The
Art of Scapegoating
The author, Dennis King has generously agreed that we
include in our website: Chapter 16.
“The Art of Scapegoating” All copyrights remain with
the author. 1989 |
|
In an
October 1987 review of Veil, Bob Woodward's Iran-Contra book, LaRouche
held forth on the subject of propaganda. "There is no morality, no
truth," in a propaganda war, he wrote. "A choice is made to boost or
to discredit this or that personality, group, issue, or policy, and the mechanics of the psy-ops [psychological
operations] trade go to work without scruple to get the job done."
The
statement referred to the CIA and the KGB, but LaRouche might as well have been
talking about the NCLC. Few organizations have ranged the ideological map with
such adroit inconsistency. First they attacked the
The inconsistencies sometimes reflect LaRouche's
personal pique.
More
often they arise from his dualistic view or politics—that all groups inevitably
split into factions representing sharply opposed views. Thus, the LaRouchians
condemn the bad Mafia of drug pushers but praise the good Mafia of redeemable
patriotic labor racketeers. They rail against the bad Communists who, like
Gorbachev, promote glasnost, but express admiration for the good
Communists who adhere to old-fashioned Stalinist views. They distinguish
between good and bad Freemasons, good and bad Knights of Malta, good and bad
Klansmen. They also believe that the war of "humanist" vs.
"oligarchical" tendencies is within the soul of individual world
leaders, which makes it perfectly logical to praise Reagan one moment and
savage him the next.
Underneath all this, LaRouche continues to
pursue his anti-Semitic Grand Design through front organizations,
coalitions with outside groups, election campaigns, pseudo-academic
conferences, and what he calls the "naming of names." His propaganda methods are far more complex
than those of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups. He will start by
selecting a legitimate issue such as AIDS, the farm crisis, or defense
spending. Giving an appearance of sincere concern, his followers often research
the issue thoroughly and come up with proposals that make sense. But they always announce that an evil plot
is blocking implementation of their proposals and attempt to steer the campaign
in an anti-Semitic direction. Sometimes they employ obvious
euphemisms—"Zionist," "usurer," "shylock," or
"cabalist." Other times, they refer to "monetarists" (as in
moneylender), "Venetian bankers" (as in The Merchant of Venice), or
"Our Crowd" (from the title of Stephen Birmingham's best-selling book
about prominent New York Jews), They also use esoteric code words like
"British," "Babylonian," "Whore of Babylon," and
"Mesopotamian," which may puzzle the average person but strike a
chord with anti-Semites of the old school.
Another tactic is to highlight well-known
Jewish families or individuals. The Bronfman family (Seagram's),
oil tycoon Armand Hammer, philanthropist Max Fisher, or investment banker Felix
Rohatyn are either blamed for problems with which they have no connection or
assigned a greatly exaggerated responsibility. If an individual happens to be a
mobster or some other reprehensible type, the LaRouchians will emphasize his
misdeeds to the exclusion of those of his Gentile associates. (To the
LaRouchians, Meyer Lansky was the Mafia in his day; the Sicilians hardly
counted.) LaRouche's publications also strive to hit mainstream Jews with guilt
by association, through the use of semantic tags—e.g., "Lansky's
ADL," "Lansky's
The list of those to be attacked includes many
non-Jews, such as Senator Moynihan of
Through such tricks, LaRouchian propaganda
blames the Jews for just about every problem facing the average American. The
message is carefully tailored for different constituencies. Farmers are told
that Wall Street "monetarists" are behind the agricultural crisis and
the decline of the family farm. Teamster’s union leaders are told that liberal
Jewish foundations are behind the government's crackdown on union corruption.
The AFL-CIO rank and file is told that its leaders are Zionist agents who don't
really care about bread-and-butter problems. Black college students are told
that Jews exploit black entertainers and that the Anti-Defamation League
secretly funds the Ku Klux Klan. The public in general is told that Jews are
inveterate conspirators who planned the slayings of Abraham Lincoln, John F.
Kennedy, and Jimmy Hoffa, and are trying to assassinate LaRouche.
The LaRouchians weave into these charges a
toned-down version of the "blood libel"—the belief, widely held in
medieval
LaRouchian propaganda also tries to raise doubts about
the patriotism of American Jews. When a Pentagon official, Jonathan Pollard,
was arrested as an Israeli spy in 1986, the LaRouchians portrayed him as
typical of Jews in the
The
loyalty issue has been a standard anti-Semitic tactic ever since the French
army captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason in 1894. But the
LaRouchians add another twist (as did Hitler in Mein Kampf, and Stalin
in his polemics against Trotsky), claiming
that the Jews are not just spies but political agents who secretly manipulate
policy to weaken the nation's will to resist its enemies.
LaRouchian
publications also depict
Such
themes go hand in hand with attempts to trivialize
the crimes of the Third Reich. In
1978 LaRouche dismissed the Holocaust as mostly "mythical," while his
wife, Helga, called it a "swindle." New Solidarity attacked the Holocaust curriculum in
Austrian
President Kurt Waldheim seems to be another innocent victim. When the World
Jewish Congress produced evidence of his Nazi past in 1986, Executive
Intelligence Review dismissed it as a "gigantic hoax." World
Jewish Congress chairman Edgar Bronfman, EIR added, is a "Meyer
Lansky-linked organized crime figure."
President Reagan's 1985 trip to the graves of SS
officers at Bitburg in
Despite
all this, LaRouche and his followers vehemently deny they are anti-Semitic. They say that the real anti-Semites are the
Zionists, who keep the Jews in an inward-turned nationalistic frame of mind
and use them on behalf of nefarious oligarchical political purposes. One of the
supposed aims of the LaRouchians is to liberate the Jews from Zionism so they
can lead fuller lives.
Zionism
and the Jews are not the LaRouchians' only obsessions. They agitate around a
variety of issues that appear innocuous and often intriguing: a crash program
for fusion, a manned trip to Mars, new irrigation projects for the
In this
they followed the basic principle of
fascist agitation: Pick a problem that is real, highly visible, easy to
understand, and, above all, charged with emotion, then offer a simplistic
solution. They are attuned to such issues and the ever-shifting
possibilities for demagoguery because of their constant dialogue with the
public. LaRouche followers are at the
nation's airports every day, all day, talking politics with quintessential
middle Americans. Or they are on the
phone for long hours as fund raisers, sounding out the views of potential
donors. As candidates for public office, they fan out each primary season to
working-class neighborhoods and farm communities across the country, not just
to ask for votes but to engage people in serious discussions.
The best example is the AIDS issue. By the fall of
1985, LaRouche recognized that it was about to become the scariest issue of the
decade. He concocted the slogan "Spread
Panic, not AIDS!" The entire
human race, he claimed, would face extinction if stern measures weren't taken
immediately against gay people and mosquitoes. Offering himself as the only
leader willing to act with the necessary ruthlessness, he picked
LaRouche's cadres were
preprogrammed for the quarantine campaign. For years words like
"faggot" and "queer" had peppered NCLC publications, along with allegations that child molesters,
Satanists, and Communists control the gay rights movement. The articles
also suggested that homosexuality is a characteristically Jewish condition and
that rich Jews encourage it to undermine
Western civilization. When the AIDS
crisis erupted, LaRouche blamed the "shylocks" for being too cheap to
pay for research crash programs.
His gay-equals-Jewish canard dates back to the 19705,
when New Solidarity raved against the "faggot politics" of
"Zionist-supporting" gay activists. New Solidarity published a
cartoon series in which prominent New York Jews were shown in Roman togas at a
banquet sponsored by the "Emperor of Homohattan," Mayor Ed Koch. In
the early 19805 LaRouchian publications accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionist
Gentiles of being part of an international "Homintern." LaRouche
wrote Kissinger; The Politics of Faggotry, a crude and defamatory
leaflet on his longtime Symbolic Jew. According to LaRouche, Kissinger's alleged
"heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger
evil," and Kissinger is "psychologically" part of a
"distinct species." In the context of LaRouche's biological-racial
theories about the Jewish "species,"
the equation of Jewishness and "faggotry" was unmistakable.
LaRouche also taught that the alleged
pathology of the Jewish family, especially the mother's possessiveness,
produces psychosexual aberrations in young Jews. A 1986 New
Solidarity item, "Jewish Mothers in the Age of Aquarius," joked
that homosexuality is the natural result.
That
the Jewish oligarchy deliberately promotes homosexuality is suggested by
LaRouche's references to "sodomic," "pederastic," and
"lesbian" practices within oligarchy-controlled "cults"
such as Freemasonry and the Quakers. In a November 1985 speech, he said AIDS
was a "man-made evil" linked to these "cults out of
In an
article on government monetary policy, LaRouche claimed that the money for the
necessary public health measures against AIDS could only come from funds
currently being used to service the international debt. But the
"shylocks" were blocking this: "Shylock demands his pound of
flesh, and cares not in the least whether the collection kills the
debtor." The implication was that anyone who opposed Proposition 64 was
probably acting on behalf of powerful Jews. LaRouche lashed out at "Meyer
Lansky's"
LaRouche's AIDS propaganda bears a
striking resemblance to Hitler's on syphilis as set forth in Mein Kampf. Syphilis,
like AIDS, is sexually transmitted, and in the 1920s there was no cure. Hitler
focused on it because of his obsession with racial purity and his fear that the
Aryan bloodline was being contaminated. Just as he blamed the spread of
syphilis on its victims, especially prostitutes, so LaRouche blames gays for
spreading AIDS. Hitler believed that sexual promiscuity and prostitution were
the result of "Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our
mating instinct" and thus called syphilis the "Jewish disease."
LaRouche refers to AIDS as the "Babylonian disease."
Hitler's answer to
syphilis was to call for a quarantine of prostitutes and other infected
persons. "There must be no half measures; the gravest and
most ruthless decisions will have to be made. It is a half measure to let
incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones. . . .
[I]f necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated—a barbaric
measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it but a blessing for his fellow
man and posterity." LaRouche, in "The End of the Age of
Aquarius?," urges much the same solution for AIDS: "We've got to
contain it, we can't find a miracle cure that fast; we're going to have to use
methods of public health, which means we're going to have to put away every
carrier until they can no longer carry."
The
parallels continue. Hitler said regarding syphilis victims that there "is
no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity." LaRouche says it's "nonsense" to be concerned about the
"civil rights" of AIDS victims. Hitler criticized the authorities
for not "summoning] up the energy to take decisive measures" and for
their attitude of "total capitulation." LaRouche says the
Mein Kampf and "The End of the Age of
Aquarius?" both express a concern for public health and describe
quarantine as necessary in order to save lives. Yet Hitler
clearly stated that his syphilis-fighting program masked a higher goal: The
Nazi Party leadership, he said, must "succeed in representing to the
people the partial goal which now has to be achieved, or rather conquered, as
the one which is solely and alone worthy of attention, on whose conquest
everything depends. The great mass of people cannot see the whole road ahead of
them without growing weary and despairing of the task." LaRouche is
equally candid, linking the struggle for an AIDS quarantine with the need for a
new ideological "paradigm" in
What
When two-thirds of
As the
campaign intensified, some opponents of Proposition 64 developed a strategy to
cut through the smoke screen and expose the hidden political agenda. Howard Wallace, the coordinator of the San
Francisco Labor Council's work against Proposition 64, stated in the SFLC
newsletter: "The real purpose of this initiative has little to do with
either AIDS or public health. . . . [The
LaRouchian] purpose is to build their small corps of storm troopers into a
larger one. ... In the grand tradition
of Hitler's Nazis, they're taking the path of least resistance: attacking
those who suffer in some measure from social stigma . . ." But too much of
the literature opposing Proposition 64 continued to be confused, jumbling together
the political and pseudo-medical issues and dismissing the LaRouchians as kooks
or cultists.
In the
following year the quarantine idea became "respectable" nationally.
Congressman Dannemeyer appeared on TV talk shows to discuss it as just one more
proposal in the marketplace of ideas. Several other prominent New Right
politicians expressed interest in the concept. In mid-1987 President Reagan's
domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, when questioned about it, coolly
commented: "I don't see any evidence at this point that a
quarantine in the traditional sense would be particularly effective"
(italics added). Thus does LaRouchian propaganda spread like ripples in a
pond.
LaRouche
meanwhile developed a more extreme solution for AIDS. Praising
From this, he passed over to the concept of an
anti-gay Holocaust, stopping just short of advocacy. "The only
solution" to AIDS, he said, "is either public health measures
including isolation as necessary, or 'accelerated deaths' of carriers." He
added: "The point of no return ... is coming up very fast. If the violence
comes, the politicians, the courts, and the governments will have no one to
blame but themselves. They left a desperate, terrified population no other
choice."
Meanwhile,
public concern over AIDS reached a high pitch. An American Medical Association
poll found that 50 percent of the American public believed all necessary
measures should be taken to stop AIDS "even if it means some people might
have their rights violated." LaRouche continued his inflammatory
propaganda, claiming that AIDS was spread by casual contact and that the
majority of heterosexual Americans would soon be infected if his draconian
measures were not adopted. His followers were on the phones at their telephone
boiler rooms in
While
this represented less votes than the first time (because of a lower voter
turnout), the percentage of supporters had risen from 29 percent to 32 percent.
(In November 1988 a third AIDS crackdown measure appeared on the ballot, this
one sponsored by Congressman Dannemeyer and other conservatives without
LaRouche's direct involvement. Although polls in September indicated that it
had majority support, it failed to pass.)
LaRouche had
demonstrated the vulnerability of the public, when frightened and angry, to the
lure of thinly veiled fascist measures. He had
desensitized millions to the idea of rounding up unpopular minorities. His
NOTES TO CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LAROUCHE'S VIEWS ON PROPAGANDA: LHL, "Woodward's Book on Casey: A Blend of Fact and Fiction," EIR, Oct. 16, 1987.
CALLS REAGAN "PUSSYWHIPPED": James Ridgeway, "Secret Agent Man," interview with LHL, Village Voice, Oct. 13, 1987.
INDIRECT ALLUSIONS TO THE SO-CALLED JEWISH QUESTION: LHL, The Pestilence of Usury, NDPC pamphlet, 1981; "Bring the
CALLS SCHLESINGER "IMP OF EVIL": LHL, "A Query to the President: Is Jimmy Carter Truly a Christian?," NS, Oct.13, 1978.
DRUG-PUSHING ALLEGATION: Konstandinos Kalimtgis et al., Dope, Inc.: Britain 's Opium War Against the U.S.
POLLARD PORTRAYED AS TYPICAL OF JEWS IN u.s. GOVERNMENT: "Pollard Case: Soviet-Israeli Spies Will Be Exposed,"
PURGE OF JEWS FROM U.S.GOVERNMENT DEMANDED: "Pollard Should Be Only the Beginning," NS, Mar. 16, 1987.
JEWS AS POLITICAL AGENTS, NOT JUST SPIES: "Register the Zionist Lobby as Foreign Agents!," MS, Sept. 5, 1978.
ISRAEL "MAIN INTERMEDIARY" IN STEALING SECRETS FOR SOVIETS: "Pollard Talks: Mossad Agents in U.S. Govt.,"
LAROUCHIANS DENIGRATE THE HOLOCAUST: LHL, "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," NS, Dec. 8, 1978;
SOOBZOKOV DEFENDED: "Who Is Tscherim Soobzokov, and Who Wants Him Dead?," NS, Aug. 26, 1985; "Soobzokov Dies;
WALDHEIM SUPPORTED: "LaRouche Calls Waldheim Affair 'Gigantic Hoax,' " EIR, June 20, 1986.
COMMENTS ON BITBURG: "Victory in Germany," NS, May 13, 1985; "The Shocking Truth about Simon Wiesenthal,"
ATTACK ON KISSINGER: LHL, Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry, NCLC leaflet, Aug. 3, 1982.
SAYS HOMOSEXUALITY WAS "ORGANIZED" BY THE OLIGARCHY: LHL, "The End of the Age of Aquarius?," EIR, Jan. 10, 1986.
ALLEGES THAT "SHYLOCKS" ARE BLOCKING ACTION AGAINST AIDS: LHL, "Baker Learns Lesson of Merchants of Venice,"
HITLER ON SYPHILIS: Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, '943). PP- 246-57-
AIDS THE SPRINGBOARD FOR A NEW NATIONALISM: "New Solidarity Hits 100,000 Subscriptions," NS, Aug. 22, 1986.
HANGING AND BURNING SUGGESTED: LHL, "The End of the Age of Aquarius?," pp. 40-41.
GARY BAUER'S VIEWS ON QUARANTINE: "How to Make America Safe for Families," interview, New York Newsday, Aug. 19, 1987.
LAROUCHE COMMENTS ON GAY-BASHING: LHL, "Teenage Gangs' Lynchings of Gays Is Foreseen Soon," NS, Feb. 9, 1987.
Usurers to Justice!," N'S, Jan. 21, 1983; "Does U.S. Mean Uncle Shylock?," NS, Aug. 12, 1985; "Milton Friedman Finally
Gets His Pound of Flesh," NS, May 3, 1985.
(New York: New Benjamin Franklin Publishing House, 1978); Moscow's Secret Weapon: Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Mafia,
EIR special report, Mar. i , 1 986, see esp. pp. 12-21.
NS, June 13, 1986.
NS, June 16, 1986.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "The Zionists' Holocaust Today," NS, Jan. 26, 1979; Carol White, "Will There Be a Next Generation?,"
NS, Sept. 15, 1978.
Blood on Hands of FBI, ADL," NS, Sept. 13, 1985.
EIR, May 14, 1985.
NS, Oct. 28, 1985.