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Radio War Nerd EP #169 — Reagan Zombies: Elliott Abrams & the Lyndon LaRouche Cult (Patreon)

Published:
2019-02-22 16:49:10
Imported:
2026-06
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Recorded February 18, 2019

One Reagan Era zombie returns to power, another returns to the grave. The War Nerd and Ames first look at Elliott Abrams, Trump's recently-appointed Venezuela regime-change viceroy, and the El Mozote massacre that Abrams ran cover for nearly 4 decades ago . . .

At 1:22:00 - Ames & the War Nerd discuss the strange & loathsome life of neofascist cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, who just died at age 96. We talk about LaRouche's early Quaker life, his years as a thwarted Trotskyite revolutionary, and how he transformed of his gaggle of middle-class Trotskyite grad students into a weird & violent neofascist cult . . . 

* Images

*MSNBC's Sarah Kendzior tweeting LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review excerpt from 1987 column claiming Trump turned into Kremlin agent during his Moscow visit. ("Elephants and Donkeys" was a regular feature column in LaRouche's EIR)

*1976 LaRouche campaign poster

*LaRouche AIDS Quarantine pamphlet for 1987 California ballot initiative

Reading: "Lyndon LaRouche & the New American Fascism" by Dennis King; "Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves" by Matthew Sweet. 

Total time: 3:14:21

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

MoldyTolge

Psyched to get some War Nerd insight on Lyndon LaRouche, the real life PKD character. My favorite LaRouche scheme was offering to pay the Italian government to strictly enforce his "scientific pitch" standards upon orchestras and send in the Carabinieri in order to confiscate tuning forks.

JoR

Please do a Timur the great episode. I feel like RWN has a gap of 3 of the greatest conquering groups/people, Alexander's Macedonians, the Mongols and Timur.

Avery

The tankies who popped up in the comments of the Venezuela episode were absolutely wild. I have been thinking about those guys ever since. They're very orthodox Leninists in a sense, and will be easy to recognize if they ever get political power in the West.

Ellen Harold

I just looked up “tankie” and it said the term referred to people who defended the brutal 1956 Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, which even Sartre condemned. Another definition was people who defend Stalin’s purges. Silly me, I thought must be a reference to the battle of Kursk (or “Girls With Tanks”). It sounds like La Rouche’s ghost still lives. Listening to this week’s phantasmagoric episode I had the feeling I was drifting in and out of an old Long John Nebel show. The real weird old America — the Freudians, the Trotskyites - the 1950s — truly the twilight zone.

Max

There’s also a new prescription medication specifically for treating chronic opioid-related constipation, without, and I quote “reducing the pain-relieving effects of the narcotic”. Kid you not. So for an extra $380 a month you can have the luxury of crapping normally while still staying as high as shit.

xnfec

There is always the Trainspotting version.

Some Guy

There are plenty of people in my parents generation who hate Trump but still think that everything that Ronald Reagan's hands touched, including these awful people, are made of solid gold.

Dan P

Nice

Jason Thompson

I've got to read more about the history of psychiatry re: homosexuality. I've heard the "psychiatry was intensely homophobic" thing before, and while I recognize there's some truth in that, I also have the impression it provided an alternate, non-religiously-moralistic way to view homosexuality in the mid-20th-century. And my father, a psychiatrist, was the least homophobic person I knew growing up -- though as a kid in the '80s I have to admit that wasn't saying much.

Dan P

One thing that may explain hiring Abrams (beyond his very specific skills), is that conservative big-dollar political donors are intensely nostalgic for the Reagan era, and "getting the old band back together" may induce them to open their wallets a bit more.

Jeffrey Martin

Likely being one of those derided as 'tankies', I'll throw in my two cents. 1) Chavez and Maduro did fail to diversify the economy. No sentient commentator has ever denied this. 2) There are and have been corruption and mismanagement. No sentient commentator is likely to deny this. 3) The exchange rate policy has been an unmitigated disaster. However. (1) is essentially irrelevant to the dispute between Chavismo and the white, bougie opposition. The latter wouldn't have been any more successful in diversifying the economy than Chavez and Maduro, probably wouldn't have tried, and would only have changed the distribution of the proceeds of the oil business - away from the public projects and social spending of Chavismo, and into their bank accounts, probably with an admixture of partial privatization - as Bolton is talking about - from which they would profit, and which would hamstring any potential future Chavismo government from engaging in necessary social spending. To the extent that the opposition are complaining about economic diversification, they're engaged in bad faith. (2) is also irrelevant, precisely because the neoliberal years in Venezuela, as in every country which has experienced the neoliberal turn, have been years of corruption, revolving doors, self-dealing, and outright theft. At best, accusations of corruption and mismanagement are akin to Democrats and Republicans accusing one another of just about anything; at worst, they're another instance of bougie bigots accusing their opponents of what they're doing. (3) is relevant, but mainly insofar as it has provided the opposition with the opportunity to create black markets and artificial shortages, from which they profit handsomely. All of which is to state the obvious: none of the actual failings of Chavismo are the reasons that the opposition actually opposes Chavismo, all of which actual reasons have everything to do with loss of avenues of corruption *that benefit them*, loss of control over some sectors of the economy, diminished leverage over the poorer and blacker classes (eg., food distributions, public housing construction, local workers' groups, etc.). and so on and so forth. Same as reactionaries ever were. Supporters of Chavismo and the opposition *do not* share a common understanding of the causes of the crisis, even where they ostensibly point to the same policy failures; moreover, again, the opposition do not even articulate those criticisms in good faith. Speaking as though good faith exists, and as though a common understanding does as well, allows the opposition to obscure their real reasons, which are those of every reactionary grouping ever, and more specifically, of Latin America reactionaries, who tend to be sociopathically, sadistically feudal in their violent hatred of, and violence towards, any policy, however minute, that diminishes their power/wealth, and the class distance between themselves and their "inferiors" they believe themselves entitled to. Even in the absence of the disastrous exchange rate policy, no amount of diversification actually attainable in the circumstances would have prevented economic contraction once oil prices collapsed. The opposition have been waiting for a crisis, true to the reactionary/neoliberal playbook, and there is not now, nor was then, anything Chavez and Maduro could have done to conciliate them, short of renouncing their rule and following the playbook of the 80s and 90s. When leftists speculate about how, maybe, a bigger anticorruption drive, or a diversification program, or somethingsomethingsomething, might have prevented the crisis, they're missing the point, misidentifying the causes of the crisis. You can get all those things right, and an opposition of that type will *always* bide its time, waiting for the crisis, or the chance to create a crisis, that will enable them to press their claims. That's not to say that left governments shouldn't fight corruption, shouldn't pursue economic diversification, and shouldn't correct dumbfuck currency policies - only that doing those things won't stop the Right from creating a crisis.

Brian Harvey

Have to correct your New Hampshire geography. Rochester, where LaRouche was born, is definitely not northern NH. Huge Quebecois community though.

Jimothy Realname

Wow, I had been under the impression that LaRouche was just a largely harmless crank. Haven't even finished the episode yet and this shit is completely insane.

teh_drewski

Hey, the Queen can be a secret lizard person *and* a drug dealer guys, come on.

big microbe

Can't wait to compare this to the inevitable episode of The Dollop where they cover LaRouche

zaabittimov

Regarding the Azov battalion, it was funny to watch the divide in the Serbian nazi/fascist scene over the Ukraine war. The Serbian right wing is pretty pro-Russian across the board, so it wasn't particularly surprising that a large number of volunteers from Serbia went to fight on the Russian side, mostly weirdo neo-Chetniks, and Orthodox fanatics, mercenary types and neo-Nazis. You can find Donbass separatist gear in shops that sell nationalist kitsch and see young, moronic looking dudes sporting Novorossiya stuff. When the war really got started, those of us who keep an eye out for what the local fascists are doing noticed immediately that some of the better known Nazi-skin types, took a break from drinking in Student's Park in Belgrade to go off an fight with the Donbass rebels. Debates then started up online between fascists who supported Russia vs. those supporting the Ukrainians. Basically, the pro-Russian side was arguing the standard anti-NATO stuff, Kosovo is Serbia, Crimea is Russia, Ukrainians are an invented nation, Ukrainians are friends of the Croats, etc. The smaller pro-Ukrainian faction was arguing that both Russians and Ukrainians are brotherly white, Slavic nations who need to unite and fight Judeo-Bolshevism and that the Novorossiya project is simply a neo-Soviet idea (Soviet symbolism, etc). It got even funnier when I started to read Russian and Ukrainian fascist websites with Russian neo-Nazis saying "you foreigners are idiots, we hate Putin, he's controlled by the Jews and flooding our country with Central Asians" with some even supporting NATO as a bulwark against Bolshevism while Ukrainians Nazis were appealing to some sort nationalist internationalism and quoting anti-colonialist texts.

zaabittimov

I also remember seeing some bizarre Nazi anti-war graffiti saying "No wars between brothers" followed by some runes. You can't make this shit up!

Mark Ames

Agree with most of what you say here. Don't want to speak for Ignacio but I'll speak for Ignacio and say from everything he's written and said that I know, he'd largely agree too. But I think you're downplaying the political effects of 3). The point was was that 3) is particularly relevant because as it created very serious economic problems and widened the gulf between the poor and the new profiteers, it also seriously alienated a lot of the chavismo base, layer by layer, turning them either apathetic or openly hostile. That's something that's been going on for several years. Looks like Trump's coup campaign rallied back to Maduro a lot of the old chavez supporters who'd turned apathetic or hostile over the past few years.

Mark Ames

There's a lot of splits like this among neo-Nazis, some have a romanticized view of Russia under Putin because Hillary and the DC elites hate Putin so therefore he must be their savior; but then Ukraine has the Dream Team of actual neo-Nazism for reals (but they're EU and CIA backed!), while Putin suppresses and jails Russian neo-Nazis and far-righties. There are some Russian neo-Nazis who've fought for Ukraine because Putin is too Jewish and the Ukrainians are more pure-Nazi. And then there's Navalny, who takes a similar white nationalist view—Russia shouldn't be fighting brother whites in Ukraine, should instead be killing Muslims from the south. It ain't easy being a neo-Nazi these days.

eh

I don't quite get why deflecting about Bernie lining up with the soft interventionists is perfectly okay but doing the same about Maduro's mistakes is unreasonably doctrinaire. I think what's going on is a political disagreement masked as disagreement about the basic facts of the situation, and maybe shows a lack of conviction or misunderstanding in the people attacking Ignacio. If you actually are a marxist-leninist it's not so much Ignacio's diagnosis of the situation (currency manipulation that ties in to the interests of the military and the oil sector capitalists the Venezuelan state needs to rely on for access to international markets is tanking the economy) as the proposed solution of ”more democracy” that's nonsensical – if the right wins they will tear down any gains made and trigger even more street violence. I'd argue that the crisis in Venezuela doesn't show the failure of socialism so much as the fact that social democracy can't be sustained in the third world outside of boom times. Without expropriating the expropriators there isn't the kind of surplus to redistribute to sustain any kind of comprehensive social programs or even expanding other sectors of the economy, and now that falling commodity prices and fascist or cryptofascist middle class backlash is hitting South America only Morales is holding on without a major crisis. As it's the right wing of the PSUV that is in control of financial policy it makes very little sense to attack Maduro or his government for despotism or incompetence, after all these are the people most likely to be glued to the standards of bourgeouis democracy. The social democrats in Sweden never had a major political crisis precipitated by the Wallenbergs or Gyllenhammar who have a very similar position in the economy to Venezuelan oligarchs and whose power and control of capital was actually consolidated by central bargaining and high tax rates. So why is the bourgeoisie and middle class of Venezuela attacking a set of policies that would functionally lead to the same set of results if all other things were equal unless there is simply too small of a surplus to both sustain their lifestyle and the programs that the PSUV either has or should have implemented? It seems to me that the options were either maintaining all the niceties of parliamentary democracy or comprehensive economic reform, and now that Venezuela has reached a crisis it's useless to pretend that taking actions that would have destroyed the compromise that led to parliamentary elections being a viable route to power would have prevented the current crisis. It would just have happened sooner, and possibly with a better prepared set of people in power.

eh

To be clear, unless everyone in the Venezuelan government genuinely is a massive moron wedded to a failing program the current implementation of the currency controls is almost certainly a concession to the bourgeoisie that got out of control. If diversification and a different currency regime had been implemented the coup attempt would just have happened earlier.

Gee Mama

Interesting remark re: pain killers and opioid epidemic.Maybe it's localized? Or age-related? I had a somewhat similar dental problem a few years back (abscess under an old root canal) and the first dentist who saw gave me a box of full-on oxycodone. Not even the timed-release oxycontin, the original donkey-kick-to-the-brain oxycodone. Actually went through a mild withdrawal. It was wild how much easier it was to get that than a fricking removal.

radiowarnerd

That seems a good analysis. Why has Morales been immune btw?

radiowarnerd

That's hilarious. This is why you don't hear a lot about stable far-right alliances. There's nothing more centrifugal than a bunch of pathologies in one room.

radiowarnerd

Yeah, but it gets hot standing on the corner in that mask all day.

radiowarnerd

Thanks for the correction. Neither of us is very experienced with New England.

radiowarnerd

I appreciate this analysis. I'm not in a position to comment on it. As I said on the show, the reason we were so glad to get Ignacio is that we're not in any way experts on Venezuela. Maybe Ignacio will read this and have some comments of his own.

radiowarnerd

That's a really good point. I've seen that nostalgia myself and, having endured Reagan as Governor before he became President, have a hard time keeping calm with it.

radiowarnerd

I think that what I was saying on the show is that orthodox psychoanalysis, in particular (as opposed to psychiatry in general), wielded the threat of diagnosis of homosexuality as a way of controlling their patients.

radiowarnerd

Ah, OK. Yeah, sarcasm involves a real intimacy between players, and it's not wise to attempt it with a broad online audience.

radiowarnerd

Assuming you can get someone to prescribe you the stuff in the first place! (Bitter)

radiowarnerd

Yeah, for one thing they were all high as kites. Nobody would give you mere ibuprofen for an abscess back then!! But perhaps I am overstressing this particular topic.

radiowarnerd

You're absolutely right, I know it, I'm ashamed. We had a guest lined up to talk about Timur but it fell through at the last minute. And always remind me when I haven't done something. It's not malice or scheming, it's just distraction.

radiowarnerd

Wow. "My AK-47 makes a B-flat, as you will soon hear!"

JoR

I'll try to mention it once a month or so, ha ha. Also don't be ashamed, there's so much relevant content to cover historically speaking, let alone modern stuff, that it'll probably be impossible to cover anywhere near everything

Ellen Harold

My dentist warned me that root canals sometimes “blow up” decades later. And like and behold it happened to me. As I understand it’s a buildup of off gassing from the infected gum (the tooth having been killed by the root extraction). In this country they go into it from the top in an operation called an “apical”. It’s supposed to be done by an endodontist under full anesthesia. My sympathies to John for his ordeal. It’s really a medical emergency.

Michael S. Judge

Maybe it's been addressed already, but Baraka was probably the most prominently political American poet whose name anybody knew in the 1970s – there were others, but they weren't nearly as famous. Baraka had the tendency to change his politics all the time, to dive with total dedication into whatever he'd just decided was righteous, and to denounce and rail against anybody who believed what HE'D believed a few weeks ago. It's hard to knock the guy too much for trying to figure out how best to apply Marxism to the history of African-American people, but he tended to get pretty doctrinaire and dismissive of anybody who didn't believe exactly what he did. Amiri also had a DEEPLY anti-Semitic period, primarily in the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s, during which he openly fantasized about murdering old Jewish women in Central Park and so forth. His "historical critique" of the period was that Jews had abandoned and betrayed all other ethnic and religious minorities in America by "selling out" everything alien or Other about themselves in order to become, effectively, white. He eventually denounced all that, but in 2001, he wrote a poem called "Somebody Blew Up America" in which he claimed that Jews and Israelis were warned to stay away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, so it all clearly lingered for some time.

Michael S. Judge

Oh, and the music stuff: LaRouche was convinced that all music has been tuned wrong since, I think, the Middle Ages or early Renaissance, and he would pay for performances of classical music retuned according to a system which he, of course, had personally devised.

Michael S. Judge

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the kid who fairly recently got run over under suspicious circumstances had received some kind of childhood treatment at the Tavistock Institute, and LaRouche had an ornate theory about Tavistock as a laboratory for manufacturing decadence to destroy Western culture, so that might have something to do with the death.

fjfffffddd

Have you ever addressed tuning systems in your podcast? I assume you mean equal temperament vs JI stuff right? It is an interesting topic.