Statement on Jeremiah Duggan

With this article I am urging more ex-members to step forward. Do it however you want, but just DO IT! One good way is to post a statement on the factnet or at a personal blog, as I do.

***

I was at the LaRouche-conference 2003, where Jeremiah Duggan participated too. I spent two days at the youth conference afterwards, and then I went back home to Sweden.

The night before Jeremiah died, or perhaps two days before I spoke to him.

At the conference he had voiced his opinion about several things, among them that he wondered whyt many of the people the movement were attacking were Jewish, but also why so many "enemies" were Brittish. The movement said that Sharon was "fascist" and he wondered if that was not antisemitic to say such a thing..

On the night I saw him in a very heated exchange with some of the french and american LYM (LaRouche Youth Movement members) at the youth hostel in Wiesbaden, where I too was staying. The exchange I listened to had to do with if the world could be changed or not, if humans are good or not. Duggan were of the opinion that mankind was evil and that ist was not possible to change the world to the better. He was clearly in a bad shape. Almost crying. The LYM told him not to be psychosexually impotent. They yelled at him that he was not "serious" about his life..

He left the discussion (or the Lym left him, I cant remember). I went up to him to calm him down and see what I could do. I was already at that time on my way to leave the organization and did not like the way new "recruits" were put under psychological pressure. I simply asked him what HE thought about things and let him speak.

First he voiced his worries about antisemitism, but added that that was no BIG problem. The biggest problem with the LaRouche-organization was that it was so "optimistic" that it believed that it could change the world. He told me that he had decided to visit the conference because the conference had an Anti-racist, anti-war and were opposed to "the conservative revolution" in The USA. But all this optimism about mankind and the nature of man that the LaRouchemovent apparently stood for, made him disturbed. It reminded him of a cult, he told me.

That REALLY freaked him out, because his view was different. He explained that he believed that mankind was evil and that the earth was the hell of another universe, a kind of giantic prisonhouse. Mankind are here to SUFFER, he told me. God is not a good God, but God is the devil.

This is what I remember.

My conclusion after the discussion with him was that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. A breakdown that partly had to do with his very "black" and pessimistic worldview but mostly had to do with the methods the LaRouche cult used to try to recruit him and persuade him to join the cult.7

(I spoke to Poul Rasmussen from Denmark about my worries about him afterwards.)

After the death of Duggan the cult ordered an halt to all internal discussion about this. All obeyed! And that was one of the reasons I got mad at the organization. The things that happened was obviously problematic for the cult.



That is my statement.

/Torbjörn J.
May 28, 2011

--------------------------------------

PS


To get a sense of hos I view it, I will add one relevant letters where I write things that I have forgotten by now.

1)

From a letter to an anti-LaRouche activist, 2009.

I do not know what happened later but know that beating opponents was NOT a part of the cultmethods at the time. (That does not exclude that he was beaten. There could have been a fight with individual members or something could have happened that made him angry. Remember that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown the night (?) before.) My view is still that he either committed suicide or had a breakdown and did not know what he was doing. (THAT IS MY OPINION!)

In retorspective my view is that he was most probably recruited in the way nearly all new recruits are recruited. he was recruited to come to the conference because it wanted to change the world.

When at the conference two things combined. First that he reacted to
the cultmethods in the organization, especially the false optimism of it. Secondly, the false optimism of the organization made him suffer a crisis, because his basic worldview was pessimistic: i.e. the world is evil, god is evil, the earth a prisonhouse, etc...

I am a bit unsure what happened then. Often when a new contact comes to a conference he or she continues to be provoced by the difference between what is said by the movement, and what some people call the movement (nazi, etc). Often they will voice their critizism in the open at the conference. The notes of Duggan, shows that this happened, and I can confirm that he reacted and asked if it is not antisemitic to
say that some jews, like Sharon, are fascist.

It is not true that opposition is seen as negative immediately. At a youth conference it is recepted in two ways. Either as good, because it is an opposition of a person that can be persuaded to be a hardcore member (Many fulltimers, old as well as LYM has had doubts, and expressed them in public at conferences, at first), or it is seen as a threath, because it desorganizes other potential recruits.

My impression at the time was that he was treated according to the first group. I remember that I spke to some people after the intervention Duggan made, and they saw it as fruitful (this could have changed later on, I dont know about that).

At the evening (I at least think it was this evening) I spoke to Duggan for some time. he talked about his fear about antisemitism, but confessed that it did not seem probable. The big thing he reacted on that evening was the OPTIMISM. he said that the organization is wrong because it believes that mankind is good and that politics can change the world to the better. His basic worldview was pessimistic: i.e. the world is evil, god is evil, the earth a prisonhouse, etc...

He talked about this for so long that I came to the conclusion that Duggan might be one person that has planned or plans to commit suicide. He is not stable. Ther older members I spoke later to said that "we know that, and have talked about it". Just before we talked he had gone through an "egostripping" session... 6 LYM:ers from France and the US stood around him and all "discussed" his opposing arguments and that tries to persuade him that he is wrong!

We talked about Shakespear instead for some time, and talked about his worldview, and then we parted.

On the day after or two days after, I left to Stockholm, and when I came there I heard that he had committed suicide. Probably two days after we met. I dont know what happened with him during these days...

I believe that the LYM made a demonstration at downtown Franfkurt or Wiesbaden one of these days. If so, it would have been during that demonstration/booktable deployment that someone made antisemitic remarks against him (I believe J tennenbaum told the mother that this had happened once.). Most probably that happened. Some old antisemites used to attack the jews inside the movement. I have seen that happen several times.

That a new LYM recruit is exposed to this kind of violent "attacks" (to use the LaRouchian language) during a deployment, is seen as good. But considering the state he was in I think that this was disasterous for him. I did not participate at the demonstration/rally, I think I was at the office doing intelligence work that day.

I cant remember everything. Some years has passed since the conference. But I want you to know the things I know! The dating might be other than what I have told, this is my picture of it.

And it was no antisemitic/nazi conference, not even a coded one! :o) It was a conference by a conspiratorical harmageddon cult, that wanted to recruit
people based on false optimism!

Six years after the conference, at a time when many, or even the majority, of the participants has left the organization after realizing that it is a dangerous totalitarian cult. Perhaps one would be able to get them to speak out if one treaded the cult more like a cult?

http://american-lycurgus.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-duggan-campaign-why-alienate.html

http://american-lycurgus.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-on-jeremiah-duggan.html



/T

On Jeremiah Duggan

A quick comment on Jeremiah Duggan. Just for the record.


I maintain that the LaRouchemovement is a CULT, especially the youth movement and the U.S. branch of the movement. I also maintain that I believe that the methods the cult used, and still uses, (social control, etc) led to the death of Jeremiah.

He most probably had a breakdown of some kind and the "organizers" of the movement most probably scared the shit out of him, not too uncommon when youngsters get involved with cults.

The reason I know is that I was there and spoke to him the day before, or two days before, and he did NOT feel well. And the young LaRoucheorganizers where pushing him more to the brink, with the demand that he should agree on everything, stop being "psychiologically impotent", and "join" the movement fulltime.


As I repeatedly have told the mother to Jeremiah, the police is free to contact me, anytime! But, please remember, that the story I have to tell, is what I saw and what I knew, and it is not something weird about a "nazi-conspiracy"!


/T

Don Veitch book, Beyond Common Sense

Don Veitch book, beyond Common Sense, is available on the internet.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55699439/Beyond-Common-sense

The Danger In LaRouche Psycho-Politics.

Lifton’s words are appropriate:

“Rather than stimulating greater receptivity and
‘openness to the world,’they encourage a backward
step into some form of ‘embededness’- a retreat into
doctrinal and organisational exclusiveness, and into
all-or-nothing emotional pattems more characteristic...
of the child than the individual adult “ (page 436)

“And if no peak experience occurs,
ideological totalism does even greater violence to the human
potential, it evokes destructive emotion, produces
intellectual and psychological constriction and deprives
man of all that is most...
and imaginative - under the
false promise of eliminating these very imperfections
and ambivalence which help to define the human
condition. This combination of personal closure, self
destructiveness, and hostility towards outsiders leads
to the dangerous group excesses so characteristic of
ideological totalism in any form.It also mobilises
extremist tendencies in those outsiders under attack,
thus creating a vicious circle of totalism.

Drawing Hitler mustaches on pictures of Barack Obama

Reading about the recent elections in the USA, and the Tea party, I notice that the LaRouche movement has had one great impact upon the current US political debate.

The LaRouchies introduced the habit of comparing Obama with Hitler. The were the once who first drew Hitler mustaches on pictures of Barack Obama.

Now many of the the tea party activists are doing the same thing, drawing Hitler mustaches on Barack Obama!

That is the kind of things that happen when the LaRouche "Democrats" show their "democratic" face.

/T

The end of the world did not happen... again!

It seems like good ol' Lyndon did it again. He predicted that not later than October this year the financial system would collapse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilMhuiqBEo

He has certainly predicted these kinds of things before. Just read this:

http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Cult.FcrasH

Unfortunately the police did a great mistake when they raided the offices of the LaRouchemovement around 1987. They seized the archives of the offices. That means that it is a bit hard for the youngsters in LaRouches-no-longer-so-young-movement (LYM) to read the old issues of New Fed of EIR. But I would recommend that they do so if possible.

They would find that Lyndon has predicted "with 100% certainty" tha crash of the financial system several times. Why did the system not crash in 1970, 1975, 1977, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1995 etc?

Lyndon LaRouche makes Jehovas Witnesses look sane in comparison, After all they have only been so stupid, as to claim that the world would collapse at a fixed date, about four times in a century. Lyndon has done so about forty times in 60 years!!!

Please compare Lyndon with the witnesses:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/witness8.htm

/Torbjörn

PS

Yes, I am back. I will keep this blog alive.

Not that active for the moment...

Please excuse that I am not so active at the moment, and that my blog is not updated. I am busy with something called: LIFE! Something the members in the LaRouchecult should try too. Life is wonderful!

/European

The truth about LaRouches campaign for "better" healthcare...

The signature "Eaglebeak" posted this on the Factnet recently. Bear in mind that LaRouche uses the same method INSIDE the organization that he calls "nazi-economics" when talking about the US government!

/T

------------------------


Boom (er) Bust

Overheard in Giant

You might call it gossip, if it were more light-hearted. But it's really pretty grim.

I have heard several reports around town recently about members in their 50s--people who have been in the organization since their college days--being thrown off insurance.

This includes:

People with chronic, debilitating diseases

People who went to prison for LaRouche, for Pete's sake

People who haven't held a real job in their whole adult lives, and are too sick (and unskilled) to get them now

People with thousands of dollars per annum in prescription drug bills

They're old, they're expensive--why, some may even be losing their passion for Lyn's Kampf--

So whoosh! Out they go!

What I can't figure out is how Lyn, crowding 87, thinks he's still younger than springtime.

The pictures on LPAC, when the Youth "LPAC editors" are dumb enough to put them up, certainly give that fantasy the lie.

I can't figure out how the "Boomer" members can put up with the obvious fear and loathing Lyn exhibits towards them.

But then I remember.... It's spelled C-U-L-T. The Soviets had their Prolet-kult, Bismarck had his Kult-ur-kampf,, but all that's left to Lyn is the Kult.

No Uncle Joe or Iron Chancellor he.

The double standards of Lyndon LaRouche's cult: health care!

Double standards is always a sign that something is wrong, in "normal" politics and religion as well as in cults, like the LaRouchemovement.

However, double standards can also empower a person that is in a cult to think for themselves! The American cult expert Steven Hassan ( http://www.freedomofmind.com/ ) writes in his books that it is very often the double standards that helps people leave a cult. When they see that the methods of the cult is another one than the teachings of the cult it is an alarm-bell, and it CAN make the cultmember think about what the heck he or she is doing.

I had many such double standards that helped me when I decided to stop bullshitting and leave the LaRouchemovement. For example:

* The cult claimed to be against "labor intensive work" (slave labor) but depite this the central parts of the cult (especially in the USA) worked seven days a week with the cult for more than twelve hours a day (except sunday, when they worked less), almost for nothing!

* LaRouche claims to base his method on HYPOTHESIS, and claims that no human can know the absolute truth, depite that LaRouche himself in EVERY speech and article claims that his worldview is THE truth, and it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to find one single hypothesis in any of his "scientific works" ("Hypothesis non fingo", to be blunt!)

* Since LaRouche holds the truth, no opposition is allowed and people can be subjected to harch attacks for doing such "outrageous" things as listening to Beatles of Elvis! (=i.e. the movement is NOT agapic, as it claims)

* This last thing means that the organization is dualistic, manichean, even if it claims to dialike dualism and manichean thinking. Everything is black and white, good and evil... And there are no greyscales and no colours...

All current members should look at the campaign for the healthcare in the USA. It is claimed that Obama is like Hitler because his health care reform is like the nazi genocidial program to "eliminate useless eaters" (disabled for example).

This is how Nancy Spannaus descibes it in the June 12 EIR:

"The Obama team showed no shame. Again and again, burnished under a patina of bureaucratic jargon, they demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the most vulnerable of American citizens, insisted upon stopping so-called unnecessary medical care for as much as a third of the American population, and put their version of fiscal health before the lives of people. While they brazenly pour trillions of dollars of Federal monies into the very banking institutions which have brought the world economy to its knees, they tell American citizens, particularly those on Medicare and Medicaid, that they are "overconsuming" health care, and have to be stopped, "for their own good.""

I have no opinion on the US health care reforms and Obama, I know too little, but this much I can say: There is much that is wrong with it and I know for sure that some jerks in power believe that it is too expensive to help all people. That is not only wrong, it is also bad economics. I agree on that!

But before attacking others the movement should perhaps look at its internal policy!

My question to all that are members in the LaRouchemovement is if you have an insurance that is the best possible? Do all youngsters that join the movement immediately get an insurance that covers all? And is the families insured too, as is the case with many, many insurances in the USA.

Off course it is not!

People that have left the LaRouchemovement in the USA can tell that it is not so. The organization pays the most basic health care, but the insurances, if they even exist, are the cheapest and simpliest possible!

And this winter there was a big debate in Leesburg (the HQ for the cult) because the movement actually decided that family members that are no longer members of the cult or cannot work with the cult (for medical reason) should not get medical help, in the form of insurances for the family, from the cult.

And people that suffer some medical problem because he or she is sitting in a dusty office eight (!) days a week, it is not automaticly so that the working conditions are improved and the cultmember gets help. No, not at all!

So, why attacking Obama when you first should attack Lyndon and get a health care that is ok, not like today when the health care "insurances" and working conditions are so lousy that only other employers that use "labor intensive work" (slave labor) can be compared to it!

And... Lyndon LaRouche recently claimed that abortion is wrong and some kind of murder! Well... EVERY OLDER MEMBER OF THE CULT KNOWS WHAT PRACTICES THE CULT USED UP UNTIL THE 80s! It was abortion, abortion, abortion! The cult does not like children, that is a FACT!

If you still believe in the movements campaign for health care, you should begin by kicking LaRouches butt, not by attacking Obama!

/T

Is the LaRouchemovement a cult? Check out Dr. Robert J. Lifton's criterias for what a cult is.

DR. ROBERT J. LIFTON'S CRITERIA FOR THOUGHT REFORM
THOUGHT REFORM: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALISM
CHAPTER 22
(Chapel Hill, 1989)
THE FUTURE OF IMMORTALITY
CHAPTER 15 (New York 1987)

Any ideology -- that is, any set of emotionally-charged convictions
about men and his relationship to the natural or supernatural world
-- may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction. But
this is most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most
sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in
their claim, whether a religious or political organization. And
where totalism exists, a religion, or a political movement becomes
little more than an exclusive cult.

Here you will find a set of criteria, eight psychological themes against
which any environment may be judged. In combination, they create an
atmosphere which may temporarily energize or exhilarate, but which at the
same time pose the gravest of human threats.

(BRIEF OUTLINE)

1. MILIEU CONTROL

the most basic feature is the control of human communication within
and environment if the control is extremely intense, it becomes
internalized control -- an attempt to manage an individual's inner
communication control over all a person sees, hears, reads, writes
(information control)
creates conflicts in respect to individual autonomy
groups express this in several ways: Group process, isolation from
other people, psychological pressure, geographical distance or
unavailable transportation, sometimes physical pressure
often a sequence of events, such as seminars, lectures, group
encounters, which become increasingly intense and increasingly
isolated, making it extremely difficult-- both physically and
psychologically--for one to leave.
sets up a sense of antagonism with the outside world; it's us
against them
closely connected to the process of individual change (of personality)

2. MYSTICAL MANIPULATION (Planned spontaneity)

extensive personal manipulation
seeks to promote specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such
a way that it appears to have arisen spontaneously from within the
environment, while it actually has been orchestrated
totalist leaders claim to be agents chosen by God, history, or
some supernatural force, to carry out the mystical imperative
the "principles" (God-centered or otherwise) can be put forcibly and
claimed exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs become the only
true path to salvation (or enlightenment)
the individual then develops the psychology of the pawn, and
participates actively in the manipulation of others
the leader who becomes the center of the mystical manipulation (or
the person in whose name it is done) can be sometimes more real than
an abstract god and therefore attractive to cult members
legitimizes the deception used to recruit new members and/or raise
funds, and the deception used on the "outside world"

3. THE DEMAND FOR PURITY

the world becomes sharply divided into the pure and the impure, the
absolutely good (the group/ideology) and the absolutely evil
(everything outside the group)
one must continually change or conform to the group "norm"
tendencies towards guilt and shame are used as emotional levers for
the group's controlling and manipulative influences
once a person has experienced the totalist polarization of good/evil
(black/white thinking), he has great difficulty in regaining a more
balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality
the radical separation of pure/impure is both within the environment
(the group) and the individual
ties in with the process of confession -- one must confess when one
is not conforming

4. CONFESSION

cultic confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal
and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself
sessions in which one confesses to one's sin are accompanied by
patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring within
small groups with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal change
is an act of symbolic self-surrender
makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between
worth and humility
a young person confessing to various sins of pre-cultic existence can
both believe in those sins and be covering over other ideas and
feelings that s/he is either unaware of or reluctant to discuss
often a person will confess to lesser sins while holding on to other
secrets (often criticisms/questions/doubts about the group/leaders
that may cause them not to advance to a leadership position)
"the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you"

5. SACRED SCIENCE

the totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic
doctrine or ideology, holding it as an ultimate moral vision for the
ordering of human existence
questioning or criticizing those basic assumptions is prohibited
a reverence is demanded for the ideology/doctrine, the originators of
the ideology/doctrine, the present bearers of the ideology/doctrine
offers considerable security to young people because it greatly
simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a
sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying
the truth about human behavior and human psychology

6. LOADING THE LANGUAGE

the language of the totalist environment is characterized by the
thought-terminating cliche (thought-stoppers)
repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon
"the language of non-thought"
words are given new meanings -- the outside world does not use the
words or phrases in the same way -- it becomes a "group" word or
phrase

7. DOCTRINE OVER PERSON

every issue in one's life can be reduced to a single set of principles
that have an inner coherence to the point that one can claim the
experience of truth and feel it
the pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is a conflict
between what one feels oneself experiencing and what the doctrine or
ideology says one should experience
if one questions the beliefs of the group or the leaders of the group,
one is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them
to even question -- it is always "turned around" on them and the
questioner/criticizer is questioned rather than the questions answered
directly
the underlying assumption is that doctrine/ideology is ultimately more
valid, true and real than any aspect of actual human character or
human experience and one must subject one's experience to that "truth"
the experience of contradiction can be immediately associated with guilt
one is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one's own evil
when doubt arises, conflicts become intense

8. DISPENSING OF EXISTENCE

since the group has an absolute or totalist vision of truth, those who
are not in the group are bound up in evil, are not enlightened, are not
saved, and do not have the right to exist
"being verses nothingness"
impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or destroyed
one outside the group may always receive their right of existence by
joining the group
fear manipulation -- if one leaves this group, one leaves God or loses
their transformation, for something bad will happen to them
the group is the "elite", outsiders are "of the world", "evil",
"unenlightened", etc.

From the factnet: Lyndon LaRouche and the double standards on Obama

The LaRouchemovement views Obama as a new Hitler, so once again... The contrast between what the movement claims that it aims for, and what it does, or says about Obama is, is striking!

This thing was posted by "poe" on the Factnet last night! I want to share it with you! ( http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showpost.php?p=379425&postcount=2279 )

/T

****************************************************************

POST #2279 06-05-2009, 04:07 PM poe


Yesterday the President of the United States of America gave a speech in Egypt, the country where Schiller claims Monotheism was born. In that speech, the President:

1) Called for a Dialogue of Civilizations between Islam and the West.

2) Spoke of that which unifies the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

3) Called for a Two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestine dispute.

4) Taught about how the Arab Renaissance helped produce the European Renaissance.

5) Demanded a halt to the building of Israeli Settlements in Palestinian Territory.

6) Reminded the world that the United States was born out of a war against Empire.

7) Called the United States a historical force for progress in the world.

8) Called for removing all combat troops from Iraq by 2012.

9) Stated that a day to day improvement in the economic life of the Palestinians is necessary for the security of Israel.

10) Preached about how Non-Violent methods are the best means fot achieving political change.

and

11) Upheld the fundemental right of all nations, even Islamic ones, to the Peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Now, all eleven of these things were things that we were fighting for back when I was a member of the Labor Committees. So , after the speech, I went to all of the LaRouche websites to try to see what The Organization was saying about it. But all I could find there was posters of the President with mustaches scribbled on them, and video clips of children cussing.

Have fun! :o)

First go to the "LaRouche memo-generator". Here you can generate random "internal memos" from LaRouche. All made up by combining real sentences by Lyndon LaRouche.

The spooky thing with the generator is that the "memos" are not half as crazy as the real memos LaRouche writes, but that it still looks like an authenthic LaRouche-product!

http://laroucheplanet.info/memo_engine/nonsense_lhl.htm

Secondly. The Swedish cartoonist Lindström (bonton.se) has drawn a picture from the latest cadre school with LYM, the LaRouche Youth Movement. It is the picture below! Please notice that it is Helga Zepp LaRouche that is giving the speech!



Thirdly! A reader of this blog noticed me that the cartoon figure Herman looks and acts a lot like Lyndon. that is true: http://comics.com/herman/?Page=2 Here is a picture of a typical evening at the residence of Lyndon and Helga!

Lyndon LaRouche compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler!

http://larouchepac.com/node/10280

"The Hitler program has been revived by the Obama Administration," warned Lyndon LaRouche. "This is straight Nazi stuff. It's not a quibble; it's not an interpretation. This is a direct copy of the philosophy of the Nazis. You cannot duck that issue. This is Nazi stuff, and it's explicit. We know all this stuff from Hermann Goering and so forth in the 1920s, and after that with their international connections, like certain Wall Street firms. We have been warned, and we act accordingly. People who condone this are criminals, because they either knew, or should have known, what they are doing. They either knew, or should have known."

"This is mass murder," LaRouche said. "Obama has adopted Hitler's program. There is no reason to hold one's tongue...This is Hitler's policy now being echoed by Obama. Let's not allow any compromise. You have to attack this directly. He has adopted Hitler's genocidal health policy."

Lyndon truly follows on the path of such "gigants" as the late Frankhauser!

/T

KKK collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche, Roy Frankhouser, dies!

Longtime KKK leader Roy E. Frankhouser Jr. of Reading dies

http://www.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=138941

By Dan Kelly,Reading Eagle

The self-proclaimed head of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania died Friday in Spruce Manor Nursing Home, West Reading, with no known survivors.

Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., 69, who had operated the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ in the 100 block of South Fourth Street, which doubled as the local KKK headquarters, had resided in Spruce Manor since November 2006.

The Berks County coroner's office is seeking next of kin to claim Frankhouser's body.

Anyone with information about survivors or who wants more information call the coroner's office at 610-478-3280.

During his life Frankhouser had been convicted of an international fraud scheme, allegedly involved in assassination plots against U.S. government leaders, acquitted of a stabbing a rival Klan leader, lost an eye in a bar fight and waged a battle to get his white supremacist show on public access cable television, according to just a few of the dozens of newspaper clippings in the Reading Eagle archive.

The longtime Klansman and former member of the American Nazi Party was convicted in February 1995, following a four-day federal trial in Boston stemming from allegations he advised a white supremacist's mother to destroy evidence linking her son to the desecration of synagogues in Randolph and Brockton, Mass., as well as alleged assaults on black Brockton residents.

On April 28, 1993, Frankhouser was acquitted in Cumberland County Court of assault charges stemming from a 1992 stabbing incident in a hotel where a large KKK meeting was being held.

Frankhouser, then 53, was acquitted following a two-day trial.

The jury cited self-defense in finding the Klansman not guilty.

Frankhouser testified that stabbing victim Frank Mosley, a KKK security guard, and several skinheads ambushed and attacked him while he was attempting to enter the meeting. James W. Farrands, imperial wizard of a large Klan faction, was at the hotel.

Frankhouser said he defended himself with a Swiss army knife he had in his possession.

Frankhouser claimed a victory for free speech in 1985 when he launched "Race and Reason" on Berks Cable TV, the predecessor to BCTV.

He later hosted "White Forum" on BCTV.

He was on television on either network for more than a decade.

On Feb. 17, 1988, Frankhouser was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000 for advising political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. to obstruct a federal grand jury probe into an alleged fundraising fraud scheme.

During the trial, Forrest Lee Fick of Stony Creek Mills testified that he and Frankhouser were asked by a member of LaRouche's organization to kill former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger during a flight to Europe.

According the newspaper records, Frankhouser was first arrested in 1961 at age 22 for kicking an Atlanta police captain in the shins during a protest.


TO READ MORE, LOOK HERE:

http://www.laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Cult.RoyFrankhouser

And from a book by Dennis King:

http://lyndonlarouche.org/fascism21.htm

http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/fascism22.htm

Lyndon LaRouche, the nonagapic homophobe that thinks it is right to beat homosexuals!!

Today I post a DISGUSTING quote by Lyndon LaRouche on homosexuality from 1986!

/T

"We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word.

Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay", they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw!) The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users. There are 20 million cocaine sniffers in the United States, at least. Of course it does affect their mind; it affects the way they vote!

What was the problem? The problem was the cultural paradigm shift. If someone comes up and says, "Yeah, but you can't interfere with the civil rights of an AIDS victim" — what the devil is this? You can't interfere with an AIDS victim killing hundreds of people, by spreading the disease to hundreds of people, which will kill them, during the period before he himself dies? So therefore, should we allow people with guns to go out and shoot people as they choose? Isn't that a matter of the civil rights of gun carriers? Or, if you've got an ax — if you can't aim too well, and just have an ax or a broad sword — shouldn't we allow people with broad swords and axes to go out and kill people indiscriminately as they choose, as a matter of their civil rights?

Where did this nonsense come from? Oh, we don't want to offend the gays! Gays are sensitive to their civil rights; this will lead to discrimination against gays!

They're already beating up gays with baseball bats around the country! Children are going to playgrounds, they go in with baseball bats, and they find one of these gays there, pederasts, trying to recruit children, and they take their baseball bats and they beat them up pretty bad. They'll kill one sooner or later. In Chicago, they're beating up gays that are hanging around certain schools, pederasts; children go out with baseball bats and beat them up-which is perfectly moral; they have the civil right to do that! It's a matter of children's civil rights!"

/Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The End of the Age of Aquarius?" EIR (Executive Intelligence Review), January 10, 1986, p. 40.

Cult or no cult? (Part 4) Is Lyndon LaRouche omnipotent and Omniscent, or just a macho bully?

I re-read today what an ex LYM-member posted on the Factnet in June 2004:

"(2) Is it possible at all that one human being should be right about everything all the time? When has Lyn EVER admitted being wrong? Does that sound normal? Therefore, is this someone I should be following, someone who implicitly claims to be infallible about everything? "

Good question. If one looks at the way the organization speaks about its guru Lyndon LaRouche, it actually seems like LaRouche is God.

Lets look at that. I borrowed a thing from this website: http://www.lava.net/~hcssc/Omni-God_Challenge.html )


The basic Christian theology centers around the proposition that there is "One Almighty" omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-benevolent "God" (embodied in Jesus) and one less-powerful, less-knowing, less-present, all-evil devil-god named "Satan." A host of "angels", "demons", "spirits", and other supposedly immaterial entities of varying superhuman but less-than-supreme power accompany, assist, and obey either "God" (good) or "Satan" (evil).

The organization believes that:

Lyndon is omnipotent -- that "He" is all-powerful; nothing is beyond "His" capability as a POWERFUL POLITICIAN; WORLD HISTORY CENTERS AROUND HIM, everything that has happened in politics the last 40 years has either been WITH him or against him, no politician has been greater and he is superior in every way, Lyndon is ALWAYS RIGHT (per definition) and has to my knowledge NEVER EVER admitted that he has been wrong about ANYTHING!

Lyndon is omniscient -- that "He" is all-knowing; nothing is outside or beyond "His" knowledge; no mind smarter; perfect in knowledge; He can grasp ANY subject, he is a universal GENIUS; and... Lyndon is ALWAYS RIGHT (per definition) and has to my knowledge NEVER EVER admitted that he has been wrong about ANYTHING!

Lyndon is omnipresent -- everything that happens on this planet has to do with him, all powerful people knows who he is and the evil oligarchs are fighting his ENORMOUS INFLUENCE UPON GLOBAL POLITICS; nothing is beyond "His" reach; "He" is at one with time and space; and Lyndon is ALWAYS RIGHT (per definition) and has to my knowledge NEVER EVER admitted that he has been wrong about ANYTHING!

Lyndon" is omni-benevolent -- that "He" is always good; incapable of evil; no greater love; "He" is perfect in every way; He is AGAPIC... And besides... Lyndon is ALWAYS RIGHT (per definition) and has to my knowledge NEVER EVER admitted that he has been wrong about ANYTHING!

And the enemies you have are all SATANISTS!

Well, Lyndon... If you were omni-benevolent, why do your slaves work seven or six and a half days at the offices, at least twelve hours a day, for NOTHING?

If you were omnipresent, howcome do no politician (more than your dear buddy Mugabe) like you, or even want to cooperate with you?

If you were so damned omniscent, why could you not forecast who bought your underpants, and were the money for food and clothes and housing came from, when you were asked about that at your trial?

If you were so damned omnipotent, why is it that you have often been so wrong, but are such a big COWARD that you dont admit that! (It takes much more strength to admit that one has been wrong, than to never admit any faults or flaws!)

You are no God!

And thus, the organizers and members are WRONG when they hold on to a worldview that more or less ASSUMES AXIOMATICLY that Lyndon is some kind of God.

/T

My Swedish blog is created!

For those who can read Swedish I have started the work to create a Swedish blog. You can read it here:

http://eap-larouche.blogspot.com/

/T

The tour James Bevel did to Australia 2004

Hylozoic Hedgehog posted an interesting thing from The Searchlight on a tour James Bevel did for the organization to Australia, in 1994.

James Bevel was Lyndon laRouches choosen Vice president Candidate at the time. Last year he passed away after being sentenced by a court to 15 years in prison for incest against his daughters! According to the things said at court he was abusing his own daughter while he stayed in Leesburg at the time, 1992 to 1994, and was guarded by the security guards of the organization.

I remember that I spoke to him when he visited Europe for a conference that year. I sat down together with some other young members and he spoke about - sexuality! He said that he had had sex with cows(!) when he was young, but now he had learned to control his sexuality! He talked much about sex, when he spoke to youngsters...

The post about his tour in Australia shows that CEC spent 25000 dollars on a tour with public meetings where perhaps a dozen new people showed up.

“You have to ask yourself, why do these people bother? Possibly because they know they’re on a good wicket, flying around the country, chatting away on their long-distance phone calls, playing away at being secret service agents and spending other people’s money like there was no tomorrow.

“$25,000 spent for four or five new faces in the audience. That sort of gross financial negligence is usually reserved for government departments. That’s nearly a third of what the League of Rights spends in a year."

The post can be read here: http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showpost.php?p=378887&postcount=2053

And please read my post on Bevel too: http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showpost.php?p=378897&postcount=2060


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The deeds of a good friend of Lyndon LaRouche...

In March this year the wife of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe dies in a suspicious car accident, in which the Prime minister gets injured. Tsvangirai is a long time opponent of the President and dictator Mugabe, whom Lyndon LaRouche considers to be an ally. Tsvangirai is considered to be a Brittish agent by Lyndon because he works for democracy in Zimbabwe...

Many opponents of Mugabe has had sudden "accidents" recently.

According to President Robert Mugabe, deadly crash was "due to the hand of God"...

This is a drawing by Zapiro about the "accident"...



Apparently some of Mugabes allies knew about the crash BEFOREHAND (read more here). The Police apparently looted the belongings of the Prime minister (Click here to read more) and the minister himself has ruled out that it was an assassination attempt (read here) but most people believe it was a staged assassination attempt.

By the way. On May 5 a group of Human Rights Activists whose only crime is that they want democracy, was sent to jail. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/05/zimbabwe.activists.jailed/index.html#cnnSTCText

But in the eyes of Lyndon LaRouche democracy and Freedom is not so important as he views all that fight for democracy in Zimbabwe as Brittish agents, who are led by George Soros.

/T

Cult or no cult? (Part 3) THE LAROUCHE MOVEMENT AS A CLASSIC CULT

Hylozoic Hedgehog has had a series of posts on the Factnet about a book by a former member of the australian organization, that wrote a book called "Beyond Common Sense: Pyscho-Politics in Australia" (BCS).

HH quotes some things the author of this book (Don Veitch) has written about the LaRouchecult. The link to his post is: http://www.factnet.org/vbforum/showpost.php?p=378816&postcount=2017

I am quoting some of it here, please go to the original post to read the rest:

/T

**********************


In the last section of BCS (pps. 77-101), Veitch attempts to put the LaRouche operation in Australia into some perspective. Although it is impossible to summarize all of his arguments here, his account is extremely shrewd and at times remarkable. Drawing from his lifelong background as an anti-Communist activist, Veitch essentially sees LaRouche as someone whose entire career mimics a “Leninist”-style cult. Drawing on the writings of Michels, Weber and Robert Lifton, Veitch vividly portrays the LC as a classic political personality cult centered on worshiping the charismatic Great Helmsman:

“At all times the great feats and courage of LaRouche are promoted: he has claimed to be a communicant with God; he speaks to the great minds of history; he has changed the course of human history; he is at the forefront of every contemporary political issue; he is the central concern of evil forces for He alone can save the world in the areas of economics, philosophy, music, physics, mathematics, linguistics, and culture, LaRouche is claimed to have made dramatic breakthroughs, his feats are paraded before the loyal followers.”

Veitch then later quotes Max Weber: “Charismatic domination means a rejection of all ties to any external order in favor of the exclusive gratification of the genius mentality of the prophet and hero.”

Veitch quite insightfully remarks:

“Promotion of LaRouche to absurd proportions is just one of the tactics to keep office workers in line and hard at fund-raising activities. It is the organization’s role to convince the organization itself of this fact. With such blind assurance the organization can ask for the supreme sacrifice. The LaRouche myth has degenerated into an organizational tool is Australia, and susceptible people have gone along with it. The goal of the LaRouche movement IS the LaRouche movement. It exists for no other purpose than to perpetuate its own (self-adjudged) purity of method and doctrine.”

Veitch then continues:

“The major role of the organization is to maintain the organization, and this means maintaining The Leader and those who walk in His Image. A premium is placed on being more loyal than the loyal [Tony and Nancy this means you – HH]. . . . . Thought control within the organization is THE business of the LaRouche-CEC operation. And to this extent, purges are an organizational imperative. An annual purge against evil is conducted. No dissent is tolerated, for if it was, the charisma of the leader and his role as an Agent of History, would dissipate and the game would be over. . . . A compliant, unquestioning ‘lapdog’ attitude in encouraged [Tony and Nancy . . . HH]. Certain chosen members are encouraged to seek out and spy on potential trouble spots and to report back to the ‘leadership.’ . . . The consequence of this internal witch-hunting (the Australian LaRouche organization literally does hunt down the ‘witch-mother’), is the creation of an intimidated organization and a sterility of human thought, quite the opposite from what the organization claims fulsomely to be nurturing – a new Golden Renaissance.”

As a result,

“A main cultural feature of office practice at the CEC, a practice cultivated, encouraged and developed by the leadership, is the culture of the ‘underhand method.’ Such a culture encourages spying, denigration, undermining, paranoia. It is of an authoritarian and undemocratic nature. In any mentally sane organization it would be denounced as ‘backstabbing,’ ‘petty-minded,’ and office infighting, but in the Australian LaRouche organization it is an organizational tool, it is elevated to a semi-mystical process of cadre training. In the end it is corrupting. It encourages megalomania in its leaders [Tony and Nancy . . . Oh, never mind . . . HH], and entrenches their paranoia.”

As a result of this process the entire LaRouche project in Australia was rooted in fraud:

“The Citizens Electoral Councils is an organization which calls upon people to make great efforts for humanity. It considers itself revolutionary, challenging the axioms of society and battling to save the world from an impending holocaust, a New Dark Ages. It appeals to the finest traits of individuals, but in fact betrays them. . . . Whilst the ICLC members are willing to make the sacrifice, believing that this is the unselfish and high minded duty to humanity, what in reality is happening is that they are placing themselves into a controlled environment, and making themselves vulnerable to manipulation.” In short, “The CEC-LaRouche movement is merely repeating the errors of a thousand discredited sects and cults.”

(...)

Veitch concludes Beyond Common Sense: Psycho-Politics in Australia this way:

“The ‘freedom’ or input that adherents of LaRouche in Australia might have is the freedom and input of a McDonald’s Franchisee. When joining up you accept the corporate design, logo and product. There is not changing of the ingredients or the hamburger promotions and franchisors must be gratified in some way.

“One wit has claimed that the LaRouche movement is a combination of a McDonald’s corporate structure, Christ and his disciples, the tub-thumping and martial rules of the Salvation Army, the missionary zeal of the Mormons, and the zealotry of the Communist International (the ‘Comintern’).

“In all these you will find the essential ‘herbs and spices’ of the LaRouche political organization.”

Because the ICLC has become so ossified, the group “is now a self-perpetuating, self-congratulating, inbred, inward-looking oligarchy. Its techniques and technology are out of date. The brain has ossified. Little has been achieved [little that is outside of being sent to jail – HH]. The leadership is made up of ageing increasingly disillusioned misfits, still waiting. Members are, at all times, made subservient, unquestioning and regimented. For those deemed to be ‘backsliders,’ a campaign of psychological terrorism and abuse is directed against them until they either conform or leave. LaRouche in Australia now presides over an increasingly ineffective but deluded group of people.

“In the initial tilt for world power, the message was a Marxist one, in the second long march to world victory, the organization has crawled into a Catholic-ecumenical mould – in much the same way as a hermit crab occupies a new home. This strange mixture has created irreconcilable ‘contradictions’ within the LaRouche structure. This accounts for some of its bizarre behavior.”

The last page of BCS ends this way:

“This then is the story of how a promising start was made to a new political organization capable of challenging existing structures and orthodoxy, but was destroyed by a compliant party secretary, conniving to hand a promising structure over to a foreign organization espousing suspect psychological theories based on highly discredited Marxist dogma. The CEC in Australia is a ‘swamp.’

“That such a process should be allowed to occur is beyond psychoanalysis, beyond common sense, and well into the realm of self-destruction.

“It is impossible to start a renaissance of the mind through a vicious thought-control program.”

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Confessions by someone who is NOT a coward!

.
David P. Goldman, a former associate of LaRouche, wrote yesterday an article about his time in the cult. I am posting an excerpt of it here!

/T

-------------------

Confessions of a Coward
By David P. Goldman

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1409

(...)

The critic Harold Bloom once argued that the characteristic American religion is a species of gnosticism, and I have good reason to believe it to be true, having spent some years—from 1976 to 1986—in a gnostic cult under the leadership of a man named Lyndon LaRouche.

Was it all bad? In March 1984, Norman A. Bailey, then special assistant to President Reagan for international economic affairs, told NBC news that the LaRouche organization had “one of the best private intelligence services in the world.” The supply-side publicist Jude Wanniski—my future business partner—had introduced me to Bailey in 1981, when I ran the economics desk for LaRouche’s publications. Among my colleagues were several researchers who went on to distinguished careers. The Asia desk chief, for instance, was Dan Sneider, afterward a distinguished correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Mercury, and now director of a university research institute. European economics was handled by Laurent Murawiec, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute; the Middle East desk was headed by Bob Dreyfuss, now a regular contributor to the Nation, American Prospect, and New Republic; and the chief science writer was Jonathan Tennenbaum, a brilliant mathematician who had taught at the University of Copenhagen.

We were all about thirty, and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.

Here is one answer: We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward.

During the 1960s, LaRouche was a one-man Trotskyite splinter group, teaching free-lance courses on Marxist economics at whatever venue would have him. He culled student radicals with an intellectual bent who were repelled by the mindlessness endemic on the left in the late 1960s. LaRouche’s pitch was insidious: How can you justify yourself morally unless you know that what you are doing is right? There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.

We were atheists, of course—the concept of “religious intellectual” was unknown to me in my student days at Columbia and the London School of Economics—and the idea that truth might come through revelation seemed beyond snickering. The Vietnam War, the crisis in race relations, and the cracks in the economic structure of the 1970s persuaded us that we had to do something and that indifference was morally inexcusable.

And that is where LaRouche had us. His intellectual method resembled the old tale about stone soup: Having announced that he had the inside track on the hidden knowledge that underlay Western civilization (one of his essay was titled “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites”), he attracted a small parade of intellectual orphans, whom he then put to elaborating the details. By the late 1970s he had collected some highly credentialed acolytes, including a group of physicists and mathematicians at his front organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation.

LaRouche claimed to trace a tradition of secret knowledge across the ages, from Plato and Plotinus, through the Renaissance, and down to the German scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Of course, that raises a question: If there exists this kind of knowledge, then why isn’t it universally shared? The reverse side of the gnostic page is paranoia: There must be a cabal of evil people who prevent the dissemination of the truth.

In LaRouche’s Manichean view of the world, a conspiracy had suppressed the truth in the service of evil oligarchs. Starting with Aristotle, it continued through to the nominalists, the British empiricists, and that supposed pinnacle of modern evil, Bertrand Russell. The Venetian Inquisition, the British Empire, the Hapsburg family, the Rockefellers, and the Trilateral Commission all figured variously in this grand conspiracy against LaRouche’s supposed intellectual antecedents. Jewish banking families kept popping up in LaRouche’s accounts of the evil forces.

You might think—you should think—that this would have sent us running for the exits. But, Godless and faithless, we were all possessed by a fear of being Jewish, and LaRouche offered us a rock to hide under. LaRouche feigned a sort of philo-Semitism, praising marginal figures who could be fit into his mold: the Platonist Philo of Alexandria, for example, and the German rationalist Moses Mendelssohn—Jews, that is, who sounded more like Greek philosophers than like Jews. He also portrayed himself as the opponent of Nazi tendencies that lurked everywhere. In a caricature of the reductio ad Hitlerum, everything he didn’t like pointed to the Nazis. The economist Milton Friedman, whose students had advised the Pinochet regime in Chile, must be a fascist because LaRouche didn’t like his economics, and I coauthored a book with LaRouche in 1978 with that silly allegation.

LaRouche’s anti-Semitism was rarely in the open, but it often lurked just beneath the surface. Sometime in the early 1970s, he had played political footsy with the Liberty Lobby, a group headed by the anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Willis Carto. In a Carto-influenced article LaRouche later tried to suppress, he put the number of Jewish dead at around 1.5 million. I knew about all this, and I looked the other way.

In 1978, I did a study for LaRouche of the economics of the narcotics traffic. The numbers I crunched showed that narcotics was a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year business—not a controversial conclusion today, but at the time it seemed startling. LaRouche took my quantitative study and combined it with the paranoid musings of other researchers into a book, Dope, Inc., that had unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones. I knew about this, too, and again I looked the other way.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, LaRouche was doing well, with a pocket publishing empire, a more-or-less accepted scientific front in the Fusion Energy Foundation, and a remarkable capacity to raise money (a good deal of which, it later turned out, was obtained by fraud). Nonetheless, within a few years nearly all his key people had quit. Once they began to engage the real world at a serious level, they broke free of LaRouche’s spell. For my part, I owe a great deal to Norman Bailey, then director of plans at the National Security Council. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the United States would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s.

After I became convinced that the Reagan administration knew what it was doing, my break with LaRouche was inevitable. He cashiered me as economics editor for his publications in 1982, for the offense of predicting (correctly) that the Reagan reforms would bring about an economic recovery (since if the American economy was on the mend, it did not need a savior like LaRouche). But I was still stuck emotionally in LaRouche’s flypaper. I moved to Europe, consulted for Bailey, and pursued musical research under the auspices of another LaRouche front, the Schiller Institute, until 1986.

I had grown up as a red-diaper baby in a secular Jewish household (although my parents put me through the motions of a Bar Mitzvah at a Reconstructionist synagogue). I joined the left-wing Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair and spent a summer on a kibbutz in Israel where the Israeli flag flew underneath the red flag of international socialism. Like so many leftist Jews, I came to believe that only a universal solution to humanity’s problems would solve the problems of the Jews, and the more universal the solution, the less Jewish. In plain English I was afraid to be Jewish: The less Jewish I was, and the more universal, the less likely I would be to be killed for being Jewish.

And yet, physical fear in the background of the Holocaust was only one consideration. Another, deeper fear kept me at a distance from Judaism. My only sense of the sacred had come from classical music, the great avocation of my adolescence. The over-representation of Jews in classical music is no accident: Jews who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge God sometimes find music a safer means by which to evoke religious feelings without the fearful demands of encountering a personal God. To approach the sacred, Jewish tradition admonishes, is both exalting and dangerous, and it is less frightening to look for the sacred in Mozart’s sonatas than on Mt. Sinai. I had studied piano intensively and composed a bit while young, and I continued my studies through college. This bound me to LaRouche more closely than many of his other dupes, for he was a great aficionado of classical music, using the ill-gotten proceeds of his fund-raising machine to sponsor public as well as private concerts by first-class musicians.

Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: “Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread.” For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva—of return.

(...)

/David P. Goldman