LaRouche: Nazi? Fascist? or Sui Generis? Contrarian?

A post from the Factnet by larouchetruth that I find very useful. It was written in response to a post from me that you can read here: http://american-lycurgus.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-larouche-is-and-is-not.html

/T

#1382       03-19-2009, 12:27 AM

larouchetruth  Member   Join Date: Jan 1970 Location: schertz, texas, usa Posts: 79

LaRouche: Nazi? Fascist? or Sui Generis? Contrarian? I actually think there is a greater degree of fundamental agreement than all the back and forth would suggest, on the true nature of LaRouche. But I would like to put back into the discussion some observations I made a while ago that seemed to meet with general agreement, and that others also advanced. First of all, LaRouche in my opinion is uncommonly sui generis. One of a kind. Unique. Unlike any leader, political leader, or cult leader, before in history. So many facets of this weird guy cohabit his world that truly defy any attempt at coherently describing them, or encompassing them in any word drawn, directly or by analogy, from history. While it does seem that most, if not all, of us now will agree that it is meaningless to call him a Nazi, calling him a "fascist" strikes me as almost equally inaccurate--not because he doesn't share lots of characteristics with recognized fascists--but because he also differs enough from any known fascist as to rasie the simple question, what does it evenmean to call him that? Labelling things (or people), if it is not name calling, or lying, is only useful if by adding the label, the thing/person is better understood. In other words, if you didn't know much about something/one, and someone gave it/him a label, would you by that act learn significant useful, accurate information, without also receiving misleading or false information about that thing/person. I think posed this way, the uselessness of the fascist label for LaRouche comes into focus. LaRouche is so significantly different from any other person properly labeled fascist in history, that to call him that is more misleading than informative, because it is incompatible with so much of what he is, or stands for (has stood for). Again, he is too sui generis, too much his own ever-shifting concoction of inconsistent ideas and claims, to be meaningfully captured by any label from history such as "fascism." Some have called him totalitarian, and I certainly think that fits. But that is a way of thinking, it is not an all-encompassing lablel like Nazi or fascist, which calims to be a total description. Totalitarianism, often called (and shorter to type) totalism when used to describe the mind-set of a totalitarian, can be applied to lots of people, and it doesn't imply that you have in any sense fully described someone. Call them a fascist, and you are basically claiming to fully describe someone. Totalism is an attribute of someone, which can coexist with lots of other attributes, so that several people all exhibiting totalist ways of thinking can be in every other way quite different. When one calls someone a fascist, one is describing all the ways that peolple share many attributes in common. One can exhibit totalist traits. One is a fascist.  This goes to the heart of the arguments on this score that European is making, which I agree with. The internal "line" is not 100% governing as to what one can say about a group like this, but it is by the same token not irrelevant either. The complete and total absence of any hint that any member has ever had while in that our thinking was fascist, or racist, or anti-semitic, for that matter, really suggests the impossibility of the organization being considered fascist, racist, or anti-semitic (at least in the form that any other organization has ever been anti-semitic). I know, I know, I've just stepped in the umgawa, and it's a huge pothole full of the stuff. I don't want to ignite the anti-semitic debate that what I just wrote will do if I fail to head it off at the pass right here, so please let me explain what I mean. In real time, lots of us were concerned about appearing anti-semitic, with the protocols stuff in Dope, Inc., with the 1.5 million figure published in NS, and other things. But throughout it, we, at least I am quite sure most of us (if any of you were exceptions, you were way ahead of me), knew, absolutely, as far as we were concerned, that we (each of us personally) didn't have an anti-semitic bone in our bodies, and we would have resigned immediately if we thought for a moment that Lyn was anti-Semitic. So, this fact, and I believe it is a fact, suggests that if Lyn was anti-Semitic (or racist, for that matter, same argument), we have something utterly unique in the annals of human social history, an organization founded by someone with a certain (repulsive) ideology, who recruited every single member on the basis of conscious rejection of that very ideology. What sense would that possibly make. So, it comes down, as several people stated some weeks ago on this topic, to suggesting that LaRouche had what I will call (I forget what these previous posts called it) latent anti-Semitic, and probably racist, attitudes, that descended from his parents, but that have never been conscious to LaRouche himself, and which he adamantly refuses to recognize in himself. This is where, I believe, the power of my argument from last month or more, that LaRouche is above all a contrarian, someone who constitutionally must distinguish himself from every convention of society, from every expert in areas in which he professes to be the real "expert," by making claims that go against all conventional belief. I truly believe that the only reason LaRouche can make the objectively anti-semitic remarks that he does is that in his own mind, he so strongly knows he is not anti-semitic that he simply barges ahead with the belief that he knows the truth, and that just because a lot of the biggest bankers in modern history happened to be Jews, for instance, is no reason to shy away from going after them and showing no concern not to appear anti-semitic.  The upshot of all of this is a confirmation, I believe, of European's contention that objectively, as a matter of fact, the attempt to smear LaRouche and the LC as fascist/nazi/racist has done more harm in terms of actually helping people to join, rather than deterring them, and as such represent a huge disservice to the cause of saving people from joining, and drying up his supply of recruits. Someone earlier today said that King, having once asserted the LaRouche-Fascist-Nazi connection, now can't retreat from it, regardless of how much damage that association has done, and may continue to do. To return, then, to what I started to say about how LaRouche is so different in so many ways from any other fascist in history that to call him that is at best meaningless, and at worst misleading. This is where all the features that we all know so well are relevant. The arguments about which fascist would care about developing Africa, fighting AIDS, building massive water projects to irrigate third world farm land, teaching a classical education in the schools, and all the other specific things he has called for over the years, many of which may have been impractical in the extreme, but which were all clearly pointing in the direction of wanting major economic development to help the world's population, are relevant here. What fascist organization concocts the type of intellectual edifice, drawing from icons since the dawn of history? And so on and so on. So, I simply cannot find any words or phrases that would in any useful or informative way describe "what" LaRouche "is." But, as this Board demonstrates, there is virtually an endless well of things to say about what LaRouche does, how LaRouche thinks, etc. Seeing through LaRouche may seem simple to us now. But accurately descibing him is surely the most complex thing about him.