Views of Lyndon LaRouche and The LaRouche Movement - Accusations of Fascism Against The LaRouche Movement

Accusations of Fascism Against The LaRouche Movement

LaRouche's movement has frequently been accused of being fascist. Those making the accusation include Democratic National Committee chairman Paul G. Kirk, a local Texas Democratic district committee., and Democratic activist Bob Hattoy

Dennis King, a former Marxist-Leninist and member of the Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s and early 1970s, used this thesis in the title of his book-length study of LaRouche and his movement, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). Operation Mop-Up, which is said to have consisted of violent physical attacks on left-wing meetings, is used as a basis for such accusations.

Andrei Fursov, a Russian historian and academician at the International Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck, Austria, was interviewed in 2012 by the Russian publication Terra America and asked to comment on the characterizations of LaRouche in Western media. He replied that intellectuals who have called LaRouche a fascist do not deserve to be called intellectuals, and that the charge has no basis in any real scientific analysis of politics. According to Fursov, it comes from the fact that LaRouche criticizes the supposedly "democratic" but actually "liberal totalitarian" system of the West.

George Johnson, in a review of King's book in The New York Times, said that King's presentation of LaRouche as a "would-be Führer" was "too neat", and that it failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish, while acknowledging that LaRouche's "conspiracy theory is designed to appeal to anti-Semitic right-wingers as well as to Black Muslims and nuclear engineers". In his 1983 book, Architects of Fear, Johnson described LaRouche's dalliances with radical groups on the right as "a marriage of convenience", and less than sincere; as evidence he cited a 1975 party memo that spoke of uniting with the right simply for the purpose of overthrowing the established order: "Once we have won this battle, eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy." At the same time, Johnson says, LaRouche also sought contact with the Soviet Union and the leftist Baath Party in Iraq; failing to recruit either the Soviets or right-wingers to his cause, LaRouche attempted to adopt a more mainstream image in the 1980s. Laird Wilcox and John George similarly stated that King had gone too far in trying "to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi" and that LaRouche's most severe critics, like King and Berlet, came from extreme leftist backgrounds themselves.