Линден Ларуш және оның істегендері: Саяси және ғылыми көзқарастар

Political and scientific views of the American activist and his followers

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) and the LaRouche movement have expressed controversial views on a wide variety of topics. The LaRouche movement is made up of activists who follow LaRouche's views.

According to Matko Meštrović, emeritus senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics of Zagreb, Croatia, LaRouche's economic policies call for a program modeled on the economic recovery program of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, including fixed exchange rates, capital controls, exchange controls, currency controls, and protectionist price and trade agreements among partner nations, although Roosevelt generally pursued trade liberalization. LaRouche also called for a reorganization of debt world wide, and a global plan for large scale, continental infrastructure projects. He rejects free trade, deregulation, and globalization.

Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Trotskyist and praised Marxism, but he and the National Caucus of Labor Committees abandoned this ideology in the late 1970s. From then on, LaRouche no longer opposed private ownership of the means of production, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class. According to Tim Wohlforth, during and after his break with Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" derived from Vladimir Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realize their leading role in society. He was influenced by Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as becoming such a hegemonic force. He rejected Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself. LaRouche was influenced by his readings of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Karl Marx's Capital developing his own "theory of reindustrialization", saying that the West would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimize costs (see neocolonialism.) To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments had since been stripped of their quasi Marxist language and citations, his core theories had remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.</blockquote>

LaRouche's philosophy references an old dispute between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle believed in knowledge through empirical observation and experience. Plato believed in The Forms. According to LaRouche, history has always been a battle between Platonists—rationalists, idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and the primacy of ideas—and Aristotelians—relativists who rely on empirical data and sensory perception. Platonists in LaRouche's worldview include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche states that many of the world's ills are due to the fact that Aristotelianism, as embraced by British philosophers like Locke, Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and represented by "oligarchs", foremost among them wealthy British families, has dominated, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. LaRouche frames this struggle as an ancient one, and sees himself and his movement in the tradition of the philosopher kings in Plato's Republic. LaRouche and his followers use Neoplatonism as the basis for an economic model that posits "the absolute necessity of progress". Economies evolve in stages as humanity devises new technologies, stages that LaRouche compares to the hierarchical spheres in Kepler's model of the solar system based on the Platonic solids. The purpose of science, technology and business must be to assist this progress, enabling the Earth to support an ever growing humanity. Human life is the supreme value in LaRouche's world view; environmentalism and population control are seen as retrogressive steps, promoting a return to the Dark Ages. Rather than curtailing progress, because of dwindling resources, LaRouche advocates using nuclear technology to make more energy available to humanity, freeing humanity to enjoy music and art. In LaRouche's view, the people opposing this vision are part of the Aristotelian conspiracy. They may not necessarily be in contact with one another: "From their standpoint, [the conspirators] are proceeding by instinct", LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way History doesn't function quite that consciously." Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led LaRouche to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, pro lifers, and followers of the Ku Klux Klan—even though LaRouche counts the Klan itself among his foes. George Johnson, in Architects of Fear (1983), has described LaRouche's Neoplatonist conspiracy theory as a "distortion of a real philosophical distinction". Writing in The New York Times in 1989, Johnson described LaRouche as "a kind of Allan Bloom gone mad" who seems to "believe the nonsense he spouts", a view of the world in which Aristotelians use "sex, drugs and rock and roll" and "environmentalism and quantum theory" to support wealthy oligarchs and create a civilization destroying "new Dark Age".

LaRouche wrote that conspiracy was natural in human beings. In 1998, he responded to critics of his conspiracism, such as Daniel Pipes and said that Pipes wrongly believed that all reports of conspiracy are axiomatically false. LaRouche's critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his current orientation as being a conspiracist worldview. They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Daniel Pipes said that LaRouche personalizes his conspiracy theories, and associates "all of his adversaries with the forces of darkness." The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a LaRouche publication, ran an "investigative report" titled "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist" in 2007. The article states:
Perhaps the only name that sends the VRWC gang more into orbit than either Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the name Lyndon LaRouche. The very same apparatus that waged a billion dollar slander campaign against the President and the First Lady throughout much of the mid and late 1990s, has an even longer track record of venomous slander and frame up campaigns against LaRouche and his political movement. Of course, the reality is that it was the Bush Cheney campaign, backed by the Scalia Supreme Court, that actually stole the 2000 election in Florida. In 2001, LaRouche said that rogue elements within the American military took part in, or planned, the September 11, 2001, attacks as part of a coup d'état.

LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. LaRouche has said that the dominant imperialist strategic force acting on the planet today is not the United States, but the "Anglo Dutch liberal system" of the British Empire, which he asserts is an oligarchic financial consortium like that of medieval Venice, more like a "financial slime mold" than a nation. According to this theory, London financial circles protect themselves from competition by using techniques of "controlled conflict" first developed in Venice, and LaRouche attributes many wars in recent memory to this alleged activity by the British. According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade. According to Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, LaRouche is the "most illustrious" Anglophobe. These views are reflected in three books authored by members of his organization:

Dope, Inc. by David P. Goldman, Konstandinos Kalimtgis and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978 : this book discusses the history of narcotics trafficking, beginning with the Opium War, and alleges that British interests have continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money laundering in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of London. In an article, "The Sexual Impotency of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party", LaRouche criticised Machismo. Regarding the role of women, he adds, "The task of real women's liberation is to generally strengthen women's self consciousness and their power and opportunities to act upon self consciousness."

Critics say the movement is antisemitic, conspiracist, and anti LGBT, and that its political and economic proposals are a cover for its actual beliefs.

During the 1980s, LaRouche and his supporters made comments that were seen as anti gay. A LaRouche affiliated newspaper wrote that demonstrators against the LaRouche sponsored AIDS initiative in California were from the "lower sexual classes."

British journalist Roger Boyes wrote, "Anti Semitism is at the core of LaRouche's conspiracy theories, which he adapts to modern events most recently the war in Iraq." As an example of LaRouche's alleged antisemitism, Dennis King cited LaRouche's statement (under the pen name L. Marcus) in The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), "Jewish culture is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." The charge of antisemitism in the LaRouche network resurfaced in the media in 2004 in accounts of the death of a Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who had been attending a Schiller Institute event in Germany. British press reports described LaRouche as "the American leader of a sect with a fascist and antisemitic ideology". LaRouche denied over a long period that his movement is antisemitic. In 2006, LaRouche said, "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti Semitism [is] the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today." Debra Freeman, a spokesperson for LaRouche, told a newspaper in 2010 that, "Hitler was a lunatic, but his policies were based principally on economic policy and staying in power. We mourn the loss of six million Jews and countless others." LaRouche's critics have said he is a "disguised anti Semite", in that he takes the classical antisemitic conspiracy theory and substitutes the word "Zionist" for the word "Jew", and ascribes the classical antisemitic caricature of the "scheming Jew" to particular Jewish individuals and groups of Jews, rather than to the Jews as a whole. "Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University", LaRouche says. He says, "Zionism is not Judaism." In 1978, the same year LaRouche's article cited The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the LaRouche group published Dope, Inc.: Britain's Opium War against the U. S., which cited the Protocols and defended its authenticity, likening the "Elders of Zion" to the Rothschild banking family, the British Royal family, and the Italian Mafia, and the Israeli Mossad, General Pike, and the B'nai B'rith. (Dope, Inc.) Later editions left out cites to The Protocols. This is the genesis of the claim that LaRouche has said Queen Elizabeth runs drugs. When asked by an NBC reporter in 1984 about the Queen and drug running, LaRouche replied, "Of course she's pushing drugs that is in a sense of responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it." Chip Berlet argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses antisemitism through the use of "coded language" and by attacking neoconservatives. During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not. Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf. The African American civil rights leader James Bevel was LaRouche's running mate in the 1992 presidential election, and in the mid 1990s, the LaRouche movement entered into an alliance with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Another LaRouche movement member with a record in civil rights issues is Amelia Boynton Robinson, who is vice president of the Schiller Institute, a LaRouche organization; she has described the movement as following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.: "Mr. And Mrs. LaRouche built a movement, taking up where Dr. King had left off. They realized there must be an universal image of mankind, which transcends all racial differences and barriers."

LaRouche's movement has frequently been accused of being fascist. Those making the accusation include Democratic National Committee chairman Paul G. Kirk, a local Texas Democratic district committee, and Democratic activist Bob Hattoy. Dennis King, a former Marxist–Leninist and member of the Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s and early 1970s, used this thesis in the title of his book length study of LaRouche and his movement, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). Operation Mop Up, which is said to have consisted of violent physical attacks on left wing meetings, is used as a basis for such accusations. Andrei Fursov, a Russian historian and academician at the International Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck, Austria, was interviewed in 2012 by the Russian think tank and web portal Terra America and asked to comment on the characterizations of LaRouche in Western media. He replied that intellectuals who have called LaRouche a fascist do not deserve to be called intellectuals, and that the charge has no basis in any real scientific analysis of politics. According to Fursov, it comes from the fact that LaRouche criticizes the supposedly "democratic" but actually "liberal totalitarian" system of the West. Fursov said that in Russia not so many people know of LaRouche and that the important thing is not the quantity, but the quality. George Johnson, in a review of King's book in The New York Times, said that King's presentation of LaRouche as a "would be Führer" was "too neat", and that it failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish, while acknowledging that LaRouche's "conspiracy theory is designed to appeal to anti Semitic right wingers as well as to Black Muslims and nuclear engineers". In his 1983 book, Architects of Fear, Johnson described LaRouche's dalliances with radical groups on the right as "a marriage of convenience", and less than sincere; as evidence he cited a 1975 party memo that spoke of uniting with the right simply for the purpose of overthrowing the established order: "Once we have won this battle, eliminating our right wing opposition will be comparatively easy." At the same time, Johnson says, LaRouche also sought contact with the Soviet Union and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq; failing to recruit either the Soviets or right wingers to his cause, LaRouche attempted to adopt a more mainstream image in the 1980s. Laird Wilcox and John George similarly stated that King had gone too far in trying "to paint LaRouche as a neo Nazi" and that LaRouche's most severe critics, like King and Berlet, came from extreme leftist backgrounds themselves.