Would you invite a Nazi or a Klansman? If you did, would you discuss his politics at face value, or his peculiarly cultish beliefs, or his megalomania, or his campaign for elective office?
Dennis King's book on LaRouche tells the history pretty well; better but more dated is Chip Berlet's old pamphlet Brownshirts of the Seventies, and follow-ups in issues of the Public Eye.
At the time that LaRouche was still posturing as a (racist and homophobic) Marxist, and who ordered his goon squads to destroy the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Communist Party USA in violent armed attacks, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, on my motion, declared them to be fascists, and called for a united front to defend any labor or left gathering against their attacks. I believe we were the first to do so. Several Maoist groups were still holding joint meetings with LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees at that time. A few weeks later, he dispatched his goons to my home in Jackson, Miss.; by a stroke of fortune, when I was out of town.
Shortly after that, LaRouche published a pro-George Wallace pamphlet on white Southern labor, which was disguised as a knockoff of my anti-racist SCEF pamphlet, The Roots of Class Struggle in the South, even stealing some of the photos from my pamphlet.
In the 1980s, he made common cause with the largest anti-Semitic movement in the U.S., Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, which led LL's tabloid The Spotlight to gush over the first Marxists who see things as they did.
In contrast to these activities, the crimes for which LaRouche went to prison -- bilking affluent elders of their life savings through credit card frauds, were relatively tame.
All the same, what can be gained by giving him a platform? Ken Lawrence
> I need some counseling. Lyndon LaRouche's publicist called me
> yesterday wanting to book the great man - whom a press release she
> sent along later described as "considered by many to be the world's
> leading physical economist" - on my radio show. Half of me say that's
> weirdly interesting and half of me is thoroughly creeped out. Any
> thoughts?
>
> Doug