Talk:Lyndon LaRouche/Australian media coverage

Sources cited in "The Politics of Paranoia", chapter 5 of Race by Andrew Markus

• The Age, 23 March 1991 (Sheena MacLean) - see below
• The Age, 29 May 1993 (Rosemary West) - see below
• The Age, 22 June 1993 (Gerard Henderson) - editorial
• The Age, 5/19 May 1996 (Murray Mottram) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Age, 11 June 1996 (James Button) - see below
• The Age, 30 August 1998 (Mark Forbes) - see below
• The Age, 27 June 1998 (Farah Farouque) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Australian, 26 July 1993 (Madonna King) - see below
• The Australian, 19 January 1996 (Colleen Egan and Jamie Walker) - see below
• The Australian, 3 May 1997 (Mike Steketee) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Weekend Australian, 22-23 November 1993 (Matt Price) - ??
• The Australian Financial Review, 14 June 1996 (Geoffrey Barker) - see below
• The Bulletin, 22 May 1984 (Tim Duncan) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Bulletin, 27 September 1988 (Laurie Oakes) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Bulletin, 4 April 1989 (Lyndall Crisp) - no mention of LaRouche
• The Bulletin, 23 May 1995 (Greg Roberts) - no mention of LaRouche
• Sunday Herald Sun, 14 July 1996 (Gerard McManus) - sensationalist reporting, no substantial mention of LaRouche
• Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1992 (Mark Skulley) - no mention of LaRouche
• Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 1998 (Jon Casimir) - no mention of LaRouche

Notes:

• Last 200 or so words of the Sheena MacLean article unreadable on microfiche
• Laurie Oakes article is the best source for origins of the CIR-CEC movement in Australia
• Lyndall Crisp article claims that the League, National Action, Australian Nationalist Movement, and the Queensland branch of the Immigration Control Association all "endorse" CIR, while a newspaper published in Brisbane, Wake Up Australia, supports CIR and has a circulation of up to one million
• Jon Casimir is best source for origins of the Port Arthur conspiracy theory

Text redacted:

• Text of the three articles which were reproduced in full has now been redacted. If you are researching the LaRouche or CIR-CEC movements, it may still be viewed via the history tab.

Sheena MacLean

"Seeds of unrest" by Sheena MacLean, The Age, 23 March 1991, Saturday Extra pp 1, 4

• Full text of the article; -- redacted

Rosemary West

"Peeling back the rhetoric of LaRouche's simple solutions" by Rosemary West, The Age, 29 May 1993, p 7

• Full text of the article; -- redacted

James Button

"Gun Ho" by James Button, The Age, 11 June 1996, p 11

• New political party being formed by merging the Australian Reform Party, led by Ted Drane, with Australia First, led by Graeme Campbell
• Button asks if this is more than just a single-issue movement
• Quotes Drane as saying "the New World Order has become a popular topic of conversation." Drane worries that Australia will "lose its sovereignty" by signing too many United Nations conventions. Drane believes "we'll be told by all these nations currently killing each other what to do."
• Concludes that "fears of immigration, internationalism and invasion" have attached themselves to the gun rights movement
• Text mentioning LaRouche;

National Party politicians, fearing a drift of supporters, have been quick to link far-right groups and the gun lobby, which is likely to be the new party's backbone. A federal MP, Ian Causley, said some gun lobby rhetoric was sounding like that of the League of Rights, while the Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, warned that supporters of American extremist Lyndon LaRouche were infiltrating the lobby.

The claim is denied by Craig Isherwood of Citizens' Electoral Council, which is linked to LaRouche. And "we have nothing to do with Graeme Campbell," says Mr Isherwood. Supporters of LaRouche, who see the Commonwealth as the world's most dangerous power, are also no friends of the League of Rights.

A spokesman for Mr Fischer said the Deputy PM read about the LaRouche connection in a copy of Lock, Stock and Barrel magazine. Published by Ron Owen, president of the Gympie-based Queensland Firearm Owners' Association, the gun magazine contains tirades about government power, invasions of Australia and the "vanishing white races". A regular column attacks what many far-right groups see as their greatest enemy: the New World Order.

Mark Forbes

"A conspiracy of crackpots" by Mark Forbes, The Sunday Age, 30 August 1998, pp 13-14

• Joe Vialls, Port Arthur massacre conspiracy theorist
• Some people actually believe Bryant was a UN agent
• Vialls had his articles published in right-wing magazine The Strategy.
• Text mentioning LaRouche;

In the sort of coincidence that normally sets conspiratorialists abuzz, that same week [May 1997] on Executive Intelligence Review, the magazine of the American fruitcake Lyndon LaRouche, published a radically different theory.

Bryant was, in fact, a highly trained assassin brainwashed in the 1970s by a secret society of psychiatrists based out of the American Tavistock Institute, creating an Australian-style Manchurian candidate.

According to EIR, respected psychiatrist Dr Eric Cunningham Dax was “deployed” to Tasmania, where he briefly saw Bryant. Bryant then had a secret, high-level military training to enable him to carry out the massacre. The proof: “On one of his trips to the UK, he checked into a hotel in Hereford, the super-sensitive home of Britain's elite Special Air Services.”

The motive? To “shell shock” and then control a population, EIR tells us Port Arthur was the latest Tavistock conspiracy following the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis.

“The Tavistock-sponsored form of blind terror, of which Bryant is an example, has the greatest advantage to its authors that its programmed zombies almost invariably kill themselves,” EIR wrote.

This theory proved too far out for even the far right, but Mr Vialls' assertions continue to gain currency [amongst members of the One Nation party.]

Madonna King

"Far right stuff?" by Madonna King, The Australian, 26 July 1993, p 9

• The Australian ran a front page article ("Nationals to woo far-Right extremists" by Madonna King and Tim Stevens, The Australian, 26 July 1993, pp 1-2) about the Nats considering approaching the CAP (Confederate Action Party) during their upcoming merger talks with the Liberal Party
• Full text of the article; -- redacted

Colleen Egan and Jamie Walker

"Extreme danger" by Colleen Egan and Jamie Walker, The Australian, 19 January 1996, p 11

• Mostly about the assassination of Wayne Tibbs, leader of the Confederate Action Party
• Text mentioning LaRouche;

Certainly, the coastal and pastoral region around Geraldton is a hot bed of right-wing political activity: the local CAP branch was the first in Western Australia, an offshoot of the parent organisation in Queensland.

Just an hour along the railway at Morawa, regular meetings are held of the Rural Action Movement, a militant farmers group that, at the height of the rural downturn in 1991, blockaded the inner streets of Perth with hired trucks.

At that time, RAM members also cut railway lines and stormed the office a leading bank to “draw the attention of city people to the plight of the man on the land”.

Some had wider political aims. The self-styled founder of RAM, a flaxen-haired wheat farmer named Max Johnson, was a devotee of the American ideologue Lyndon LaRouche.

Members of RAM, like many in the Australian right-wing, adopted LaRouche's bizarre conspiracy theories and strident anti-Semitism. “Australia, like America, has a very strong tradition of individualism,” says Dr Phillip Smith, a sociologist from the University of Queensland, “...and that makes fertile ground for these groups when they talk about the rights of the individual to [own] guns and their general antipathy to the State.” The extreme Right probably reached the zenith of its influence in the lead-up to the last federal election. In Queensland, the CAP caused the National Party real grief, taking a sizable chunk of the vote in the 1992 State poll. There was even talk of bringing the far Right into the party fold.

Since then, however, the movement appears to have imploded. The CAP disintegrated and is no longer registered with the Australian Electoral Commission. Another right-wing organisation, the Citizens' Electoral Councils, has also fallen by the wayside, though it continues to field candidates and, reportedly, is extremely well financed.

The political standard-bearers for the far Right are now the League of Rights and Australians Against Further Immigration.

Geoffrey Barker

"Rural battlefield" by Geoffrey Barker, The Australian Financial Review, 14 June 1996, Weekend Review pp 1, 13

• Vast tracts of rural Australia being won over by marginal political movements whose style is populist
• New political party being formed by merging the Australian Reform Party, led by Ted Drane, with Australia First, led by Graeme Campbell
• National Party politicians believe that rural shooters and farmers will eventually return to the Coalition
• Notes that gun control is only the current peak issue in a far reaching populist agenda, which could easily be picked up disenfranchised rural voters
• Text mentioning LaRouche;

Campbell and Drane project themselves as the reasonable faces of this populist movement, even rejecting the description of themselves as "populist". Campbell has distanced himself from the American extremist Lyndon La Rouche whose organisation backs the so-called Citizens' Electoral Councils which have tried to inject La Rouche's paranoid, anti-semitic nonsense into Australian politics. Drane says he does not share what he calls "far Right Ultra Nationalist" views.

Other articles

Found these on a Factiva search (will leave others to integrate):

Poisoned Political Seed Finds Its Ground By ALAN ATTWOOD (New York correspondent) 5 June 1996 SMH (p.9)

He is invariably described as a political extremist, a political maverick, a guru of America's far Right, or simply a perennial candidate.

Lyndon H. LaRouche jnr is that most dangerous offspring of the American political system - a child of the marriage of money and some very loopy ideas.

Even more disturbing than the philosophies espoused by LaRouche and his supporters is the fact that a significant number of people believe in them. Oklahoma, Waco and Montana have all demonstrated that there is, in modern America, ground receptive to poisoned seed.

Candidates aligning themselves with LaRouche still bob up at elections at the national, State and local level in the United States. Just recently, some 162,508 people voted for LaRouche in the California Democratic primary, compared with 2,175,921 for President Clinton. And in the Washington DC primary, 374 people opted for LaRouche ahead of the President.

As much as he is often mocked - one description of him is "America's best-known political psychopath" - his philosophies continue to have some currency even though LaRouche himself, a presidential candidate from 1976 onwards, is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Minnesota for mail-fraud conspiracy related to fundraising.

LaRouche, now in his 70s, has demonstrated remarkable ideological flexibility in his time. Once a member of the US Socialist Workers' Party, which took a Trotskyist line, he had moved to the far Right by the 1970s.

Among his more spectacular (and unsubstantiated) claims are that the Queen and former President Ronald Reagan were part of a world-wide drug cartel and conspiracy.

He is anti-British, describing them as "a different alien species". He also once accused Dr Henry Kissinger and former Vice-President Walter Mondale of being KGB agents and maintained that AIDS was a Soviet plot.

Theories of the LaRouche movement have also gained currency in Australia. It has links with the Melbourne-based Citizens' Electoral Council, to which LaRouche is, according to one of its publications, "the foremost economist of this century who was framed up and jailed by the American establishment for his fight against drugs, usury and free trade".

There is a nasty streak to the LaRouche movement. It is blatantly anti-Semitic. One American journalist described it as the most successful extremist movement in modern US history. Mr Dennis King, wrote that La Rouche aspired to "a populist mass-movement of farmers, small businessmen, and blue-collar workers whose anger over drugs, unemployment, and high interest rates was to be channelled against 'the Zionists'".

Gun Rebels Force Govt To Retaliate By TONY WRIGHT And BERNARD LAGAN 5 June 1996 SMH (p.1) <-- related to the Age article by James Button above

[...]

Mr Fischer continued his campaign yesterday to persuade shooters that those with genuine reasons would be allowed keep most of their guns under the new laws.

He repeated his claim that far-right extremists, including the US-based LaRouche organisation, was infiltrating the gun lobby (Full Report, Page 9).

But Mr Craig Isherwood, the national spokesman for the Citizens' Electorate Council - the LaRouche operation in Australia - said he was "flabbergasted" by the claim and his organisation had nothing to do with the gun lobby.

If gun lobbyists used his organisation's material, which proposes a sovereign Australia building its economy behind trade barriers, that had nothing to do with him, he said.

Conspiracies Are A Nice Little Earner by Mike Seccombe 3 February 1999 SMH (p.10)

MEASURED as a political party, the Citizens Electoral Council is a failure. At the last poll, it recorded just 0.08 per cent of the vote, and its leader's bid for a Senate seat secured the votes of 744 people in the whole of Victoria.

But we probably should not measure the CEC as a political party. Measure it as a business and it is highly successful. It markets paranoia, through a structure that is part personality cult and part telemarketing.

In its annual return to the Australian Electoral Commission, made public this week, the CEC says it secured donations of more than $1 million -substantially more than any of the other small outfits, including Pauline Hanson's One Nation, the party with which its supporters often overlap - by selling its accounts of governmental and international conspiracies.

The CEC believes in variants of most of the one-world government/ international economic conspiracy theories common to much of the extreme Right here and elsewhere. It advocates a nationalised bank in Australia, the reintroduction of tariffs, a return to fixed exchange rates - policies that strike a chord with those frightened at the pace of economic change.

But there's more to it than that. The Jewish community accuses it of anti-Semitism, with the Jew the CEC most loves to hate being Henry Kissinger (a KGB spy, would you believe), for reasons we will come to.

What makes the CEC distinctive among the far Right groups is that it is republican. It holds the British Government, and in particular the royal family, guilty of a range of vices from the drug trade to "Prince Philip's combined conservation/Aboriginal land rights frauds".

According to the CEC, the British Government wanted the Japanese to take Australia in World War II "to set up a bloody 15-year meat-grinder war in the Pacific" for unspecified ends. The Duke of Edinburgh is the "chief executive officer of the ultra-wealthy Club of the Isles, the centre of the world's financial oligarchy".

The CEC's official newspaper details a plan hatched by Prince Philip (who is apparently close to Henry Kissinger) to "carve up Russia" to serve the ends of "David Foreman, the founder of the Earth First! terrorist group . . . based on the Deep Ecology of Norwegian Nazi philosopher Arne Naess", which is the basis of the United Nations Biodiversity Treaty.

Only a small minority does not find this stuff amusing, but that minority is a fecund source of funds. The $1 million that the party received in donations came from a relatively small number of people, almost all in depressed rural areas. While most Australians are apathetic about their politics, CEC supporters often part with large amounts of money. They do it, as one 81-year-old woman who gave almost $23,000 says, because "[Lyndon] LaRouche is right about the truth".

LaRouche is one of those cult figures that the American political-religious Right throws up regularly, like a more political version of televangelists such as Jim Bakker, a man who has set up around himself a cult of personality, who is seen by his followers as a prophet and by his opponents as a man motivated by profit.

La Rouche has spent time in jail for mail fraud and tax evasion, which brings us back to Henry Kissinger. According to CEC lore, it was Kissinger who "triggered the more than decade-long judicial onslaught by corrupt elements of the US Department of Justice and US judiciary system . . ."

LaRouche is always styled as "American statesman and economist Lyndon H. LaRouche" and often features with his wife, "Helga Zepp-LaRouche, German political leader and Chairman of the Schiller Institute". LaRouche's rambling essays are hard going, full of arcane references to the likes of "the Anglophile Fronde heritage of Physiocrats such as France's Dr Quesnay".

The CEC was established in 1988 in Queensland, although its headquarters now are in Victoria. Initially its main concern was the simple issue of citizen-initiated referendums, but in the early 1990s it came into the LaRouche fold.

Yesterday, an executive member of the CEC, Robert Barwick, said the organisation actually raised more through subscriptions to its publications than it did from straight political donations.

The CEC employs 20 full-time staff, and operates what Barwick described as "quite a large phone operation", canvassing for subscribers and soliciting donations. It did not simply target depressed rural areas but "rang everyone". "We get business names out of the phone book," he said.

Its quarterly Australian paper, New Citizen, sells for $1. The real money, however, comes from subscriptions to LaRouche's main American publication, Executive Intelligence Review, at $650 a year.

Selling paranoia - overwhelmingly to the elderly, vulnerable and dim - is good business.