I was thinking very selectively and limited when a member. I let myself do that. I fooled myself. I wrote quite a lot of things for the LaRouchemovement and confess that I was guilty of intellectual dishonesty. And I was guilt of not PROTESTING against the intellectual dishonesty of the movement that I knew about.
In the movement we talked a lot about looking for the true "platonic" traditions in history. We searched for thinkers that supposedly followed the "platonic" and "leibnizian" methods. We traced the "long lines of history" and looked for the co-conspirators of Schiller, Leibniz and the American revolution. We contrasted this to the negative, evil forces of the oligarchs. The venitians, the anglo-dutch financial oligarchs, scottish rite freemasons, satanists and hedonists, etc...
This method of dividing the world in good and evil, in darkness and light, is called DUALISM! Manichean thinking! LaRouche has written some quite negative things about dualism and manichean thinking, but according to his customary method of double standards, he himself often practices what he condemns! Thus... In LaRouchian writings about history there are no greyscales, everything is black and white!
The aspect of LaRouchian dualism that I dislike most these days is this dualistic constant need for perfect heroes.
The kings, artists, thinkers and politicians that are "good" in history, accordning to the LaRouchian dogma, are always written about as "heroes". They have almost no problems. They are all thinking very much like LaRouche... There is a video from the 80s on Schiller that is quite typical of this. Schilller is described as the perfect, all-knowing, excellent poet that just overcame everything and fought like some kind of superhuman being.
In WW2 FDR is, according to LaRouchian thinking, the symbol of everything good and Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill symbols of everything evil. That means that all Churchill did is declaired good and all FDR did is declared evil. If there are some peoblems with a heroe like FDR it is discussed briefly, preferably in a footnote.
The problem with that is visible in the case of FDR. There are some things that happened during WW2 that is declared as "evil". The holocaust, Hitler, and such things that the axispowers did, is off course seen as evil by the organization, but also allied actions like the allied bombings of Germany, the use of nuclear bombs, the dividion of Europe after the war, the Morgenthauplan for Germany (deindustrialization of germany after the war).
The problem with the black-and-white thinking of LaRouche and his foloowers is that it simplifies history. Ok, I would agree that the four examples above of "evil" things that the allies did during the war are indeed no good! But, were it just the Brittish that was behind this? FDRas a matter of fact were all for these four things. When Stalin and Churchill divided Europe after WW2 FDR supported them. FDR supported the Morgenthauplan too!
In order to avoid making the same mistakes all over again that we have made in history we need to be ruthful. We dont need stories about "heroes" without faults. We need to look at how ordinary people with faults dealt with great problems and did some things that sometimes were better than other things, and sometimes they made things that were disasterorus. But when looking truthfully at all sapects of a persons choices, and the outcome of the choices, one can learn things and develop as a human being.
If one only gets to see the "good and heroic" things a person did, the historic figure will be harder to identify with. He or she is more distant to the ordinary person. I mean. All of us know that we are not perfect and still we, who are not perfect, hear stories about heroes that are supposedly perfect.
History is a fascinating subject. too fascinating to be destroyed by LaRouchian dualism. The world is simply not just good and evil. there are a lot of greyscales in between and person that do so called "good" can often do so called "evil" and the opposite.
/T
PS
Interestingly enough... Dualists also said that that which had to do with the soul was good (like intellectual activity) and that which had to do with the body is evil! The organization seems to have the same kind of dualistic division into good and evil. The intellect is the highest good according to LaRouchian thinking, sex is some kind of necessary evil!
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