Lyndon Larouche
Conspiracy theorist who ran for US President and believed that the Queen was head of a drugs cartel
LYNDON LAROUCHE, who has died aged 96, was a Trotskyist-turned-rightwing extremist, conspiracy theorist and convicted felon who founded one of the oddest political movements in the United States and stood for president eight times from 1976.
Fired by the conviction that “history is nothing but conspiracies”, he claimed that The Beatles were “a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications” to undermine American morals; that “the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund”, including the Duke of Edinburgh, were pushing the world towards a Third World war, and that Henry Kissinger was a communist agent.
He claimed that “the Nazis did not kill six million Jews” and alleged that Jews had founded the Ku Klux Klan. He linked the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to the 9/11 attacks and blamed the Iraq war on Jewish financiers’ influence on the US.
A favourite target was the British Establishment: he claimed that the Queen headed an international cocaine-smuggling cartel. It was his mouthpiece, The Executive Intelligence Review, that made the claim, taken up by Mohammed al Fayed, that the Queen and Prince Philip were behind the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
According to Larouche, the Royal Family was set on terrorising the US into becoming a British colony again, giving the House of Windsor a monopoly in the US cocaine market. The only person powerful enough to foil this plot was the Princess of Wales, so she had to be eliminated.
In the mid-1990s he claimed that the former Times editor Lord Rees-mogg and The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-pritchard were part of a British Intelligence plot to destabilise the Clinton administration.
Larouche had grown rich through a company that developed computer
software for the haulage industry and another that printed newspapers for high schools. His political organisation operated through an array of front groups and sponsored candidates at state and local levels. He succeeded in developing links with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klansmen.
By the mid-1970s his movement had 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America. Though he never won more than 80,000 votes in his presidential bids, many were taken in. In 1980 he outpolled Governor Jerry Brown of California in a Democratic primary in Connecticut.
In the 1980s Larouche, through his group Panic (Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee), he convinced 2 million Californian voters that Aids was created by “the Soviet war machine” and that sufferers should be sent to quarantine camps to die.
In 1986 and 1988 he gained enough public signatures to force California to hold referendums on whether Hiv-carriers should be quarantined and gay men, restaurant workers and schoolteachers given mandatory testing. The ballots returned a “no” vote both times, albeit with 2 million votes in favour the first time and 1.7 million the second.
In 1988 Larouche’s headquarters were raided and he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for attempting to defraud tax collectors and for failing to repay more than $30 million in loans from his political supporters. After his release in 1994 he ran for president again in 2000 and 2004.
In Europe, Larouche activists made inroads through the Schiller Institute, a Wiesbaden-based think-tank founded by his German-born wife, Helga, which hit the headlines in Britain in 2002 after a British Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, died after attending an Institute conference.
The 22-year-old was reportedly hit by a car in Wiesbaden in what authorities described as a suicide. However, the verdict was overruled by a British coroner after it emerged that he had been at a meeting of the Schiller Institute believing it was a conference opposed to the Iraq War. He had become distressed by antisemitic rhetoric, and had telephoned his mother in London in terror to tell her he was in “big, big trouble”.
Lyndon Hermyle Larouche was born on September 8 1922 at Rochester, New Hampshire, to Quaker parents; his father was a travelling salesman. When the US entered the Second World War, as a Quaker he declared himself a conscientious objector, though towards the end of the conflict he enlisted in the army.
After the war, he enrolled in Northeastern University in Boston to read Economics but “resigned”, complaining that the university had not challenged his intellect.
From 1948 to 1963 he was active in the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, and in 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a fellow SWP member with whom he had a son. The marriage ended in divorce in 1963.
His own group surfaced in the late 1960s as a faction of the Left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. In 1973 he founded the US Labor Party, and first ran for president under its colours in 1976.
By then he had begun to make contacts with Right-wing groups, telling his supporters it was a tactical alliance to oppose imperialism. From the late 1970s he associated himself with the Democrats, but party leaders refused to recognise him as a member.
In 1977 he married Helga Zepp, a leading activist in the West German branch of his movement.
Lyndon Larouche, born September 8 1922, died February 12 2019