, but some of the blogs about Iran and Dreyfuss were pretty funny. Dreyfuss called the existing Iranian regime fascists which caused some in the conspiracy universe to attack him . They mentioned his membership in the LC with a twist. This time, these blogs which were writing that what was going in Iran was a CIA run plot had Dreyfuss as being a CIA connected propoganda mouth and his earlier Larouche work was just part of his history. If these people only knew that if you want to discredit something real fast as crazy, just have Lyn do the talking and Jeff S do the calls and articles. Webster Tarpley Has his own juggernaut in the 9/11 crowd which has overtaken UFOs, JFK, the Loch Ness Monster and bigfoot in things to commit your life to. What is funny is to read the people who use their own conspiracy world to attack Webster as a One World conspirator! I can not copy/paste this, but it is funny to read. http://worldhistoryaudiobooks.com/20...er-2007-london http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=113015.0 Quote:
Now what about the Larouche take over the world 2009 Word tour? Well, you have to look far and wide to find a few small mentions of the cult these days. Since the cult is basicall a laughing stock on college campuses and students do instant googles on them, the lonely card table shrine is slowly gathering dust. http://blog.billlawrenceonline.com/2...o.aspx?ref=rss Quote:
Now if the cult does give a cheap copy of a Lyn Opus to a passerby, what do they do when they get home? Why they ask others on the web who then use the web to explain how wacky the cult is. http://forum.armyranger.com/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=48867 Quote:
http://caribbeancricket.com/topic/926359 Quote:
http://crankycon.politicalbear.com/2...unity-nutters/ There has to be someplace where the cult is welcome and Lyn is worshipped ? Besides "Phil Ossifer who Howie always gets a kick out of, there is a perosn named "Oregon Patriot who will worship Lyn to the last breath it seems on Politico. http://dyn.politico.com/members/foru...&CurrentPage=2 Any post with this comment about being educated in the cult is worth reading. Quote:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/fo...sage828117/pg1 http://www.godlikeproductions.com/fo...sage828864/pg1 http://freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/vi...188fa678756cfd This is too funny! I did not have the window opened up for this at first and thought that this was someone calling the cult in Australia a bunch of goofs and making fun of Lyn. When I opened up the window to max, I saw that this was from the CEC! http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0907/S00036.htm Quote:
Dejavu once again. Beside Tony Chaitkin doing an intervention against a Rockefeller and indicted him visa "Operation Nuremberg" , the cult should bring back C = 256 in Italy one more time for old time's sake as someone found an old Schiller Institute article. http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbt...1224307/1.html I would love to see Webster do a web cast at the same time as Lyn and see who can draw more viewers. I would go with Web. xlcr4life@hotmail.com
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#2453
07-04-2009, 02:39 PM
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Check Swing
Around Town
1. Legal Seafood--or is it Legal Beagles? Actually, it's corgis. LaRouche Legal Leader Second-Class B Boyd has a ... Welsh corgi. I don't know about you, but I take this as a sign that Babs has gone over to the dark side --joined the Cheney-Blair-Obama cabal surrounding the House of Windsor. Joining hands with her Britannic Majesty, no less. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...oyal-pets.html If I were LaRouche (as Winston Churchill once said of Sir Strafford Cripps, we may now say of Lyn--"There but for the grace of God, goes God")-- Anyhow, if I were Lyn, I would get Jeff and Bruce right on it. It's these little things that tell us experts in close reading and content analysis that momentous developments are in the offing. Dogs are the window to the soul, after all. Helga has always favored hounds of hell, for example. So when Babs shows up with a Welsh corgi, I think we all know what that means. 2. Legal Tendresse Speaking of Bruce--the word on the street (in LaRouche's immortal NBC deposition phrase) is that Bruce is now monitoring every single check the NEC writes. First it was the mysterious events of early February, which prompted Babs' memo on bad check policy, among other things. Now, Bruce is being brought on to supervise the NEC on the legal aspects of every check written. Amazing--40 years of writing checks, and the followers of the world's greatest economist still haven't gotten the hang of it.
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#2454
07-04-2009, 03:08 PM
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Quote:
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#2455
07-05-2009, 02:26 AM
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Around Town-Germany
Two current members of the LC attended services for H. Cramer in Germany along with several former members. Among the members present was Dr. Webster Tarpley who has his PHD from Catholic University in DC. People later went to a local restaurant to further talk about their friendships with Cramer as well as telling people what they have been up to after leqaving the LC. For some crazy reason, Herr Doktor Tarpley spent the evening glued to Muriel with a never ending political discussion while friends of the recently deceased Cramer wondered when his name would be mentioned. A somewhat Twilight Zonish episode for some. Well, if Webster has a doctor in front of his name, he is doing better then Lyn, so I can not complain. Take advantage of someone you know from Leesburg Webster who would sure act different to you with that title. Webster gets better web coverage, more speaking engagements and interviews then Lyn these days. His web show has a better and bigger audience and now he has a far superiour degree then two time college drop out Lyn. Life is funny this way. Hope everyone is having a happy 4th of July and I do wish that Bruce DIrector hits quota so he can get home early for a change. Speaking of Bruce Director, one has to wonder if any of his recent cheking of the checks has anything to do with how a Lyn fan boy on the web explains to people asking questions that since the local offices are non profits, this means that members do not do anythting for money or benefits or care about hours worked and merely work for the love of Larouche and saving humanity? xlcr4life@hotmail.com Last edited by xlcr4life; 07-05-2009 at 02:30 AM.
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#2456
07-06-2009, 06:24 AM
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I hope your 4:th of July celebrations were fine!
There seems to be a new thing by Feldman on Duggan that might be of interest to someone: http://www.holocaustresearchproject....larouche2.html (If it is not new, it has appeared as new on several websites the last days...) You all know what I think about this! Instead of demanding an investigation into the death of Duggan based on the fact that he participated at meetings of a cult, Feldman claims that the antisemites in the more-or-less-nazi-party, that LaRouche leads, murdered Duggan because he was a Jew. Here are the final quotes: "The Gouttman Report in Australia serves to emphasize the danger of the LaRouche Organization as a threat to the democratic process in nation-states. In addition to its “cultish” nature, there also is overwhelming evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of the LaRouche Organization, as principally distributed in Europe by the Schiller Institute. Infringement of laws against incitement to hatred appears to have taken place, and indeed appears to continue to take place in Wiesbaden. One must ask: why has this network, with its history of anti-Semitism and terror tactics, been allowed to operate unchallenged for so long? Today, the world looks to Germany to abide by public statements that they will, first, take action against anti-Semitism and against any organization spreading dangerous extremism; and second, will uphold a Penal Code outlawing criminal acts and organizations engaging in destructive or criminal activities. Germany has a special responsibility to show the rest of the world where it stands on the issue of anti-Semitism and extremist movements. In view of Jeremiah Duggan’s sudden and violent death, it is time to critically scrutinize the activities of the LaRouche Organization and its main European arm, the Schiller Institute, with an eye to an investigation of their collective illegality, which includes incitement to hatred and Holocaust denial. " So, once again we are moving further and further away from ever finding out anything about the death of Duggan! *sic!* Still there is NO justice for Jeremiah! /T Last edited by European; 07-06-2009 at 06:27 AM.
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#2457
07-06-2009, 03:23 PM
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“HO HO HO CHI MIHN! THE NMF IS GONNA WIN!”: Up Against the Ivy Wall with the New Mole Files!
In May 1968 the Progressive Labor Party withdrew its support from the SDS Transit Project. That same month, “the National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees” -- which included the SDS Labor Committees in New York City and Philadelphia -- first emerged as an independent self-identified SDS “tendency.” The New York group would publish Solidarity, first issued a few months later by the “Labor Committee of the New York Students for a Democratic Society.” It would also put out the first truly “Labor Committee-run” issue of the Campaigner. [See NOTE TWO below.]
At the very end of May 1968, the “Fraser-Papert faction” of PLP tried to present its program at a PL convention. A few days later Papert was officially expelled from PL. With Papert went 10 to 15 members of the Fraser-Papert grouping in New York City and Philadelphia. Then a few days later on 9 June, Labor Committee members such as Paul Milkman were among the over 800 people who had arrived for a week-long SDS National Convention held in Lansing, Michigan, at Michigan State. On paper, SDS seemed to be almost unstoppable with the National Convention coming right after the Columbia strike. In reality, SDS was sinking deeper and deeper into chaos. THE EAST LANSING SDS CONVENTION A key PL/SDS activist named Jeff Gordon also attended the meeting and later reported on it in the October 1968 issue of Progressive Labor. In an article entitled “SDS: An Analysis,” Gordon took note of the newly named Labor Committee writing: “Another proposal was called ‘Proposal for Building Labor Committees.’ It came from the ‘Philadelphia and New York Labor Committees.’ (There are two labor committees in N.Y. ‘The New York Labor Committee is one of them.)” The full text of the SDS Labor Committee proposal was published in the 24 June 1968 edition of New Left Notes. The document begins: “SDS should encourage the formation throughout the country of committees through which radicals can work with and propagandize workers and poor people. . . . We are not suggesting that organizing and propagandizing among students, black people, and the unorganized and the most oppressed should be de-emphasized; it is at this point still the most important aspect of our activity. . . . But at some point soon, the mass actions of these people must begin to find support among the increasingly discontented white workers, even be joined by them.” After a section critiquing local control struggles both in communities and the workplace – a seeming critique of SDS attempts to organize Newark on the one hand and PL’s emphasis on factory colonization on the other – the proposal continues: “The following are lines of action (general and specific) with this aim which the New York-Philadelphia Labor Committees have begun and will continue this summer. We recommend things of this nature as the activity of other labor committees formed; we do not suggest them as ready-made projects. The issues and actions effective in each city and each situation can only be determined by research and experience.” The proposal then outlines the Labor Committee role in leafleting around 1) the transit hikes in New York City; 2) leafleting and rallies in the New York garment center; 3) the role of the Columbia Liberation School as a forum to debate ideas; 4) ongoing “research – with special attention to up-coming strikes, housing campaigns, et cetera”; and 5) support for strikes among both striking workers and the community, propagandizing about the potential links between interests of striking workers and those of other groups within the community.” The proposal concluded by endorsing “the implementation section” of the PL-sponsored Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) “with the following addition: 1) the editorial policy of the proposed newsletter be absolutely non-exclusive with respect to contributions from committees so as to encourage development of revolutionary ideas” since “at this stage of our movement, nobody has all the answers”; and 2) the coordinating office of the proposed labor committees “be in New York, where the continuing effects of the Columbia strike provide the ideal conditions for the works of student-labor committees.” In his article Gordon gave PL’s answer, claiming that the proposal “attacks the growing on-the-job militancy of millions of workers. (On this they [the Labor Committees] see eye-to-eye with the ‘new working class’ people.” Gordon claimed that by opposing factory colonization, the proposal would “attack and try to discourage workers from fighting on the job against the boss. This is the kind of worker-student misalliance the boss would support.” Gordon continues: “Workers are powerful when they fight at the point of production – where they can stop production. . . . This proposal [the SDS Labor Committee] takes a classical ‘economist’ position, holding that the major thing students can bring to workers is economic expertise” and claims to show workers that they [the Labor Committee] know how to run the system “better” than the bosses so that the workers will say “’If that’s socialism, then I’m a socialist.’” Gordon then adds sarcastically “(Easy, huh!)” PL GETS SLAPPED DOWN The Labor Committee draft -- as well as proposals from PL and one or two other groupings -- were never officially approved at East Lansing. According to Gordon, the SDS National Office (NO) and “New Working Class” (NWC) groupings deliberately placed any debate about them near the end of the week-long agenda knowing that there would not be enough time for them to be heard. Yet the NO/NWC caucus couldn’t present the formation of workshops around these ideas and the Convention agreed that the proposals would be “first on the agenda” in the coming SDS National Council meeting that fall. (It is hard to say whether or not, the LC proposal was adopted by national SDS. In his book Kirkpatrick Sale discusses the major SDS fall National Council gathering held at the University of Colorado at Boulder on 11-13 October 1968. Unfortunately, he only mentions the fact that PL’s proposal for a Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) advanced by Jared Israel was defeated by a two to one vote.) In preparation for the Boulder meeting, PL put out its October issue of PL’s theoretical journal Progressive Labor. It included not just Jeff Gordon’s article but Rick Rhoads’ “Len Marcus – Guru of Non-Struggle,” an attack on the LC that ran some 17 pages. (The article includes an extremely rare photo of LaRouche wearing a long beard and teaching at the Columbia Liberation School with a portrait of V. I. Lenin in the background.) Throughout the summer of 1968, the Labor Committee and PL carried out rival attempts to organize the New York City Garment Industry. In the September 1968 issue of Challenge, PL complained that the LC leaflets and paper (Solidarity) offered a “defeatist” line in sharp contrast to PL’s own summer project known as “the SDS Work-In Committee.” KNOCK KNOCK! IT’S THE MOTHER****ERS For Progressive Labor to run a 17 page long major article on “Len Marcus” shows that PL’s leadership was starting to take the Labor Committee seriously. Yet one of the most prophetic incidents for both the LC and PL that took place at the June East Lansing convention didn’t involve the LC at all. Instead it revolved around a clash between PL and Ben Morea’s Up Against the Wall Mother****er Lower East Side SDS chapter. From Jeff Gordon’s article: “Another proposal for structural change was presented by the ‘Up Against the Wall, Mother****er’ (UAW/MF) chapter of SDS. This group of anarchist-hippies from New York’s Lower East Side played a disruptive role throughout the convention, with the support and encouragement of many members of the National Office/New Working Class (NO/NWC) caucus. They have been using these same tactics at regional meetings for the past half year. They interrupted debate and shouted down any speaker with whom they disagreed, particularly when the speaker was a member of PLP. Their behavior at the Convention disrupted constructive political debate, intimidated people new to SDS, and gave the meeting at times the aura of a fascist gathering. “At one point their actions, led by UAW/MF leader Ben Morea almost resulted in a full-scale brawl. They persisted in trying to shout down a speech by John Levin of PLP . . . But that wasn’t enough for the UAW/MF group. They shouted that they wanted guns and violent revolution now. Their actions and words were classic form for provocateurs. They backed down in this instance after a show of physical determination by those who wanted John to speak. “Their proposal for restructuring the organization betrayed their desire to base SDS more and more on hippy dropouts and less and less on students who have a campus base. UAW/MF holds, similar to many ‘new working class’ advocates, that the revolutionary demand to workers and students is ‘quit.’ Their proposal, called ‘The Destruction of SDS,’ was rejected by a wide margin.” UAW/MF was also active during the Columbia Strike. They also helped shape the LC’s views that the New Left had the potential to deteriorate into a kind of deranged band of leftwing fascists, a rather interesting fact given the future disastrous history of the Labor Committee itself. In his 1974 “Conceptual History of the Labor Committees,” LaRouche writes about UAW/MF this way: “The Ford Foundation conduited money through numerous counter-insurgency formations which it set up throughout the country. The local franchise for the Lower East Side was held by the ‘East Side Service Organization’ (ESSO), a scummy proto-fascist gang which masqueraded as the ultra-anarchist SDS faction ‘Up Against the Wall Mother****ers.’ Members of Rudd's group were trained in karate and got other backup through ESSO. Tom Newman, the nephew of Herbert Marcuse, was the agent on the scene, administered ESSO, and dispersed funds through an unlimited checking account.” Was any of this true? FUNNY MONEY? OR DID FORD REALLY HAVE A BETTER IDEA? UAW/MF first surfaced at a regional SDS conference held at NYU on 10-11 February 1968. On Sunday 11 February, you could – among other choices – either join a UAW/MF demonstration at the offices of the underground paper RAT at 201 East 4th Street by Avenue A; attend a session on women’s liberation led by – among others – Bernadine Dohrn; or join in a discussion of the SDS Transit Project chaired by Leif Johnson and Steve Komm. As for UAW/MF, it was the creature of Ben Morea, a charismatic New York City artist. A former petty criminal and heroin addict, after getting out of jail and kicking his habit, Morea in the early 1960’s discovered the Lower East Side avant-garde anarchist culture of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater. They, in turn, introduced Morea to long-time anarchist Murry Bookchin. Morea next became involved in a radical art project called Black Mask. UAW-MF emerged as a much more street tough group out of the rubble of Black Mask. UAW-MF was somewhat similar to Kommune I in West Berlin with the huge difference being that UAW-MF actively shunned publicity unlike their media-friendly East Village copycat, the Yippies. So was the Ford Foundation behind Ben Morea? First, ESSO (The East Side Service Organization -- sometimes called the East Side Survival Organization) did exist and was located at 341 East 10th St. According to Osha (formerly Tom) Neumann, ESSO was the “business name” established by UAW-MF so the Judson Church could give the group some money to help aid the vast influx of hippies and street people who began to flood into the Village starting in 1967. Ben Morea also recalled: “We were always trying to connect the hippy part of the Lower East Side community with the street and homeless part. . . . We set up a store front to give homeless people as well as ourselves a place to hang out. We had free clothes, doctors and lawyers on retainers, a mimeograph, information for people who wanted to dodge the draft and get fake ID, information on crash pads, etc. It was a general help center. We did free food a couple of nights a week, but also held free food events in a hall or a church on the others where we would feed up to 300-400 people. We got some papers from a church [Judson Memorial] saying we were a non-profit and that allowed us to get day old or incorrectly marked stuff from the produce markets and food outlets for free. Some people worked, others made donations and the same papers helped us to hustle up grants from liberal churches to rent places, etc.” Abbie Hoffman biographer Marty Jeter also states that ESSO received funds from “a New York City poverty agency” although he fails to supply any more details. As for Hoffman, he became the figurehead chairman of ESSO’s Board of Directors which apparently was incorporated to legally receive outside funds. There was no hard and fast dividing line between Hoffman’s Yippies and UAW/MF given the ESSO overlap. It may well be true that members of UAW/MF did receive funds indirectly from New York City. On 11 October 1968 – in the wake of the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago – the New York Times reported on a NY City Council investigation of fraud in the Human Resources Administration (HRA) that administered some $1.5 billion dollars in anti-poverty funds. And as fate would have it, ESSO “chairman” Abbie Hoffman pops up in the ensuing controversy. Two New York City Councilmen – Queens Republican Joseph Modugno and Bronx Democrat Bertram Gelfand -- charged that HRA money “was used to transport youth demonstrators to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August,” charges that the head of the HRA, Mitchell Ginsberg, deemed “utterly false.” The charges, however, were reportedly based on a recent series of investigations into the Neighborhood Youth Corps, which led to seven Human Services employees being charged with the embezzlement of some $1.5 million dollars over some 14 months. Councilman Gelfand, a former Bronx Assistant District Attorney, said that anti-poverty funds were even used to send protestors to Chicago. The key funding conduit, Gelfand charged, came out of a $30,000 appropriation by the Mayor’s Urban Task Force – headed by Barry Gotterher, an assistant to Mayor Lindsay – to the city’s Youth Service Agency for the establishment of the Free Store on 14 Cooper Square. The Free Store first opened on 15 June 1968 and was used as “a gathering place for hippies and Yippies who are members of the Youth International Party.” Another New York Times article – this one on 9 November 1968 –carried an interview with Herbert Moore, the director of the Youth Services Agency, who ran the Free Store with what he said was some $40,000 in city money. Moore told the paper that “the store staff had consisted of one other Youth Service Agency member in addition to himself and eight hippies recruited from the neighborhood. In addition about 20 Neighborhood Youth Corps enrollees were used during the summer and the store channeled 20 to 25 other corps youths to churches and non-profit organizations . . . The operation’s best-known aide was Abbie Hoffman . . . . A Human Resources Administration spokesman said Mr. Hoffman worked 17 days between July 15 and September 20 as a consultant who provided ‘insights’ at $40 a day.” It seems quite possible, then, that – intentionally or not -- via ESSO the UAW-MF may have gotten some city funds as the Lindsay government tried to deal with the flood of hippies pouring into the Village in the mid-1960s. As for the UAW/MF, one of their leaders, Tom Neumann, later fondly recalled: “By the beginning of 1968, we had become a formidable presence on the Lower East Side. We ran free stores and crash pads. We organized community feasts in the courtyard of St. Marks Church. We propagandized against the merchandizing of hip culture and shook down the psychedelic stores for contributions to our cause. We scammed and shoplifted. Communists took jobs at factories, to be close to ‘the people.’ Mother****ers hung out on the streets to be close to our people, the ‘freaks’ as we fondly called them. Communists went to work. We did as little work as possible.” RAT As the deadline for the Chicago Democratic Convention approached, rumors circulated that the protestors were planning acts of violence as well as dropping LSD into the city’s water supply. Whatever the combination of rumor, deliberate fabrication, and media exaggeration – no doubt in part inflamed by the government – the UAW/MF openly embraced violent revolution and terrorism. Assuming that BOSSI (the New York Police’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations – the counter-intelligence department of the police) was wiretapping and infiltrating the Lower East Side radical scene, they would have heard the same kind of talk constantly from the Mother****ers. Although Ben Morea avoided Chicago, Tom Neumann shared the stage at Grant Park with Tom Hayden and other radical speakers. In his memoirs, Neumann recalls: “Perhaps because of my speeches, and perhaps because I was the most visible Mother****er in Chicago, I was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment that launched the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.” Neumann’s also recalled: “We asked ourselves who would be willing to take up the gun if, as was inevitable, legitimate political processes failed. The Mother****ers bought shotguns and pistols, cut the shotguns down, and stashed them beneath the floorboards of our apartments. We were preparing for the coming flood of violence and counter-violence.” Yet you didn’t have to be a BOSSI spy to know that factions inside SDS were embracing violence. All you had to do was read the pages of RAT, the underground newspaper created by Jeff Shero in New York City in March 1968. A radical leader at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1965 Shero was elected SDS vice-president while Carl Oglesby was chosen president. Shero’s RAT (RAT Subterranean News) soon became intimately involved in the Columbia strike. Documents showing Columbia’s ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex that were stolen during the uprising were first published in the pages of RAT. RAT also regularly opened its pages to members of the UAW-MF so they could publish their rants even as RAT started publishing diagrams illustrating how to make simple explosives. In 1969, RAT staffer and Swarthmore College grad Jane Alpert took part in a series of bombings in New York before being arrested while planting dynamite on National Guard trucks. Needless to say, the increasing calls to violence by bitterly anti-PL sects like UAW-MF only further fueled PL’s sense that it too smelled a rat, namely a major police provocation operation meant to discredit the left. “THE PORT AUTHORITY STATEMENT” AND THE “NEW WORKING CLASS” When UAW-MF first appeared on the scene shortly before the February 1968 meeting at NYU, the SDS local paper, Firebomb, stated: “A new radical group on the Lower East Side, called Up Against the Wall Mother****er has just been formed. . . . If people are interested in the group itself, they should contact Tom Neumann or Bob Gottlieb at the SDS regional office.” Tom Neumann [not “Newman”] a/k/a “Tom Mother****er” really was the stepson [not the nephew] of famed philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Neumann’s biological father was Franz Neumann, the author of the classic book Behemoth. He was yet a Jewish Frankfurt School exile who worked with his good friend Marcuse in the OSS during World War II. Franz’s wife Inge (Tom’s biological mother) remarried Marcuse shortly after Franz Neumann died in a car crash in Switzerland some years after the war. Bob Gottlieb, a graduate student in sociology at the New School for Social Research, helped coordinate the local SDS office. Gottlieb, however, was best known for being one of three New School grad student co-authors of the “the Port Authority Statement.” This playfully-named but densely written text tried to introduce SDS to ideas then most closely associated with Andre Gorz (author of Strategy for Labor in the Age of Neo-capitalism), Serge Mallet, and Herbert Marcuse. Through “The Port Authority Statement,” SDS was now introduced to what would be dubbed the “new working class” (NWC) theory. NWC theory reinforced already-existing arguments inside SDS that students should focus most on student issues. Such views were most associated with SDS leader Carl Davidson. In August 1966 Davidson submitted a proposal to SDS entitled “Towards a Student Syndicalist Movement, or University Reform Revisited.” He later contributed ideas to New Left Notes under a headline entitled “Praxis” (On the importance of Davidson’s paper, see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS.) At Columbia, this student syndicalist tendency led by Ted Gold with off-campus theoretical support from Dave Gilbert became known as the “Praxis axis” in opposition to Mark Rudd’s “action faction.” (Gold and Gilbert would side with RYM I during the 1969 debacle in Chicago. Gold would later be killed building a bomb in 1970. Gilbert is currently serving a lifetime jail sentence for his involvement in the 20 October 1981 disastrous botched robbery of a Brinks truck in Nyack, New York.) Bob Gottlieb, Gerry Terry and Dave Gilbert publicly presented their arguments on 17 February 1967 at a Radical Education Project (REP) conference held in Princeton University’s McCosh Hall. Kirkpatrick Sale summarizes “the Port Authority Statement” this way: “The new working class, unlike the traditional working class, is made up of people with ‘technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds,’ and of those in the schools and universities who provide them with those backgrounds. The new class ‘lies at the very hub of production’ and is crucial for the operation of a highly industrialized, technocratic, computerized, and sophisticated society.” Inside SDS, the “new working class” line would be embraced by Greg Calvert, an SDS National Secretary who spoke to the Princeton REP gathering that Sunday. Calvert and Carol Neiman aggressively promoted the “new working class” theory first in the pages of journals like the Guardian. FROM “THE TRIPLE REVOLUTION” TO “UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM” The “new working class” idea, however, arguably had even deeper roots. In the early 1960s, C. Wright Mills had famously called for “overcoming” the Old Left’s “labor metaphysic.” The early 1960s also saw the brief flourishing of the left-liberal Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. Tremendously influenced by the rise of automation and cybernetics, the Committee on the Triple Revolution in late March 1964 issued its own manifesto on the future. It outlined what they saw as vast structural changes in the future American economy that would be rooted in a radically changing composition of the American labor force. The document predicted a brewing major social crisis in America as technological modernization in particular fueled deep structural unemployment. The Triple Revolution – which was clearly meant to influence the Kennedy Administration along the lines of Michael Harrington’s famous book The Other America but only came out shortly after JFK’s assassination. It was signed not just by leading liberals like Gunnar Myrdal, W. H. (Ping) Ferry, Linus Pauling, and H. Stuart Hughes but also more overtly leftist thinkers that included the Socialist Party’s Michael Harrington as well as two top SDS leaders, Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin. With their “new working class” theory, Gottlieb, Terry and Gilbert were in a way making a virtue out of the crisis predicted by “The Triple Revolution” by elevating students and the skilled technical intelligentsia over traditional blue collar workers. Dave Gilbert would soon go one step further. On the heels of the Columbia strike and the utopian impulses it helped unleash, Dave Gilbert published a pamphlet somewhat grandly entitled Consumption: Domestic Imperialism, A New Left Introduction to the Political Economy of American Capitalism. Gilbert argued that “we have already begun to develop alternatives to the existing system. In the liberated buildings of Columbia, in the dropout communities of New York, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities, we are beginning to build our own commonwealth, our own culture.” Gilbert would soon wind up fiercely promoting the RYM I idea that the “white working class” has been hopelessly “bought off” by the cornucopia of goods produced in the “advanced capitalist sector” that also made them completely unwilling to reject their “white skin privilege” and join the revolutionary struggle. In September 1968 issue of the Campaigner the Labor Committee responded to Gilbert’s pamphlet in an Ed Spannaus and Leif Johnson essay entitled “Underconsumption: False Currency.” Here they attacked Gilbert’s “vision of fully cybernated communism.” Communism could only be a vision for Gilbert since he could only imagine the youth culture and oppressed inner city blacks as the two revolutionary vanguards in America who totally rejected the entire system. But “no social revolution can proceed on such anti-social desires. And as the dropouts are not the social base of revolution, Gilbert’s work is not the intellectual base.” “LEN MARCUS” – THE NEW LENIN! -- NOT Not surprisingly, PL bitterly attacked the “new working class” theory. In his October 1968 article “SDS: An Analysis,” PL’s Jeff Gordon critiqued different variations of the “new working class” line that included 1) the Bell-Dohrn-Halliwell proposal for SDS (named after its authors, Tom Bell, Bernadine Dohrn and Steve Halliwell); 2) the “Calvert-Neiman” line; and 3) Dave Gilbert’s Consumption pamphlet. Against the “new working class” paradigm, Gordon argued: “Automation and cybernation lead to intensification of the class struggle, not its lessening. The working class knows these developments are costing them jobs.” As for the Marcuse argument about post-scarcity society, the ruling elite always is out to persuade the masses “that they never had it so good.“ The truth is that “things are getting poorer, smaller, and worse for the working class.” Progressive Labor would also attack the Labor Committee for sharing the very “new working class” ideas it otherwise attacked. First it should be kept in mind that in late May 1968, Fraser and Papert presented their final critique of PL in a paper entitled “Economism or Socialism?” Here Fraser and Papert argued that PL’s emphasis on “point of production” organizing showed it was just another tired “Fosterist” organization. The reference was to CPUSA leader William Z. Forster, who before joining the CP had played a highly prominent role as a leading “anarcho-syndicalist” labor organizer. After Earl Browder’s fall from power with the end of the “Popular Front” line in the late 1940s, Foster regained new prominence inside the CP. Given that PLP’s founders came out of Foster-encouraged “factory colonization” work, Fraser and Papert claimed that they were still trapped in Foster’s old way of thinking. But what was Foster’s approach but a version of the “labor syndicalist” outlook that he had held for decades in different guises? PL counterattacked by claiming that the LC’s shift away from supporting working class struggle “at the point of production” to a “class-for-itself” concept was itself in practice more “new working class” rope a dope. In his classes at both FUNY and the Columbia Liberation School, LaRouche made little secret of the need for a Leninist revolutionary cadre organization composed of the most advanced intellectuals who had freed themselves from their own formerly parochial identity. This vanguard grouping would provide the intellectual general staff during a “mass strike” period. It would develop the critical programmatic demands that would insure the political struggles remained on revolutionary course and not stumble back into “Menshevik” like “economism.” Yet, the Labor Committee’s – PL argued -- never focused on the direct seizure of power. Instead, it thrived on various Popular-Front “social democratic” and reformist schemes to tax the rich and redistribute income. For all of LaRouche’s Leninist huff and puff, it was the Labor Committee that remained hopelessly “reformist.” The Labor Committee’s intellectual arrogance also hinged on its adherence to a version of the “new working class” line even as the LC attacked Praxis theorists at Columbia. In short, while the “new working class” line proclaimed students as the new vanguard, the LC took this delusion one step further and made the “revolutionary intelligentsia” – Lyndon’s whiz-kids – the technocratic arbiters of the post-capitalist order just on the horizon as soon as capitalism did the only decent thing it could do and collapse. In his October 1968 essay on the Labor Committee (“Len Marcus: Guru of Non-Struggle”), Rick Rhoads set the tone for PL’s attack when he wrote that the Labor Committee “claims that technical expertise in production on the part of students and intellectuals is the key to developing the revolutionary movement.” Rhoads goes on to quote from the LaRouche/Papert text, “The Mass Strike,” that was written in mid-May 1968 and first circulated in mimeographed form at the East Lansing SDS conference: “Students . . . represent that layer uniquely attuned to putting bourgeois management technology [recall that LaRouche made his living – or pretended to – as an “efficiency expert” – HH] at the disposal of the working class and its allies. . . Students potentially embody the means by which working people can create their own complete alternative to the economic institutions of the ruling class. . . Students can arm the potentially revolutionary layers with a program, a decisive prerequisite for an effective mass-revolutionary struggle.” Rhoads comments that such a “miraculous line” promoted by “Marcusism” probably will amount to nothing but it is worth examining as it “combines the attraction of a non-struggle, get-there-quick outlook with the superficial advocacy of the worker-student alliance.” For PL then, the Labor Committee recycled “new working class” delusions in a working mans’ lunch pail. For PL to be denounced as “Fosterist” by Lyndon’s whiz kids was actually a compliment and not an insult. Unlike the Labor Committee, PL saw itself at its core as a 100% genuine working class party even though in reality it too was an almost entirely student-driven organization with very few “real workers” on board. BAD MARX: PL GRADES HERBERT MARCUSE Yet if the real crime of the Labor Committee was to superficially advocate a worker-student alliance, at least it still advocated one. For PL, the big guns had to be turned on other factions inside SDS infatuated with people like Herbert Marcuse. In the same issue attacking the Labor Committee, PL refuted Marcuse in a long essay by Jared Israel and William Russel entitled “Herbert Marcuse and his Philosophy of Copout.” It also tried to expose Marcuse’s attempts to prove “that workers love the system.” Quoting Marcuse’s claim in One Dimensional Man that “the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places . . . the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer . . . the Negro owns a Cadillac . . . “ Israel and Russel remark: “Here, in one sentence, he [Marcuse] manages to refute Marxism, absolve the bosses, sneer at the workers, toss a crumb to male chauvinism, and accept a racist jibe as fact.” PL would return to Marcuse in the February 1969 issue of Progressive Labor with a fascinating expose entitled “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop?” It documented not only Marcuse’s work for the OSS during World War II but his ties to the State Department’s Central European Branch that worked under Frank Wisner and Marcuse’s later sojourns both at the U.S. intelligence-associated Russian Institute at Columbia and the Russian Research Center at Harvard where Marcuse’s “Project on the Soviet Social System” was directly funded by a grant from the U.S. Air Force. (Although I can’t prove it, I suspect this article also influenced the Labor Committee’s already highly suspicious view of much of the New Left.) “WE’RE THE INDIANS!”: MARK RUDD MEETS THE MOTHER****ERS If the SDS advocates of the “new working class” line hoped to use UAW-MF as a club against PL, they would ultimately be badly disappointed. Instead of building up SDS, UAW-MF wanted to destroy it completely by breaking down the entire organization into anarchist collectives pursuing an anti-technological and primitivist-communal agenda. Like the Cleaver faction of the BPP, UAW-MF identified most with street people and other “lumpen” elements; not affluent white college boys looking to get high and get laid on St. Marks Place while making sure they didn’t wind up carrying a gun in Vietnam. One famous incident from the time highlights the UAW-MF’s view of SDS. At the SDS regional gathering held at the University of Kentucky on the last weekend of March 1968, former SDS president Carl Oglesby – fresh from his discussions with members of Business International – came down from the mountaintop to explain to his listeners that the U.S. ruling class had split between pro-RFK liberal “Yankee” internationals and their Southeast-based “Cowboy” opponents. The good news was that since the Yankee internationalists had now completely soured on Vietnam, after they won the 1968 election, they would rapidly end the war. This in turn meant that SDS should get ahead of the curve by scaling back on anti-war organizing and instead return to its mission of radicalizing the cities. Above all else, SDS needed to focus on aiding inner city rebellion and begin supplying blacks with guns. Hearing Oglesby’s arguments, Ben Morea flipped out. Approaching Oglesby in a menacing way, he yelled: “Donate arms! And let Black people do all the fighting and bleeding while SDS sits securely in the classrooms! White radicals have to fight too, you honky! They may be either Yankees or Cowboys, but we’re the Indians!” Morea’s outburst and confrontational style entranced at least one member of SDS present at the meeting: Mark Rudd. Back in New York, Rudd – a white Jewish suburban boy from New Jersey -- began hanging out with the Mother****ers and copying both their rhetoric and swagger. From Osha (Tom) Neumann’s memoirs: “That Mark [Rudd] picked up on the rhetoric of the Mother****ers [during the Columbia Strike] was not fortuitous. Mark had seen Ben and a cohort of Mother****ers disrupt an SDS convention by shouting at speakers with whom we disagreed, ‘That’s bull**** and you know it.’ He liked the phrase. After the convention he had hung out with us a bit on the Lower East Side. He was impressed by our impatience with theory and influenced by our reliance on the vivifying effect of action in the streets to draw converts to our cause. In Columbia SDS he [Rudd] formed an ‘action faction,’ in opposition to the ‘praxis axis,’ whose members talked Marxist theory and believed in the need to educate people before they could act. Mark had gone to Cuba, and willingly admitted to being an adherent of the cult of Che. He read Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, which argued that the revolution begins with armed struggle of small bands of guerrillas. In Mark’s head, Che, Debray, and the Mother****ers were all singing the same song: Action is educational!” When Columbia happened, Ben Morea and his merry band of Mother****ers helped hold the Mathematics Building which, as Neumann later recalled, “was quickly transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a Lower East Side crash pad” as the Mother****ers became – at least in their own minds – “the vanguard of the new order, vandals of liberation, sworn enemies of all hierarchical institution. . . . SDS organizers made pilgrimages to our crash pads. Some of them later joined the Weathermen, which went through its own distinctly Mother****eresque stage before it disappeared underground.” For the proto-Weatherman SDS “action faction,” the UAW-MF became a kind of “Electric Acid Kool Aid Test” for being a true revolutionary. For their part, UAW-Mf taunted SDS with a poem labeled “Chapter Report on the SDS Regional Council of March 10”: A Molotov Cocktail/is a bottle filled with/three parts kerosene/and one part motor oil/it is capped/and wrapped/with cotton/soaked with gasoline. To use --- light cotton/throw bottle Fire and explosion occur/on impact with target. A “white radical”/is three parts bull****/and one part hesitation/ It is not revolutionary/and should not be/stockpiled/at this time. Respectfully submitted, Up Against the Wall Mother****er. “THE NEW LEFT, LOCAL CONTROL AND FASCISM” The rise of the Rudd’s “action faction” led to a series of increasingly physical confrontations with PL, the anti-counter-culture, anti-drug, anti-fun “short hair” Stalin groupies who to their opponents must have seemed something like the Borg. PL cadre, meanwhile, reportedly physically evicted a UAW-MF allied group from their Morningside Heights apartment. To PL if groups like UAW-MF weren’t deliberate police provocations they were doing a very good imitation of just that. The collapse of SDS following the disastrous National Conference in Chicago in June 1969 was also documented in an article entitled “SDS: Beyond the Grave” published in the September-October 1969 issue of the Campaigner. The article included a description of a Rudd-called SDS meeting in the second week of July shortly after the split which captured just how much things had deteriorated in the “beloved community” that now seemed more and more to resemble two feuding factions of Japan’s Zengakuren: “Mark Rudd and his local followers convened a rump SDS regional gathering at New York University’s Loeb Student Center. Rudd’s elaborate internal security checks, loyalty oaths, passwords, and so forth set the tone for what was immediately to follow there. . . . Admission to the meeting was limited t a single-wing of a double-door of the auditorium, behind which a gaggle of musclemen and fingermen singled out unwanted applicants for admission, and otherwise occupied themselves in conducting political interrogations, administering oaths, and celebrating other rites of political democracy. “At first push by a RYM muscleman, PL took the anarchists’ bait and mobilized to surge en masse against the barred doorway. “While PL expressed the conviction that ‘it is better to give than receive,’ Rudd’s goon squad barely managed to hold the doorway. Behind the front line of Ruddite plug-uglies, another RYM theoretician, wielding a long, metal-tipped pole, attempted to puncture PL skulls for a discreet distance. A flying potted palm, flanked by accompanying chairs and bric-a-brac, added counterpoint to the main theme of pounding fists. Later, as RYM brought a fire-hose into play, toe-to-toe slugging was superseded by successive rushes. Just as PL marshaled its forces for a final rush (which would have certainly carried), three New York City policemen rushed forward, pistols drawn, to rescue the beleaguered Rudd forces. “At this juncture, PL student ‘floor leader’ Jeff Gordon seemed undecided whether to me more enraged at the drawn guns of the police or more gratified to discover Rudd and the police on the same side of the barricades. After delivering himself of several sentences using the word ‘pig,’ Gordon led the groups outside to a brief rally in an adjacent park, Meanwhile under continued police protection, the assembled anarchists listened to Rudd promising reenactments of the preceding affray on many campuses.” In September 1968, the LC responded to the rise of Rudd’s “action faction” with Larouche and Carol’s Campaigner essay, “The New Left, Local Control, and Fascism.” In their introduction to the issue (“The Politics of Crisis”), the journal’s editors remark that the article looks at “a layer of Sorelian-type anarchists, partly recruited from nominal anarchist groupings (such as Black Mask and the ‘Situationist International’) and past members of PLP’s old May 2nd Movement.” LaRouche’s article opens: “It is an irony of history that certain New Lefters today would be quite at home with Mussolini’s radical polemics. This is not to suggest that these New Lefters are fascists, but to emphasize that fascism at its inception always appears as a movement which poses a revolutionary challenge to capitalism. Only in this way can it win popular support.”In its concluding section, the article states that the “alliance of Praxisites and street-syndicalists which has directed and weakened the Columbia strike organization this summer defends its actions with phrases which might almost be a plagiarism from Mussolini’s left anti-Marxist demagoguery and recall those of the red-hunt [against PL – HH] at the East Lansing SDS convention. It is necessary to expose both these syndicalist ideas and the influence of the counter-revolutionary practices for which they stand.” Yet just as the September issue of the Campaigner was rolling off the presses, a crisis that had been brewing inside New York City for some time between the teachers union and black community control advocates was on the brink of explosion. With the famous New York City teachers strike that early autumn, the relatively tiny Labor Committee would find itself under fierce attack not just by the “Praxis axis,” and the “action faction” but by PL as well. If the encounter with UAW-MF proved to be Mark Rudd’s personal Electric Acid Kool Aid Test, the teachers strike and the crisis it provoked inside the Left would prove the same for the Labor Committee. THREE RESEARCH NOTES NOTE ONE SOURCES: An article by Samuel P. Hays entitled “Right Face, Left Face: The Columbia Strike” first published in Political Science Quarterly, 84/2 (Lune 1969) has some interesting references to the early Labor Committee. Hays reports that the first issue of The Campaigner appeared in February 1968. Hays also provide cites for other sources that I have not examined. They are an article in the 31 October 1968 Columbia Spectator by Louis Dolinar entitled “Labor Committee Disbanded by SDS General Assembly” as well as an article by Tony Papert in the same paper entitled “Community Control, a Better Idea” on 7 November 1968, Hays also mentions an article by Larry Poleshuck in the December1968 issue of PL’s Challenge entitled “Phony ‘Labor Committee’ Loses SDS Name." On UAW-MF, see Osha [formerly Tom] Neumann, Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker (2008); and Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Mother****er: the Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group (1993). For detailed descriptions of the REP Princeton meeting, the February 1968 New York SDS meeting at NYU and even a detailed look at the founding of the national Committees for Independent Political Action (CIPA), see Alice Widener’s work Student Subversion now available for download on the web. An invaluable reconstruction of the events at Columbia from a very non-Labor Committee point of view can be found at Bob Feldman’s invaluable memoir at http://bfeldman68.blogspot.com/searc...0Memories%20(3).) For an interesting look at the way the “Triple Revolution” thesis even affected the Socialist Workers Party, see James Cannon’s lecture on the subject that can be listened to on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYWJZWXOyUY. In 1971, Random House published Calvert and Neiman’s A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism that more deeply explored NWC theory. Finally, for a look at the very early Labor Committee analysis of the East Lansing SDS conference that is critical of the way PL was treated at the meeting, see Paul Milkman’s letter to the Guardian written on 23 June 1968 and reprinted in the September 1968 issue of the Campaigner. NOTE TWO: ORIGINS OF THE CAMPAIGNER The earliest issue of the Campaigner that I have seen is Vol. 1, No. 3 from June 1968. It includes LaRouche’s article “The Mass Strike,” written on 19 May 1968. It also advertises (for 10 cents each!) these pamphlets: 1) Sharing the Poverty by Paul Gallagher and Ed Spannaus; 2) Bringing It All Back Home by Robert Dillon; 3) The Mass Strike by LaRouche; 4) The Knowledge Industry: Bureaucratic Capitalism’s University System by Leif Johnson; and 5) An Analysis of the Columbia Strike by Steve Komm. “All were published by the New York SDS Labor Committee for the SDS National Convention.” The Campaigner Editorial Board include among the regulars, Georgina Bradeen (presumably related to Nancy Bradeen Spannaus), Virginia Combathrekis, and Harlem Fightback’s Jim Houghton. The issue also carries an introductory “New Campaigner Policy Statement” stating that thanks to the transit strike work and the Columbia Strike, “the majority of the regional SDS ‘Labor Committee’ discovered its commonality of political method and perspectives.” The issue also republishes a talk Leif Johnson gave on the WBAI radio station. The editorial introduction to the June 1968 Campaigner also provides some useful background history. It states that “within a month,” the new grouping has “created over a hundred committed cadre” where there were before only two dozen such radicals. It was then decided that “our editorial board should be broadened to reflect” the larger movement “and to make the Campaigner an urgently needed vehicle for reporting the key political lessons of the Columbia Strike.” Since the two earlier issues of the Campaigner were published presumably before Columbia, they almost certainly were issued by the Regional SDS Labor Committee and centered on the transit issue. As we have seen, the Regional SDS Labor Committee really was an SDS grouping and had emerged in late 1967 following its establishment at the Princeton SDS regional gathering. Since the National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees only itself was created in May 1968, it seems reasonable to suggest that the June 1968 Campaigner was the first issue aligned directly with the new National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees. NOTE THREE: ONE, TWO, THREE, MANY MARCUSES! Tom Neumann– who change his first name to Osha in the early 1970s – makes it vividly clear in his memoirs that he deeply loathed his stepfather unlike Abbie Hoffman who had studied under Marcuse at Brandeis and greatly admired the philosopher. Tom Neumann’s younger biological brother, Michael, also happened to be a student at Columbia. A founding member of Columbia SDS, he actually was the roommate of Mark Rudd. But Michael Neumann more or less opposed the Columbia Strike. According to Osha Neumann’s book, Up against the Wall Motherf**ker, his brother Michael “agreed with Herbert [Marcuse] that universities, whatever their shortcomings, were realms of comparative freedom, and therefore disrupting them was counter-productive.” Besides Herbert Marcuse’s stepsons, Tom and Michael, there is yet another Marcuse who should be mentioned – Herbert’s biological son Peter Marcuse. Peter Marcuse was 40 years old in 1968. Born in Berlin in 1928, his mother was Sophie Marcuse, whom Herbert divorced shortly before marrying Inge Neumann. After getting a BA at Harvard in 1948 and a JD at Yale Law School in 1953, Peter Marcuse received an MA at Columbia in 1963. In 1968, he was at Yale getting a Master’s Degree in Urban Studies and by 1972 he had earned a PhD in Urban Planning at Berkeley. After teaching Urban Planning at UCLA from 1972 to 1975, he came to Columbia to teach Urban Planning. He seems to have played absolutely no role at Columbia during the 1968 Strike. STYLE COMMENT: The ridiculous stars (***) when it comes to the word Mother****er were put in by some kind of automatic program that converts the letters in the word "Mother****er" into stars each time I save this document when editing. I have nothing to do with this. -- HH Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-06-2009 at 03:53 PM.
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#2458
07-09-2009, 06:34 AM
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A few tidbit clarifications
HH, thanks so much for providing such a wonderfully rich picture of the details of the political scene of the late '60s in which "the org" was hatched, kind of the primordial soup from which "life," aka the National Caucus of Labor Committees, emerged (using the word "life" guardedly, to be sure). Nothing here that was utterly startling, pretty much stayed within the lines of what I thought I knew, only in much more general terms than the great detail you have provided. I did not know the context of the NYC Left in which the FUNY emerged, which was HLH's launching pad to attract his first recruits other than Carol. And the way this intersected the impending crackup of SDS, which involved at least 4 competing tendencies.
Just a couple of secondary or tertiary observations. First of all, at one point you asserted (or the NMF did) that by April or May of 1968, the "National Caucus of Labor Committees" was created, consisting of the New York and Phila SDS Labor Committees. But in another location, you referred to a June publication, perhaps an early Campaigner, that referred simply to the two committes. My memory strongly tells me that the NCLC was not created until some time in 1969, quite possibly not until after the crackup of SDS in June of that year. And referring to the long post you wrote just prior to this final installment of the NMFs, you were talking about the origins of the Fraser faction fight, acknowledging that its cause was still murky. In that location, you omitted any mention of the bomb plot trial, which I believe played a strong, possibly a decisive, role in that fight. Remember that Fraser (and Borgmann) were on trial in context where they didn't know but what they might be about to go to jail for many years, falsely convicted in a blatant frame-up. One of the major issues between them, and Lyn, was over what kind of defense to mount in their behalf. I believe (if any others remember it differently, please chime in) that Fraser wanted as broad a coalition, reaching out to the broadest possible parts of the Left, as possible, for obvious reasons. I believe that Lyn attacked that as "Pop Front" and wanted, well, we know Lyn, God knows what, some sort of much more "political", i.e. narrow, Lyn-centered defense that would have probably ensured their incarceration. This would dovetail with the incipient Fraser faction's articles on Walther Reuther and the Pop Front (looking toward that layer, of labor, "from above," rather than "from below"). I have no specific recollection to this effect, but it wouldn't surprise me, if Lyn even at that early moment was looking forward to testifying "on their behalf," seeing the trial as a major public forum to push himself, with little or no concern for what impact it would actually have on winning the trial. Shades of 1988 and the Alexandria and New York trials, perhaps? I clearly recall the existence of, but hardly at all recall the content of, the key article in Campaigner by Fraser et al, on this subject of the pop front, Reuther, etc., which article was highly contentious at the time. I believe this article would be a key piece of evidence to flesh out the real meaning of the faction fight, if overlaid on the defense committee battle. Which battle, by the way, came to a head at one point in a very heated meeting at John Covici's house in Philadelphia where the differences were very heatedly aired, and where factional lines perhaps began to be drawn in ways that would congeal into the actual factions. All of that said, I also believe that precisely as Fraser held out for his own independent position against Lyn, that Lyn began to react as one would expect him to, to not tolerate anyone putting himself on the same pedestal as Lyn. Therefore, I'm sure a key ingredient in the mix was Lyn's moving to sharpen any differences he saw between him and Fraser, rather than seek to find common ground and heal the split. He treated Fraser the way Roosevelt treated Hitler, demanding unconditional surrender, rather than trying to find a way for Fraser to at least save face. It's also interesting how the bomb plot case was dropped as soon as the faction fight became official--hmm. That is, just when the ability to fight it was greatly weakened, the authorities dropped it, almost as if they regarded the split as just what they wanted to happen. One final point, in reference to the discussion in the NMFs about the argument between the Action Faction, the Praxis Axis, the PL labor base-builders, and the Marcusite vanguardists, with respect to how the student movement should orient toward labor. I think that Lyn's position was, at the time, greatly superior to any of the others, and recognized the sociological limitations of workers as unripe for any kind of radical, much less revolutionary, psychology if limited to "base" level ordinary shop floor-type struggles. The adoption of Luxemburg's mass strike perspective, plausible at the time if the economy really was about to tank, provided a mechanism (in thought) to "get from here to there," to provide a way to envision the possibility of a workers' government ever coming about, which no other theory did. And sociologically, the notion that only if workers were united in a common struggle for a broader than a trade union program, a program that proposed to increase the size of the pie, rather than just claim a larger share of a fixed economic pie, would they ever expand their consciousness, was correct. Lyn's emphasis on program, along with the notion of what he later (or perhaps even then) called "the class for itself", were two central featues of what he preached at the time that I, and whih I'm certain most other members who joined prior to 1973, found so compelling.
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#2459
07-09-2009, 11:31 AM
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Quote:
I still have a few more NMF posts to wade through and one of the last will return to Philly. I've chosen to skip the entire 1970 debate. However you are right that there was some kind of debate over the defense tactics in Philadelphia. The LaRouche faction does attack Fraser for wanting a pop front of sorts for the defense. But factually, I believe the actual charges were only dropped much later. The government had the problem that they were unwilling to disclose information related to wire-tapping and the informant. I don't know if you were on Factnet then, but I posted from Lexis a good deal relating to the Fraser trial and the LC attempts to contact the Black Panthers and the Red Squad phone tapping and such. (One way to find it is to click on my name and look at the post headlines for HH and they should pop up.) It is very important to learn more about the split and I just decided not to deal with 1970 directly because 1) I had no lived experience of it except for seeing Steve talk once after the split for the SLC and 2) the documents produced by both sides through 1970 are vast, hard to find, and quite difficult to follow. But you are 100% right that there was some real showdown between Fraser and LaRouche. I just don't know enough so I don't want to project LaRouche's later crazy behavior too much back to this period as well without knowing a great deal more. The NMF/OMF lack of in-depth discussion of the Fraser-Borgmann case and later faction-fight is a gaping hole in this look back as I've said more than once before. Just your mention of the meeting at Covici's helps fill in critical gaps. So too earlier did socialistboomer who before "pay to play" mentioned that -- I think -- Anita G discovered proof that the Fraser group had organized itself into a separate party organization. Also, you memory about the name NCLC is correct. But I don't think I said that. I believe I said the name was "National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees" and NOT "National Caucus of Labor Committees." Take a look at the posts. If I didn't say "National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees" I should have. (As an aside of FDR, I think the the idea was a negotiated settlement without Hitler was the one that he rejected or at least that was the critique. The people who wanted a negotiated peace said if you offered a deal for Germany's intact borders but get rid of Hitler, there could be a conditional surrender. The counter-argument was a) the system that produced Hitler would be unchanged and b) arguments on this line would have the impact -- intentional or not -- of driving a wedge between the West and Stalin when the Russians were taking the overwhelming number of casualties. But the advocates of a negotiated peace still wanted Hitler the person out, as far as I know.) As for the LC position in SDS: My take is that "on paper" -- as you say -- it works. I agree with it today as much as I agreed with it then. Compared to the horror of SDS, it made sense. But after thinking about it, I think it was a mixed bag although far superior to both the Praxis/Action faction types on the one hand and the PL nuts on the other. But in my view, it only makes sense along the lines of "popular front" organizing the CP did in New York politics in the 30s and 40s and is actually reformist. As I shall show, this is how the other orthodox leftist sects viewed the LC. They saw the LC's program as "social democratic." The big contradiction in the LC was the idea that the program could lead to revolution as opposed to social reform. And in practice, the "mass strike" at Columbia was in a way too successful in the sense that it made SDS so popular that the new r-r-r-radicals were almost all student syndicalist types who had zero interest spending the summer leafleting garment workers, etc. The "soviet" produced by Columbia marginalized the LC tendency which in a way had more influence when SDS was much smaller and everybody knew each other. I'm not sure if I'm right about this, so I offer it only as an idea. The other point on the side of both Praxis/Action types was that the social crisis of the 1960s fundamentally was about the War and not about the working class. I think they shot themselves in the foot by deliberately alienating much of the white working class in particular but the crisis in America was not similar to France 68 as the LC claimed. As a Trotskyist Triffinite, LaRouche did believe with some reason that the system was headed for a breakdown crisis but obviously when the Bretton Woods System did collapse in 1971, it didn't lead to the total collapse of the system and a return to the 1930s. But LaRouche was wrong; not totally crazy. So, again, on paper the model the LC put forth was pretty sophisticated. It just happened to be wrong. But like you and faced only with the choice between choosing between Praxis or Action Faction or the Trot sects or the CP or PL, I would have chosen the LC no doubt about it. At the time, it seemed to combine the best of the Old Left with the New Left. But it is also very interesting to read other group's attacks on the LC. I think this is today most important to understand why we all froze up during Mop Up instead of leaving. Beside the fact that we were lied to and Mop-Up was presented as something the entire NEC had agreed upon which we now know was untrue, the core loyalties of the LC "old guard" had been formed in the period 1966-March 1973. Even the NU-WRO organizing goes back to 1966-67 in a way. To simply walk out in April 1973 would have been to say somehow that all the core identity he had to the "old" LC was somehow wrong and this proved psychologically impossible for most members, including me. And the ideas we had were that we were the best thing to come out of the New Left. So faced with this sense of personal identity, it was just mentally impossible to walk away especially given that in Mop-Up, the entire survival of the organization seemed at stake once violence was introduced. What we couldn't grasp that "Mop-Up" really was the destruction of the old LC and not the CP. We were too deeply converted from the entire experience of 1966-72 and the belief that we were right and morons like Rudd or the morons at PL were wrong. But I'm sure Rudd had the same sense and the PL types also saw themselves as the real revolutionary deal while to both of them the LC looked kind of wimpy. But I think you can't understand 1973-74 without getting the fact that the real loyalty to the LC came from the sense that from 1966-73, we were far more right than wrong. So the idea that the LC had somehow one day just fallen off a cliff seemed impossible to grasp both intellectually and emotionally. After all, hadn't we spent all those years being the "anti-crazies"? Last edited by Hylozoic Hedgehog; 07-09-2009 at 11:46 AM.
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#2460
07-10-2009, 09:36 PM
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Ahhhh summer vacation. Bruce Director sweats it out at a card table shrine after 35 glorious years of serving Lyn and licking his Oxfords while many of us are at small tables licking ice cream cones with our family.
In looking at a week or so worth of material I have to give Howie and his blog a lot of credit for being able to decipher the cult without being a member. http://www.struat.com/election/categ...che-challenge/ What is missing from his blog at times is having a first hand experience to know the cheap parlor tricks and to see how many times they get recycyled by Lyn over and over. In his blog Howie shares this from the LPAC site. Quote:
Last week I joked that there should be a battle between Doctor Webster Tarpley and Lyn over world wide web domination. I said it in jets, but it really is taking place. Lyn is setting his goals on the lucrative wing nut side of 9/11 which Tarpley has carved out a nitche for himself. Remember that Tarpley beat Lyn in having an "OBama = Trilat/CFR book while Lyn kept the delusions that he was advising Obama behind the scenes to the Lym and LYMettes. Later, Lyn sees that there is a lot of anger against Obama from exactly the same crowd that we used to call up for big money in the 1970s and 80s who were considered the far right. Lyn now dusts off the old Trilat/CFR/Bilderberger routine and presents it to another set of potential contact cards to be boiled for money. In comparison to Doctor Webster's web interviews, Lyn gave this crowd a 3 hour long web cast which found it's way into the usual fan boy sites, buit also into StormFront with anti/pro reviews but also into the sites which have issues with the Federal Reserve. In many of these sites, it is the web , not Dr. Web which describe Lyn as nuts. Here is some Dr. Web on a Ron Paul site. http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=2200436 Here is an interview Lyn does in Va . http://www.videoamerican.us/virginia...larouche-24-3/ Lyn still is used as a butt of a joke as this blog does. http://www.videoamerican.us/virginia...larouche-24-3/ Quote:
LaRouche: We Are a Government in the Wings http://larouchepac.com/node/10975 Quote:
xlcr4life@hotmail.com
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