Lyndon LaRouche Is Dead, But We Are Alive

David Lindsay

Lyndon LaRouche in 2003. (Lee Marriner/AP)

Lyndon LaRouche is dead. At least at one time, LaRouche believed that the Queen was a drug dealer, and that Henry Kissinger had been a Soviet agent of influence. As with Harold Wilson, against whom that allegation was also made, the Soviets ought to have demanded their money back.

But no one is in a position to ridicule that if they have ever believed the official version of events in relation to Orgreave, Westland, or Hillsborough. Or any of all manner of claims that have been made by, or in support of, the Clintons. Or in the murder of 100,000 military age males in Kosovo. Or in the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and in their capacity for deployment within 45 minutes. Or in Saddam Hussein’s feeding of people into a giant paper shredder, and in his attempt to obtain uranium from Niger. Or in an imminent genocide in Benghazi, in Gaddafi’s feeding of Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape, and in his intention to flee to Venezuela. Or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Or in Assad’s gassing of Ghouta, as if that had ever been an undisputed fact. And so on, all the way to Salisbury and beyond.

The people who have propounded those fantasies were doing so a very great deal more recently than LaRouche was making his claims about Kissinger or the Queen, and some of them are still peddling the Wilson theory to this day, along with suggestions that the Sino-Soviet split was faked, that the Soviet Union somehow never really collapsed, and much else besides. They are not without access to the very highest levels of the present Government, and they are directly responsible for the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn both within and beyond the Labour Party.

No claim made in the course of that campaign is any less credible than anything that LaRouche ever said, and those claims are being made today, not in the 1970s or the 1980s. In that latter decade, LaRouche’s advocacy of AIDS quarantining was mainstream comment. We know better now. But who did at the time?

Critics raise the questions around the death of 22-year-old Jeremiah Duggan in March 2003. But they themselves have far more questions to answer about the deaths of far greater numbers of young people, largely young men. LaRouche opposed any attempt to impeach Donald Trump, or otherwise to remove him this side of the 2020 Presidential Election. He was right to do so. The first such move would in any case fail in the Senate, and any variation on the second would result in appalling civil unrest. LaRouche scathingly rejected all talk of Russian hacking or what have you. He was of course entirely correct.

LaRouche wanted to restore the Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking, and he wants to return to the Hamiltonian American System, as expanded by the American School, which made America the world’s largest economy, with the world’s highest standard of living: large amounts of federal credit, at low interest rates and over a long term, to build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure, which then pay for themselves many times over. America urgently needs all of that, and so does Britain.

Like America, Britain urgently needs industrial protection through tariffs or subsidies; I prefer the latter, where possible. Like America, Britain urgently needs targeted government investment to improve infrastructure on a colossal scale. And like America, Britain urgently needs a National Bank that promotes the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation. Brexit offers Britain these opportunities at last.

LaRouche insisted that economic growth must deliver high wages, with absolute priority given to industrial and agricultural protection over finance capital, and with the protection of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He advocated co-operation with the BRICS countries, and integration into the Belt and Road Initiative. He had no time for those whose response to climate change was retreat from human progress. He was committed to real mass education, providing the general population with access to the best that had been known and thought. And he was implacably hostile to drugs, viscerally contending against the stupefaction of the workers, the poor and the youth.

We all laughed at what seemed to be LaRouche’s obsession with colonising Mars, but our species is now in the earliest stages of that very process. Today, we were all supposed to laugh at fusion power. But it looks very exciting to me. Think big, or there would have been no cars. Think big, or there would have been no railways. Think big, or there would have been no wheel.

LaRouche never quite seems to have realised that his economic programme had come to depend on the implementation of Modern Monetary Theory. Instead, he still pined after fixed exchange rates rather than rejoicing in the opportunities that could be afforded by the free floating fiat currencies of sovereign states, if those sovereign states were governed by the right people. But he was among the first to identify neoconservatism’s roots in Leo Strauss’s cultivation of an elite that was morally obliged to lie to the rest of us. Most Labour MPs, and most or all Conservatives, would laughably identify themselves as part of such an elite. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

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