Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement

The Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM or LYM) is part of the political organization of controversial American political figure Lyndon LaRouche. The LaRouche Youth Movement's "war room" is in Leesburg, Virginia.^[1]

History

According to spokesperson Barbara Boyd, the LaRouche Youth Movement was founded in 2000.^[2] Its first major campaign was in opposition to the recall of California Governor Gray Davis in 2003, which involved the circulation of tens of thousands of pamphlets and vocal opposition to the candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger.^[3]

In an article in the University of California, Berkeley independent student newspaper, The Daily Californian on February 11, 2004, reporter David Cohn described the local chapter of the LYM as "30 college-aged youths" who spent several hours each day undergoing instruction provided by the LaRouche organization. One member, 23-year-old Jason Ross, told Cohn that he had dropped out of Stanford University in his junior year to join the movement. "We are in a complete breakdown of the financial system and we know that. We can use our time in a more appropriate manner than going to school," he said. Cohn also talked to three other members who had all quit school to join the movement. The Daily Californian reported the movement's numbers as "about 100 young people from Los Angeles to Oakland" who "travel to dozens of college campuses aggressively recruiting members and not hesitating to ask newcomers to quit school." As a result of the Internet, there are active chapters in nations like Japan where LaRouche has no official organization. Most recently the LYM has expanded its activity into the African nations of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.^[1]

LYM members have been active in the Democratic Party at the state and local levels. In 2006, LaRouche Youth Movement activist and Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee member Cody Jones was honored as "Democrat of the Year" for the 43rd Assembly District of California, by the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.^[4] At the April 2007, California State Democratic Convention, LYM activist Quincy O'Neal was elected vice-chairman of the California State Democratic Black Caucus,^[5][6][7] and Wynneal Inocentes was elected corresponding secretary of the Filipino Caucus.^[8][9][10] O'Neal is also president of the LYM's Democratic Party Club, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Legacy Club, which is affilitated with the California Democratic Council.^[11][12]

The group received $462,850 in 2006 from the LaRouche Political Action Committee.^[13]

Pedagogy and campaigns

LaRouche is highly critical of contemporary college curricula, and has designed his own pedagogy for members of his youth movement, which he describes as "the reliving of the crucial discoveries of universal physical-scientific principle by, successively, the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato and the modern science of Johannes Kepler," combined with the performance of classical vocal music, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach's "Jesu Meine Freude".^[14][15][16]. They spend time in what are called "Monge brigades", which emphasize readings of Vladimir Vernadsky, Alexander Hamilton, Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann.^[17] The LaRouche Youth were assisted around the U.S. in performance workshops on classical music, as well as African-American spirituals, by well known musicians William Warfield and Sylvia Olden Lee^[18], and in drama performance by actor Robert Beltran.^[19]

From 2006 to 2007 members of the "Basement Team"^[20] produced an extensive set of computer animations described as a pedagogical tour through Johannes Kepler's New Astronomy [12] and Harmony of the World, [13] plus another set on the discovery of the orbit of Ceres entitled The Mind of Gauss. [14] After an anonymous website appeared which discussed the same works by Kepler, team members asserted that it was a plagiarized and inferior copy of their own work.^[21] In August 2008, the team released an hour-long video entitled The Harvard Yard, in which they elaborate their claim of plagiarism and charge that the "Kepler's Discovery" site was the work of Harvard University. [15] Beginning in early 2008, the Basement Team began to produce videos, including an 80-minute documentary on the clash between LaRouche's conception of the American System of economics and the free trade system. It is entitled Firewall – in Defense of the Nation State. [16] This was followed by the release on July 3 of a feature-length sequel entitled 1932, narrated by Robert Beltran,^[22] and a December production on scientific method entitled The Matter of Mind.^[23] They are also producing regular short videos on topical issues.

On November 27, 2007, the LYM launched a campaign against social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook, with the mass distribution of a pamphlet entitled "The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is the Devil in Your Laptop?".^[24] The pamphlet says that Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace, and Microsoft, owner of Facebook (Microsoft only owns 2.5% of Facebook), are involved in social engineering to destroy the cognitive powers and potential for political leadership among young people. It also attacks Wikipedia in similar terms.^[25]

The LYM has disrupted university lectures to distribute their material.^[26] On October 23, 2006, a group of LaRouche Youth Movement members twice disrupted a Connecticut U.S. Senate debate between Alan Schlesinger, Ned Lamont, and Joseph Lieberman. According to The Day, as Joe Lieberman spoke, the hecklers "sang a harmonized ode targeting Vice President Dick Cheney, which, according to the group's website, is unofficially titled 'The Fat-Ass Nazi Song'."^[27]

During the election campaign of 2006, the LYM came into conflict with organizations including the Ayn Rand Institute, which the LYM accused of promoting genocide in speeches by its representatives at various campuses. LYM members confronted Institute executive director Yaron Brook at various universities across the US, heckling him and throwing meat^[28] and "liquid-filled condoms". In one case, at the University of California, Irvine, 15 LYM members, some of who violently resisted,^[29] were arrested.^[30]

LYM members frequently combine political activity with choral music performance.^[16] They sang outside the Democratic Party Convention in Boston in 2004, and in 2007 they performed choral music with lyrics about impeaching Dick Cheney in classrooms at Harvard and Boston University.^[31][32]

During 2007, LYM members have been seen in on the streets, campuses and conferences emphasizing two issues in particular: a call by LaRouche for the impeachment of Dick Cheney, and the assertion that the theory of human-caused global warming is a fraud motivated by Malthusianism. On this latter issue, LYM have confronted Al Gore on several occasions at his public events. In Argentina, LYM leader Betiana Gonzalez disrupted Gore's speech after he recommended that Argentina reduce its population.^[33] A similar incident took place earlier in the year in Montreal, Canada.^[34] In the Philippines, LYM members debated a variety of spokespersons for the Global Warming theory.^[35]

The LYM has criticized Campus Watch and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, claiming that they act as "thought police" to stifle opposition to the Iraq war and the Bush administration.^[36]

Criticism and accusations

Journalists, former members and law enforcement officials have made a wide variety of accusations of the LaRouche organizations, including a Scotland Yard report that called them a political cult.^[37][38] Investigative journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King has described the founding of the WLYM by LaRouche as a way of maintaining his legacy after his death by "[going] back to his roots, the roots of his movement in the radical campus movement in the late 1960s".^[39] Avi Klein of the Washington Monthly describes this as an element of a campaign LaRouche created to blame the "first generation" of his own movement for fundraising failures, and to appeal to young members by channelling "the rage new acolytes felt toward their parents at a nearby, internal enemy".^[40]

The Queen and drug trafficking

According to book critic and columnist Scott McLemee:^[41]

The emergence of the group is all the more surprising, given that LaRouche himself has long since become the walking punchline to a very strange joke. He is known for some of the most baroque conspiracy theories ever put into circulation. Members of the LYM now deny that he ever accused the Queen of England of drug trafficking—though in fact, he did exactly that throughout the 1980s. At the time, he won admirers on the extreme right wing by denouncing Henry Kissinger as an agent of the KGB and calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined.^[42]

A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review denied that he had said the Queen was a drug trafficker, calling it a "bit of black propaganda,"^[43] but in 2004, in a segment about the death of Jeremiah Duggan during a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Wiesbaden in March 2003, BBC's Newsnight re-broadcast a BBC interview with LaRouche from 1980, in which he can be seen accusing the Queen of being involved in drug trafficking. He said: "Of course she's pushing drugs. That is, in the sense of a responsibility, the head of a gang that is pushing drugs, she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it."^[44]

Jeremiah Duggan

After spending six days at a Schiller Institute conference and LYM cadre school in Germany, 22-year-old Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from London who was studying in Paris, was believed to have run onto a busy road in what the British coroner called a "state of terror", and was killed. The German police investigation concluded that it was a suicide. A private forensic consultant said that he had found evidence of serious assault with a blunt instrument, but no public authorities have given credence to this claim.^[45] A LaRouche spokesman has said the young man killed himself because he was disturbed. In October 2004, a British inquest into Duggan's death heard allegations from his mother that LYM and the Schiller Institute may have used brainwashing techniques on her son to persuade him to join the movement.^[38][44]

Michael Winsted

An ex-member of the LaRouche youth movement has asserted that the LaRouche Youth Movement calls parents "brainwashed baby boomers".^[38] Ex-member Michael Winsted says that although members are convinced that they are involved in important political work, the job of most members is only to collect money and recruit more members.^[38] He says that group leaders "were constantly asking us if we would die for these ideas" and that members that become critical or disillusioned by the movement often become the focus of brutal psychological attacks by the other members, including accusations of having "mother issues", of homosexuality, sexual deviance, and allegiance to anti-LaRouche conspiracies.^[38] They are often encouraged and even led by the group's managers. Winsted recounts:

I'm caught off-guard, like, what the hell just happened?...The yelling goes on for maybe five or 10 minutes while I'm furiously backpedaling...They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer...It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable.^[46]

Jeffrey Steinberg of the LaRouche Movement responded by portraying Michael Winsted as an agent of the Washington Post, who "briefly infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the LYM."^[47]

Notes

External links

• Official website

Youtube videos

• Videos: LaRouche Youth interrupt Joe Lieberman at Connecticut debate
• Video: LaRouche Youth at Texas Democratic Convention
• Short video documentary on LaRouche Youth and Global Warming

Critical

• Washington Post: "No Joke" (a long article on LaRouche and the YLM)
• Article about LYM in campus newspaper The Daily Californian
• Letter on LaRouche Youth Movement at UCSD
• "LaRouchiacs" an Ever-Present Element On Howard's Campus
• Article on Dealing with a LaRouche recruiter
• Larouche Exposed – Pasadena City College

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