Larouche is no ‘socialist’

The corporate media is doing another disservice to real socialists and communists by mislabeling Lyndon Larouche as a “communist” or “socialist,” as his followers attack and disrupt health care reform meetings. These activities add a new chapter to this group’s reactionary history, abetted by misrepresentation in the corporate media.

Larouche’s gang has stood outside “town hall” meetings holding pictures of Obama with a Hitler-style mustache and the words “I’ve changed.” The media have attempted to use Larouche’s behavior to attack the left. When covering the rightist attacks on health care proposals, several newspapers and television programs have identified Larouche’s followers and their despicable sign as “communist,” “socialist” and “leftist.” Such claims are a great falsehood and distortion of reality.

Larouche has a long record of serving the capitalist ruling class by attacking progressive movements. Anyone who knows the real history of the left can identify his political philosophy and teaching as dripping with racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and bigotry against lesbian,  gay, bi and trans people.

It is true that back in the late 1960s Larouche was identified with a tendency that was briefly part of the left, but it soon switched to the opposite side of the class struggle. By the mid-1970s it was obvious to anyone on the left in the U.S. that he was no socialist or communist.

This became apparent in the early 1970s when his group launched what it called “Operation Mop-Up,” in which his followers violently attacked meetings of leftist and Marxist groups, especially the Communist Party USA, with lead pipes, chains and other makeshift weapons.

In 1973 Larouche mobilized a campaign against revolutionary poet Amiri Baraka, using not political arguments but slandering the African-American political/cultural leader and, in a viciously racist act, put a caricature of Baraka’s face on the body of a hyena on the front page of a pamphlet published by his newspaper, the misnamed New Solidarity. The Ku Klux Klan and other fascist organizations joined his group’s demonstrations against Baraka.

Most people on the left consider him a neo-fascist, although he never had the kind of mass following that groups like the openly racist Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council could claim at some points in their history.

In 1986 Larouche’s publishing house openly published and distributed the writings of a Nazi general named Frederich August Freiherr von der Heyd. This book, the first English translation of his work, had an introduction by Larouche himself.

During the AIDS crisis, Larouche said he supported the “accelerated death” of people with AIDS in order to “cleanse” the country of the disease. He also praised European skinhead gangs that randomly murdered LGBT people. (New Solidarity, Feb. 9, 1987)

Larouche put himself on the same side as the nuclear energy industry by organizing the Fusion Energy Foundation, a group that attacked those who opposed nuclear power and that was used by the power corporations to promote their products around the world. Larouche also publicized and championed Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.”

Larouche and his tactics of bigoted fear-mongering and senseless violence are the opposite of what communists, socialists and leftists stand for.

Don’t be fooled by the capitalist media, which are only too ready to try to discredit real communists and socialists.