From: Oiboy27 at aol.com Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 19:35:23 EDT
Doug I think you should try to explain to us or at least figure out for yourself why you don't want to give such an interesting eccentric as LaRouche even the time of day. He's been accused of many things, including of being an anti-Semite. For a few years I had a friend who was involved in the LaRouche organization and I met several people in it, many of whom were Jews and absolutely none of whom were anti-Semites. LaRouche is also accused by the Right of being a Communist. Apparently (this was mainly before I was born - I'm only 29) LaRouche's movement was pretty pro-Communist at one point and a vestige of their communism appears in their absolute hatred of globalism's supernational capitalistic exploitation and world nation-states' subsequent loss of national sovereignty (and thus democratic control of their respective national economic policies). His organization produces several rags, namely a rather poorly-written newsprint thing called the New Federalist, which seems to be aimed at Midwest populist types, but contains a fair amount of (I think) well-intentioned cultural criticism, an extremely respectable straight-policy magazine, and Fidelio, which is a nicely-written cultural magazine that is somewhat less overtly political and has articles on Schubert and Beethoven and Praxiteles and Friedrich Schiller and the like. I still subscribe to Fidelio, although I have no other contact with the LaRouche organization, and the magazine still impresses me for the most part. My father, a Classical music composer and WWII vet, subscribes to it as well and I swear that magazine has slowly made him change from a Republican to a Democrat. One of the things I like the most about LaRouche's "set" is their adherence to "Classical" values (as a student of ancient history and Classical studies at Berkeley, I find this bias of theirs to be laudable) and their analysis of what they call a "classical" value system, which affirms democracy and humanitarianism and humanism (in their take on it at least). The Left's failure to indict or even criticize some of the features of American culture such as adherence to shitty popular music and the romance with nihilism now prevalent in American youth culture will always be stumbling blocks to their causes and I like LaRouche, as freaky and pedantic as his oratorical style sounds, for roundly giving various aspects of post-1960s popular culture the sound thrashing they deserve while essentially remaining in an extremely Democratic, humanistic, and humanitarian tradition. Unpopular, unfashionable, and just strange he may be, and disliked for the time being, but to his credit he does deal in solid ideas of serious and enduring substance and the respect for solid ideas and disdain for fashionable leftisms is what drew me to LBO in the first place.