Lyndon LaRouche is a convicted fraudster and virulent anti-Semite. Now he's campaigning for the American presidency. Terry Kirby investigates his sinister global network - and his conspiracy theories about Tony Blair
21 July 2004
He has warned that the international monetary system is about to collapse and that five billion people will die in the ensuing chaos. The Royal Family and MI6 are, he claims, responsible for the international drugs trade. Welcome to the weird world of Lyndon LaRouche, the 81-year-old who is campaigning as an "independent Democratic candidate" for president of the United States in this November's election, for the fifth time. A millionaire who describes himself as "the world's leading economic forecaster", LaRouche is also a convicted fraudster and conspiracy theorist par excellence.
Until recently, LaRouche was virtually unknown in Britain, while in the United States he is dismissed as a crackpot, ignored by both the media and the political world. But since the death just over a year ago of the British student Jeremiah Duggan, a 22-year-old Jew found dead in mysterious circumstances in Germany after becoming involved with LaRouche supporters, his organisation has come under closer scrutiny than it has for decades.
Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a US think tank that monitors right-wing groups, said: "In America we have treated him as a fringe eccentric, which is wrong because the truth is he recruits a lot of talented young people, like Jeremiah Duggan, and attempts to turn them into followers who will mindlessly celebrate a cause that's going nowhere."
Duggan, who was studying in Paris, was killed by traffic when he stumbled on to a dual carriageway outside Wiesbaden, apparently fleeing from unknown dangers. Just minutes earlier he had made distressed telephone calls to his mother and girlfriend. The previous weekend he had attended what he had believed to be an anti-Iraq war meeting but which in reality was a conference organised by LaRouche largely to promote his views. His family are pressing the German authorities to reconsider their verdict of suicide.
continued http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=542953