YES. The Larouche people are nuts.

you got experience with 'em too?

On one hand Larouche people are scary, but on the other they are hilarious.
I don't mean funny in a good way, funny like the scientologists are funny. They are basically a cult. I mean Lyndon Larouche himself has been in prison for treason for the past 30 years or so, and yet he's had enough support to run for president and campaign in many cities every time. He's got to have a cult like following to pull that off.
But that's exactly what makes these people such endless sources of entertainment. As Ray states above, Larouche's tactics are to use a lot names of famous historical figures, movement, and events to convince the listeners that Larouche and his followers know a lot about everything, and consequently this makes listeners eager to accept more new information without questioning its reasoning. However the truth is that there is very little logic behind all their assumptions, very little support.
The first time I encountered the Larouche campaign, I didn't know what it was, figuring he was just some third party candidate with possibly intriguing ideas, but probably too radical/conservative to get any mainstream support. The Larouche supporters pestered me to come to their meetings and wouldn't leave me alone until I gave them my number, figuring they'd realize that was a soft rejection, and would never bother calling. My mistake was to give them my REAL phone number.
A week later I get a phone call from them saying they're having a meeting later than evening and will provide transportation to pick me up. I was in no mood to go anywhere, but they pressed on. While in the process of convincing me, they started telling me what their campaign was about.
It began with fairly standard "rampant unemployment, economy failing, etc" political campaign stuff, so I listened on. Soon though they began telling me how Bush was leading our country to hell, was a Nazi, like Hitler, and that our economy would soon collapse like Germany's economy did. "Did you know that the German people had to cart barrels of cash just to get a loaf of bread? Money was cheaper to burn than any sort of fuel??" At that point I couldn't take it anymore. Now I am no fan of Bush, I think he has the IQ of a chimp, but he is no Hitler. "Yes, I know about Germany's inflation after WWI, but that was before Hitler came to power. In fact Hitler fixed Germany's economy, that's why he had such support from the people despite his policies of mass murder. Granted he was a psychopath, but from a strictly economic standpoint, he did good for Germany."
This is what I politely pointed out to the Larouche supporter on the phone. But of course he didn't agree and continued with his crap.
"Larouche guy: WHAT??? Are you saying Hitler was a good man??? YOU LIKE HITLER???
Me: No... I'm saying he was a psychopath, but he did fix the German economy.
Larouche guy: *pause* How can you say Hitler was a good man???"
We ended up arguing for about 40 minutes, during which he called to the phone a self proclaimed european history "expert" as well as an economics "expert" to convince me. They all did essentialy the same thing, throw out more buzzwords and names at me, while I continued to point out to them that the buzzwords they used were improperly defined and the names they threw out were often used out of context. After 40 minutes they ran out of "experts" to call and instead started telling me "come to our meeting, there are more experts there, all will be explained to you at the meeting. We will drive to you right now, where do you live?"
As fun as that conversation was, and frankly it was quiet amusing, disproving the beliefs of 3 fanatics in 40 minutes, I didn't have time to waste on a meeting, nor did I want to be picked up by a van of what I had by then realized to be a cult. I politely refused, but they pressed on, trying to be as accomodating to my needs as possible. After 10 more minutes of arguing about why I was not going to come nor give them my address, I got fed up, so I told them not to call me again and hung up.

These people are quiet amusing, but definitely very dangerous. They are the type that are very polite, but very persistent. You feel guilty telling them to piss off, yet they ignore all implied rejections and politely pressure you to join/give money. Same goes for Scientology, another mainstream cult.
I mean, that arguement with them was the most fun thing I did that whole month, but unless you know EXACTLY what you're getting into, stay the hell away from them. They make you feel so guilty, it's almost impossible to get away from them. I know now that if I had agreed to go to that meeting, I would not have been able to stop there, especially since I would have gone alone.

thanks for sharing. When trying to argue with these guys, they always make you feel alone, like you're the crazy one, and hearing other people speak up about the same thing is empowering, though I am rather saddened to know that they have a prescence in San Diego.

yea its funny how peoples lives that are supposedly being ruined by a destructive cult are so "funny" to people.

oh yea, and why doesn't anybody talk shit about them from the standpoint of ideas? like a forum where they can respond? is dedication to ideas a bad thing? or only in a society fixated with its mediocrity?

sorry, it's just fuckin crazy how the people who "know" how dangerous larouche is are exactly the ones who spend the least amount of time showing me why I'm wrong to like the dood.

I'll respond to this a few months late, because I haven't checked it since then.
I haven't talked about Larouche's ideas because I think the easiest and clearest way to see how insane the group is is to see what they do, how they do what they do, and how they operate. If you want to check out their ideas, feel free to go their web site. All remotely prominent people who have spoken out against Larouche have been slandered by the Larouchists, and at least some of said slander I find believable (like many of their other theories, there is a kernal of truth in the middle which makes them seem less ridiculous than otherwise). As for saying that I haven't spent any time showing you why you're wrong...I did write the letter. I think it's fairly clear.
however, judging from what you said, I'm almost sure you're already in the group, and I've wasted this comment. Please tell me I'm wrong.
You use certain slogans/code words which are only used by Larouche supporters.

The LaRouche youth movement and the LaRouche network is not a joke! It is deadly serious.
My son was killed when in attendance at a cadre school in Wiesbaden Germany and no matter how much people have tried to provide suspicious evidence to the German police they have failed to investigate this death. They declared it a suicide and used this as an excuse to take no verifiable witness statements, destroy the clothes, disregard the tangible suspicions even the fact my son rang me shortly before he was slain begging to be rescued.

Also my son had no history of psychological problems or suicide attempts. This is far more than just a youth movement - there is much much more. We have witnesses to testify that my son was subjected to a sustained mental attack during the days prior to his death. It is my opinion he was subjected to a form of mental torture that ex members of the LaRouche network describe as psycho-terror.

There are too many unanswered questions and perhaps the most puzzling one of all is how has it been possible that for so long this sinister international political organization has allowed itself to hide behind numerous front groups and disguise itself as a legitimate political organization when really it is nothing else but a force for spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, reconstruct the gullible media with their intelligences and reports. All of which misinform and misrepresent. Then there is their means of destroying young lives and wasting their futures. Use of terror, shame, humiliation,deception, fraud and brutal intimidation and interrogation techniques provide ways of closing off the choices of young people to lead their own lives.

Fascist type Propaganda disguised and cleverly presented to deceive and trick - is their first step in planting the foundations for tyranny and inciting hate towards others.
My son was a supporter of equality, democracy, anti- racialism and pro environmentalist issues and hated any form of attack on independent thought or the rights of minorities and so he was tricked and betrayed went to their conference and saw this LaRouche network for what they really were - Liars and deceivers. He said on the last night of his life: "I do not trust LaRouche" Within a few hours he was dead and soon after his death the wife of Lyndon LaRouche Helga Zepp LaRouche told a meeting of 50 cadres that my son was the enemy. He was seen as British, a Jew and brainwashed by the Tavistock. The fact that they wanted him to join them - pretended he was their friend and then when he did want to escape from them they left him to die on the road alone, his dreams smashed like his skull. My son's life ended with him lying in a pool of blood and to this day the people responsible for being with him in his last few hours refuse to ever speak to me and yet are quite content to write articles of defamation against him, myself and the politicians whom they conveniently fantasize are connected with making me attempt to take legal action to get the death investigated.

There suspicious behavior after his death only confirms how responsible they may be.

I call upon every campus and every University authority to investigate the safety of the LaRouche movement before they allow them to come one centimeter near their students. Even the strongest are susceptible to their sophisticated methods of deceit.

Mothers and Fathers do not devote their lives to bring up their children to have them snatched and destroyed by LaRouchites. These people are like the cruel figures in the child's story - they offer the innocent sweets before snatching up their souls and their lives and devouring their futures. Be warned my dear young people. Keep yourselves safe from the harm of people with smiling faces who appear to be your friend and as soon as you have entered their houses will devour you and destroy your capacity for rational independent thought.

Go to www.justiceforjeremiah.com and you will see how the LaRouche network hides behind front groups and hides behind dangerous fantasy ideas about the Tavistock clinic, the Jews, the British, etc.

Erica Duggan

are you doing anything to help your friend get out?

To whom it may concern:

My name is Steven George Rendon and I am currently a student at Yale University, where I unofficially study under the LaRouche networks, as they say.
I offer my empathy for those who are horribly mistaken about the nature of the LaRouche organizations. Without actually having a truthful discussion in order to demystify the coordinated and systematic slander on Lyn, it will be difficult to engage a serious person who is genuinely interested. So I will do the next best thing: offer my brief personal testimony.

After my first year at university, I met the LYM organization in LA, when I first initiated my Classical Humanist studies. There I met the youth, many of whom obviously gave the impression of political urgency and individual personal confidence in study.
The youth are guilty of one thing: being stimulated by a passionate mission to save human lives and to breathe back love into our culture. I know, because I was a full time youth organizer for several months. I took a year off of formal education for that purpose. Never have I once witnessed or given reason to believe that any coercion, physical or mental, is used by the members, including myself. In fact, I peaceably left the organization formally and returned to Yale, where I am active in bringing the beautiful culture of the organization to otherwise disengaged students.

I currently maintain relationships with current members, ex members, full time, part time, grassroot supporters, youth, baby boomers, WW2 generation, the works. All are very engaged in life and promoting a culture of life.

Lyn also indirectly stimulated my interest and then devotion to the theological ideas of Pope John Paul II and his mission to grow a culture of life, Brown people, White people, Black people, Asian, African, rich, poor, and largely misled suburban culture.

I strongly encourage all to engage in the LaRouche local in your area, get involved, check back into life and study, drop the X-Box, stop wasting your money on sex and candy, and begin enjoying the creativity of humanity while you still can. Be optimistic. There is a creator and don’t worry, he’s not pissed! Mosaic, Christian, Jewish, all nations and cultures and religions that respect the dignity of the creative human individual, as reflecting the goodness and creativity of the Creator are in league and on the same team.

Sincerely,
Steven George Rendon

steven.rendon@yale.edu
www.larouchepac.com
www.wlym.com
www.wlym.com/~boston
www.larouchepub.com

I don't know how much I can do at this point. I see him when I get a chance to (ie, when he can make a moment in his schedule to see me and his other friends (we're all away at college, so we're not here that often either)), and I phone him sometimes -- but I don't want to phone too often because I think the other Larouchies might not put the call through if I called too often. I've been out of the country since January and so haven't had much of a chance to stay in contact. It really kills me to think about the whole situation, since there's nothing I can really do about it (short of keeping up as much contact as I can, despite how useless it seems), so I try to put it out of my mind. I care about him, but I can't get carried away with thinking about him (and getting depressed about it) because I have my own life to lead too, which has been depressing enough in its own right. I'll always be friends with him, and I'll try to reach out to him when there's a real chance to, but I don't think there's anything I can (or should) do more than that.

I am a person. I wrote a letter. Everything that is in the letter is my personal experience, and I stand by it forthright (much as you stand by everything you wrote in your letter, Steve Renden). I did not talk to anyone else about the letter before I wrote it, and I have never been a member of any group out to get Larouche. So nothing about it is "coordinated" or "systematic." As for justiceforjeremiah.com ... that is not my task to defend, and I would direct people to other resources (Guardian newspaper articles, etc.) available. It is important to note that all prominent critics of Larouche are attacked (usually personally) by the Larouche press.
It's heartening to hear that you maintain relationships with ex-members of the Larouche group (by ex-member, I assume you mean someone who is no longer a part of the group and no longer agrees with Larouche's political views. If that's not what you mean, please say so.). I was under the (apparently false) impression that ex-members were generally denigrated by current members.

I have empathy for your situation.

Thus far, I humbly submit, from my investigation, that there is a strange phenomenon that is created by the "echo effect" (to use the film OutFoxed's term) of a cooridinated slander or simply misinformation campaign in general. This echo effect seeps its way to the population as God-given truth, or at least remains as a frightening mental element of gossip demanding to be considered.

This tends to generate ex-members who end up convinced of the cooridinated slander and then they develop their own unique (I might gently and without offense add paranoid) twist as to what the heck went on in that obviously unique organization.

Also, by ex-member, I mean to suggest that I am not a full-time card carrying member of the organization. I look forward to the possibility of working with Mr. LaRouche and his associates at any bend in teh road. I see myself contributing to EIR after my initial collegiate studies.

The point is, is that there is a reality of Mr. LaRouche's influence in the Democratic Party. In fact, a serious LaRouche faction exists, but it is very complicated. While at university, I met with Rep. John Conyers at a panel on exposing the Abu Graib torture scandals. There he volunteered to introduce my work with Mr. LaRouche's organizations, in front of established academics of the university.

The main idea to come away with, which you will find in EVERY speech or written work by Mr. LaRouche, is that the most important reality of the universe is found in ideas of causation, or universal principle of change. The important idea that must be realized is the idea of promoting a New Renaissance of human civilization, ending war and famine, or as John Paul II put it, a "culture of life."

The point where critics get desperatedly confused, is where they quote Mr. LaRouche like a religious fundamentalist might quote the bible, that is, slice it up, excerpt a line or two which might look like a justification for the critique, and then they say, "Never mind the content. Don't take that seriously; it's all a dog-and-pony show."

So I would suggest to read Mr. LaRouche's works from the "standpoint of ideas" and you will greatly improve your life, and those around you, as well as the people of the third world who are not around, whether or not you are making very similar individual choices as those that many prejudge to be "LaRouchites." Education is a process of discovery that could never be reduced to labels and words, unless that word corresponds to and provokes a discovery of a beautiful idea, a metaphor.

Respectfully,
Steven

I've had many non-discussions concerning Lyndon LaRouche and the supposed cult youth movement. These are non-discussions because the person in question has read a slander and believes it. The people who slander have not read LaRouche, probably have no idea what physical economy is, or in the case of people like the prominent fascists Milton Friedman (one of the men behind Pinochet) they know alright but they advocate Germany 1936 as the ideal economy. Sorry people but there are some really insane people out there, and I will say but one thing to those that slander LaRouche here, read Shakespeare, read Schiller, make sure you understand what you have read, and then when you know your mind is developed, you are conscious of whether you are a Milton Friedman or a Jean D'arc.
Also, a note to the person who says that Hitler got the german economy going. This is rubbish. There is plenty of evidence proving the real situation. The real situation was that in the 1930s under Hitler, things were going so well that people had a winter of turnips, turnip soup, boiled turnip, turnip in turnip sauce etc & the Nazis were scared that the people would revolt. The economy there was appalling & one based upon primitive accumulation, as is the case today. Primitive accumulation is a cancer upon any economy.
Any questions, do feel free to write.

All the bad things that people say about the larouche movement are true. It's not even possible to have a conversation with one of these people because they talk constantly and won't shut up. So if you're patient enough, you end up getting a really long lecture (it can be hours) about how Dick Cheney is somehow responsible for all the world's problems (including the Danish mohammad cartoons and the Iran conflict, to name some). They try to make everything into some sort of conspiracy, and, when asked for proof, they will say something like, "Well, it's obvious if you've done the research. It's public knowledge, don't you know?" Things get worse from there, and if you're not on the same 'wavelength' as them, they'll make very veiled insults, trying to insult your intelligence. For instance, when I tried to respond to something he said before he was finished (even though he had been talking for some time), he implied I don't have the attention span necessary to talk to him if I didn't listen to him. They will talk for hours, pretending to be your friend and that you actually have something in common, but, as others have noted, if you disagree with them, they will act as though you're the idiot and make no attempt to disguise their insults. I was surprised when the guy told me that they had been singing at a national democratic convention, as that's very lunatic-like. I tried talking to him about the science and math that they claim to use for their economic model, but I got the impression that they have no idea what they're talking about, just throwing around words without any real significant purpose. In this regard, they are very unorganized, working on many unrelated things and trying to correlate them together into some grand economic theory, which they claim works. Of course, if it really worked, they would all be wealthy from the stock market or something similar. But they're not. Based on past experience with others, I almost immediately recognized some of their brainwashing and cult tactics. These include: talking for hours so your mind starts thinking about the things they want you to think about; dominating conversation so that you have little, if any, opportunity to question what they're saying; using insults, whether vague or direct, to cause self-doubt and effect an emotional response; claiming that their ideas are based on thorough research and, therefore, undisputable; promoting an elitist mentality (e.g. we're the only ones who are doing anything; if you're not with us, you're not helping the world; if you don't go to the national democratic convention [with us], you're a nobody, you're insignificant); repeating certain ideas over and over again; demonizing a certain individual (in this case, Cheney), who must be responsible for every bad thing, so there's a common ground of hatred (note that the nazis did this, but against the jews); setting no clear-cut goals for the group, so there's never a time when their work is done and they cease to be mentally and emotionally tied to the group; deifying certain people from the past (Leibniz & Riemann) and present(larouche). They also use subtle techniques to try to make the listener emotionally and mentally dependent on them, such as directing conversation and trying to exert control over the listener. I'm sure there are other negative behaviors they exhibit which I'm forgetting, but these should be enough to convince one of the seriousness of the situation. Those who said that the larouche movement is a cult are correct. My advice is to not make any contact with them at all, but if you're already in contact with them, make a statement: tell them you've found out they're an evil organization and don't want anything to do with them, then leave before they can respond. I recommend against attempting to engage in conversation with them. You can't reason with these people.

So basically, they're a bunch of creeps.