Did you know that one-time UCLA philosophy Professor Bertrand
Russell was the most evil man of the 20th century? Ever heard that
the Bush administration and parts of the U.S. security service were
complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks?
If you haven’t been made privy to these outlandish
theories then you’re probably not familiar with the writings
of Lyndon H. LaRouche. And don’t worry ““ until a week
ago, I wasn’t either.But even if you haven’t taken time
to read any of LaRouche’s numerous musings, you have
undoubtedly come across the impressive number of acolytes he
commands. They are near-permanent fixtures on our campus, setting
up stalls outside Bunche Hall and the Math Sciences building pretty
much every day. When I first came to UCLA I naturally expected the
most active political organizations would be the local Democrats
and Republicans, with maybe a smattering of the more marginalized
groups. But nearly every day when I go to lecture, I see this same
group shouting about the treachery of Bush’s plan for social
security and the insidious evil of the more faceless men in the
Bush administration. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me,
and this week I decided to pick up a few pamphlets. I diligently
sifted through the prolific number of pamphlets LaRouche produces
and purchased the Bible of his movement, the hyperbolically titled
“Children of Satan.” Now, I’m quite a cynical
person, so I didn’t expect to go through some sort of
enlightenment, but the literature only confirmed my fears. Much of
it was conspiratorial baloney ““ and pernicious baloney at
that. How can I take an organization seriously when it believes
that ““ forget Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot for the moment
““ Bertrand Russell, one of the most celebrated intellectuals
and pacifists of the 20th century, is the century’s most evil
man? The straight-faced conjecture that many of the famous Jewish
Marxists of the Frankfurt School were actually would-be
Nazi’s but “had no chance for party advancement because
of anti-Semitism” is equally ridiculous.
But I wasn’t really happy with just familiarizing myself
with the LaRouche-ite doctrine. I wanted to know about the people
who subscribed to it. Those I had spoken with at the stall outside
Bunche Hall were extremely intelligent and amiable. Also, amid the
fantastical conspiracy theories and the paranoid attacks on the
intellectual canon of the past 200 years, there were occasional
rays of sanity in their literature. First was their illumination of
the Bush administration’s continued use of evidence that they
knew to be false in order to justify the war in Iraq. Joseph
Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador and certainly no LaRouche-ite, has
raised the prospect that top officials knew the “case”
President Bush made for going to war with Iraq was based on
fabricated data. The facts actually look pretty damning. But for
every intelligent discussion about the merits of privatized social
security and the treachery of the Bush administration’s drive
to war, there is some wild theory about Descartes, Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke or Adam Smith being “systematically insane.”
I came away from reading LaRouche’s literature in a sort of
ideological daze. It is impossible to pin him down. One minute he
sounds like a social Democrat arguing against the privatization of
social security, the next a rabid right-winger railing against the
cultural permissiveness of the ’60s generation. Hoping to
understand how these traditionally incongruent political ideals
could sit so neatly in the mind of one man, I organized a meeting
with two of LaRouche’s followers. Over coffee, I chatted with
two 26-year-old full-time activists, Daniel Bayer and Quincy
O’Neal, who had both been part of the organization for four
years. I was struck right away by their in-depth knowledge of the
intellectual history of the 20th century. Asked about their
nebulous ideology, Bayer tells me, “That’s the only
reason we would not necessarily be leftists. If you’re
against this, then you’re for this. … Why is it that
because you’re for guns then you have to be against abortion?
A lot of the ideas amongst the left, people don’t actually
know whether they’re for abortion or not, all they’re
saying is that they’re against this thing so they’re
against that. It’s just being part of a group.” The
next hour consisted of me putting forward an excerpt from the
literature that I found troublesome and them putting forward a
defense. So Sept. 11 was an inside job concocted by the Bush
administration. Hmm. “There is some willful negligence
there,” Bayer said. “Why didn’t they shoot down
that plane if they had already hit the World Trade Center
twice?” Then onto the perennial accusations of anti-Semitism
leveled against LaRouche and his organization. I bring up a quote
from LaRouche in which he writes, “Zionism is that state of
collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of
international Jewry.” How do you defend that one?
“Zionism is different from being Jewish,” Bayer tells
me. “But the basis for being Jewish is being tied to
(Israel).” But London manipulates international Jewry? Are
you kidding? Before we left, they asked if this was going to be
“just another slander piece.” I told them that I
couldn’t help disagreeing with most of their ideas.
“Why don’t you just say, “˜Come to our stall
with evidence that shows we are wrong,'” Bayer replied.
So that’s what I’m doing. These people need to be
debunked ““ and seem to relish the challenge.
Kennard is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.