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NEW BRITAIN, Conn.—On May 4, students at
Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) interrupted their
round-the-clock preparations for final exams to contest the ideas of a
far-right cult leader invited to speak on campus. A quickly assembled
coalition of groups—including Pride, Wambli Takota, the Progressive Student Alliance, and Youth
for Socialist Action—distributed fact sheets outside the hall where
Lyndon LaRouche lectured a small crowd. The
flyers exposed the homophobic, misogynist, racist, and anti-Semitic
views of LaRouche.
Since
the 1980s, LaRouche and his supporters have
run for political office inside the Democratic Party. LaRouche heads up several organizations, including,
for more than four decades, an organization misnamed the National
Coalition of Labor Committees. NCLC is remembered inside the socialist
movement for a series of violent physical assaults on political
meetings in the 1970s, and inside the gay movement for a California ballot initiative whose
goal was the quarantining of AIDS victims.
CCSU
faculty members who either had had relatives beaten up by his group or
helped to defend socialist gatherings in their youth alerted students
to LaRouche's history. Many gay students had
already encountered LaRouche supporters flyering on
campus and had begun discussing how to respond. A professors' group,
CCSU Profs4Progress, issued a statement of support for the students in
which they described LaRouche as having been
widely condemned for "venomous verbal, and physical, assaults on
progressive groups and individuals." We stand in solidarity, they
said, "with our students in the fight against bigotry—and in the
struggle for civil and human rights."
Despite
his lack of scholarly credentials, LaRouche
was advertised on campus as an "internationally known
economist" and an "expert on Middle Eastern affairs." He
was slated to speak on the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1915 but instead gave
a rambling talk that included a piece on the threat of the "British Empire" to the "American Republic." According to Chip
Berlet, the author of “Right-Wing Populism: Too Close for Comfort”
(Guilford Press, 2000), LaRouche uses "British Empire" as a code word for
British banks—i.e., the Rothschilds and other
Jewish bankers.
Like
many right-wing ideologues, LaRouche blames
the current economic crisis on a tiny subset of the world's capitalist
class based in the financial sector of a foreign country. He tries to
resuscitate standard anti-Semitic prejudices and rightist notions about
a purported rivalry between financial and industrial capital to take
the heat off of U.S. rulers, whom he paints as
victims of a foreign cabal.
Working
people struggling to make sense of the current economic downturn are
urged by LaRouche to unite with U.S. big business and government
to fight off the destruction being orchestrated by "the
British." LaRouche also blames "the
British" for the recent U.S.-sponsored wars in the Middle East and says that the State
Department and certain generals value the information he provides them
through his personal intelligence-gathering network.
While
LaRouche's ideas are irrational and his
presentations chaotic, he has a well-financed operation and the funds
for TV time, staff, estates on two continents, and ballot status.
If
the labor movement proves incapable of providing the leadership for a fightback against the capitalist assault on working
people at home and abroad, rightist figures like LaRouche
will always be ready to step in and lead in the wrong direction.
"Students
need to know just who this guy is," said Marissa Blaszko from Youth for Socialist Action.
"Everybody at this school has to work for a living and the
depression is scaring people to death. LaRouche
may be the first in a long line of right-wing organizers to try to take
advantage of that." The student political and diversity groups are
discussing organizing a fall campus forum, with the help of CCSU
Profs4Progress, on the history and conduct of far-right and fascist
groupings in the U.S. during the last Great
Depression.
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