Lyndon LaRouche, a/k/a Lynn Marcus (Lynn for Lenin and Marcus for Marx), has breathed his last. His organization’s web site has announced his death, in (not surprisingly hagiographic terms, invoking Christ on the path to Golgotha and Martin Luther King.
The cause of death was not disclosed. He was 96 years old.
The New York Times obit notes LaRouche’s decades-long efforts to achieve the Democratic Presidential nomination and efforts by followers of his to achieve elective office.
He started out as a leftie but made a hard turn to the far right and espoused Anti-Semitic views. He railed against the Rothschilds and the British Royal Family, alleging their involvement in drug running and attempts to subvert U.S. sovereignty.
From the Times obit:
In his efforts to build a worldwide organization, Mr. LaRouche was helped by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a native of Germany who had been a journalist there. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. LaRouche was at the apex of his power in the mid-1980s, when he moved his headquarters to a large rented estate in Northern Virginia, in Round Hill, outside Leesburg. When neighbors wondered aloud why he had turned the estate into an armed camp, rigged with electronic security and patrolled by men with semiautomatic rifles, Mr. LaRouche went on the attack. He said that the Leesburg Garden Club was “a nest of Soviet fellow travelers.”
In 1987, after an F.B.I. investigation, Mr. LaRouche was convicted in Virginia on charges of scheming to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and of deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from thousands of his supporters. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and sent to a federal penitentiary in Minnesota.
During the legislative battle over the Affordable Care Act, members of the LaRouche cult often attended Tea Party demonstrations, displaying posters that depicted Barack Obama as Adolph Hitler. But when President Obama first took office, LaRouche warned that the British would try to assassinate him.
As even a broken 12-hour clock is right twice a day, LaRouche said that Dick Cheney had successfully led a neocon conspiracy to get the United States to invade Iraq.
No great loss.