The same LaRouche who, as the ninth candidate on the 1984 presidential ballot, brought us the “Feed Jane Fonda to the whales” bumper sticker, and the tacky little tract titled “Hitler: Runaway British agent.” 

His treatise on Hitler is probably LaRouche’s most credible piece to date. There’s no attempt to conceal his Nazi inclinations in his latest visitation on the American people, embodied in the most dangerous and repugnant ballot initiative ever to be circulated in California. If anyone has learned about the crimes of Hitler’s Germany, it is this dangerous maniac who would “quarantine” all who test positive to the HTLV-III virus, irrespective of whether they have AIDS or ARC or no diagnosed disease at all.

While we may be tempted to dismiss the LaRouche goons who accost us at airports trying to convince us nuclear power plants are better built than Jane Fonda, we ignore them at our peril. Posing primarily as the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) – deliberately named to confuse the unwary into associating La Rouche with the official Democratic Party, which scorns him at every opportunity – LaRouche and his messianic followers have several other disguises.

According to published reports, the core LaRouche organization is the National Caucus of Labor Committees, with from 1,000 to 3,000 dues-paying members.
But there are a myriad of other affiliated organizations, like the National Anti-Drug Coalition and the Lafayette Foundation, which reported annual revenues of $3.5 million to the IRS in 1980. Then there are the two LaRouche publications, whose reporters form a global intelligence-gathering network: the newspaper New Solidarity and the slick magazine Executive Intelligence Review, which claims more than 10,000 subscribers at $400 per year.

LaRouche is anything but legitimate; “oddball” is far too kind for him. In published statements he has claimed that Kissinger is an agent of Russia. He also accuses Queen Elizabeth II, the International Monetary Fund, the FBI and British secret intelligence services of plotting a massive international conspiracy for “world holocaust” through drug addiction, famine and bubonic plague. AIDS is the latest – and potentially most lethal – weapon in the LaRouche arsenal.

Neither right-wing nor left-wing politicians or groups of any persuasion are immune from LaRouche attacks. “A bunch of kooks” is what he called the notoriously conservative Heritage Foundation and, in the same breath, the John Birch Society, which retaliated by charging LaRouche is a Soviet agent-provocateur who wants to divert conservative’s money to himself and disrupt their organizations. His uncanny ability to clutch apparent victory from the arms of defeat is evident in LaRouche’s four presidential campaigns. As a Socialist, he won the nomination of the Labor Party in 1972 and again, after losing, in 1976.

We ignore him and his AIDS ballot initiative at our peril.