LaRouche

December 14, 2002 2:10 AM

What is so scary about what this American is saying ? Call me all the names in the book you wish but I will admit that I enjoyed this interview that Lyndon LaRouche gave in the Turkish Magazine Yarin! Hear Me, Hear Me I must say that I am not a follower nor have never ever been a follower of our perennial Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche! I just thought the article pointed out some interesting points and is a worthwhile read! Why do I feel as an American Citizen that I have to apologize for this? Well go ahead and do a google search- with the name LaRouche along with the words, mind control, fascists, communists, homosexuals, mind-control, CIA, totalitarian, or homosexual etc and you will bring up a multitude of links. What is it about this guy? Why doesn't he get such a bad rap in foreign countries (google search it) h b
posted by thedailygrowl (12 comments total)

Why doesn't he get such a bad rap in foreign countries

Because they want to believe him?

This quote nicely expresses the caliber of his thinking: "The impetus for development of the presently widespread types of violence-oriented and related video games, came from the desire of a certain U.S. military-strategic faction of the U.S. and U.K. to develop a new type of professional soldier."

If it weren't for that damn military-strategic faction, we'd all be playing "Barney has fun with the Willy-wooks" on our Playstations.
posted by shoos at 2:48 AM on December 14, 2002

My initial read makes me think that perhaps LaRouche has taken many elements of the truth and twisted them with many elements of the fanciful and downright bizarre.

Video-games to create schizophrenic killers? I've played games every day (with only a couple exceptions) of the past 19 years of my life, the bulk of those years 4-8 hours every day. I have yet to kill anybody nor show any especially violent tendencies despite relishing the bloodiest games available. While I can believe that Bush is cynically using 9/11 to perform the equivalent of a coup d'etat I really don't believe he nor his administration nor even the persons pulling his little puppet strings were involved.

Nor is it easy to swallow that the current culture clash we're seeing is intentional - it seems much more likely that this is the natural reaction of the US to Muslim irritation with losing their own world-empire with the dawn of gunpowder.

The comments on a shift to a consumer society and the companion trends toward decadence/bread & circus mentality (Fox News, anyone?), however, ring true for the most part.

Overall I'd say it's a jumbled mess that detracts from what little is left of American intellectualism simply by associating beliefs and attitudes that ought not to be mingling.
posted by Ryvar at 3:03 AM on December 14, 2002

Larouche is a natural for foreign countries - one of the few native English speakers around who can write prose that sounds like a bad translation. With his occasional good points embedded in a murky matrix of facts that sound plausible to a non-specialist, but are not necessarily accurate, Larouche is the poster boy for the importance of academic peer review.
posted by sheauga at 6:09 AM on December 14, 2002

I always see Larouche supporters on the streets here in Philly, trying to gather up support for the pepetual candidate.... they're always a bit creepy, too.
posted by ph00dz at 7:18 AM on December 14, 2002

Is that a parody??? I never realized that part of the root of the world's social and political ills is the Catholic church five miles down the road: The center of [the nastiest Catholic group inside the U.S.A., the Arlington (Virginia) Diocese] is the same St. Catherine's of Siena which formerly featured the head of the FBI, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the now convicted, former FBI agent Robert Hanssen. The ideology this network is explicitly fascism of a Carlist variety... I'd better go check it out; thanks.
posted by win_k at 7:37 AM on December 14, 2002

Here's a LaRouche website with better design.
The LaRouche minions used to replace my university newspaper in the racks with their own newspaper, pictures of the Queen of England with prison bars superimposed as the top story, with his doublespeak ranting about how she and the pope were the kingpins of world dope trade. This was before LaRouche went to prison. He didn't pay tax returns, or even file income taxes, and defaulted on BIG loans. Good monetary policy. Basically, as I recall, he was for EXTREME trade protectionism, fixed exchange rates and some banking restructuring that was so couched in his convoluted gibberish that only he could possibly implement it. Try, just try to read the campaign platform. I'm no economist, but taken as a whole this is incoherent, right? Nut job.
posted by planetkyoto at 7:53 AM on December 14, 2002

LaRouche is always a great read. He's the Andy Kaufman of Politics
posted by Fupped Duck at 8:24 AM on December 14, 2002

No! No! You've all got it wrong: Larouche is a long term agent working for them

He functions as a giant squid, ejecting a dense black ink cloud of strangely compelling but disassociated theories (backed up by great masses of wierd details), to confuse the masses and obscure them and their true intentions....

And remember - if you have to ask who they really are, you are already in their power
posted by troutfishing at 8:26 AM on December 14, 2002

Ah, LaRouche.

Back in my senior year of high school, in 1986, as part of the government classes, the entire grade was supposed to vote in a mock election that paralleled the current presidential race. As an outsider candidate, a small group of us got LaRouche onto the ballot and championed him as an alternative to Reagan, et al. (It was all satire, we were horrified by his positions.)

Reagan still won by a landslide, but we were able to get LaRouche to poll into second place with something like 35% of the vote. The teachers were not amused.
posted by warhol at 8:59 AM on December 14, 2002

A couple days ago I found a flyer in a free newspaper rack with the headline, "Is Your Senator or Clergyman a Moonie Sex Cultist?" After a brief paragraph identifying Larouche as the leading Democratic candidate for President in 2004, it ranted on and on about the evil Moonies, and featured a photograph of the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Sun Myung Moon hugging and smiling for the camera. Fun stuff.
posted by Acetylene at 10:19 AM on December 14, 2002

I've played games every day (with only a couple exceptions) of the past 19 years of my life, the bulk of those years 4-8 hours every day. I have yet to kill anybody

That's only because your parents supported and buoyed your fragile little mind with the knowledge that Santa was real. Without that outlet, you'd surely have gone off the deep end.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:47 AM on December 14, 2002

Actually, not to substantiate the otherwise-wingnut LaRouche's statements, the very well-accepted "On Killing, by US Army Lt. Col Dave Grossman, goes into a fair degree of detail regarding the quest to lower psychological barriers to murder.

The Grossman book argues - with substantiating documentation - that DoD fears over low soldier "kill rates" led them to experiment with techniques we'd now recognize as FPS games to lower these inhibitions - with highly successful results. Rounds expended per soldier were far higher in the Gulf than in Vietnam, Korea, or WWII, as a result of the disinhibitory training practices introduced in the interim.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:57 AM on December 15, 2002