Christopher Hitchens of MI6

"Just because somebody gets away with everything, doesn't mean that they're not a rapist, a liar, a war criminal and a crook."

- Hitchens

"I think Hitchens somehow considers Clinton to be a kind of honorary woman; and so, on that basis, he qualifies for the same treatment..."

Christopher Hitchens "Hitch Hike" Documentary

WHO IS LYNDON LAROUCHE?

11 APRIL 1986, Page 15

Christopher Hitchens on the fascist sect which is infiltrating the Democratic Party

Washington 

AMONG the minor hazards of air travel in the continental United States is the airport lounge kook. Usually seated behind a makeshift desk piled with unreadable tracts, but sometimes selling flowers for an unspecified 'charity', the kook has become as predictable a feature of aerial commuting as the party of nuns and the Arthur Hailey pulp. Many airports, such as La Guardia in New York, cover their concourses with disclaimer notices, which tell You that the kooks are only exercising their rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution, and have no connection with the authorities. You are thus subtly insulted not once but twice on your way to the plane.

Among the minor hazards that an Englishman in the United States does not usually suffer is Anglophobia. Admittedly, there are saloons where, late on St Patrick's Day, it is best not to call for service by crying: 'Oh I say, look here, I believe I Was first.' There was a celebrated Chicago mayor who told a tame press that he Wanted to give the Prince of Wales 'a poke In the snot', but that was years ago. Joe McCarthy called Dean Acheson 'a striped- Pains, stuffed-shirt pseudo Brit', but only once. Colonel McCormick, the ultra-conservative publisher, was for 'America First' and Hitler second, but changed his !line after Pearl Harbour. I could go on, but there's no need. Any English visitor knows how friendly and courteous Americans are, and how solicitous of our numer- ous woes and disabilities. Imagine, then, my shock a few years ago at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Waiting for a connection, I was accosted by an airport kook and decided to read his handout rather than buy an Arthur Hailey. It was by no means the standard paranoid tripe. Prodigies of ingenuity had gone into it. The globe was menaced by the Russians (natch), the bankers (yawn) and all the rest of it. But then I read that 'The fight against illegal drugs is nothing less than a war to save our youth from the destruction the British monarchy has prepared for us.' It turned out that Her Majesty the Queen, the entire House of Windsor and many other layers of the British establishment were in a grand league of narcotics dealing, whose object was the evisceration of civilisation (whether 'as we know it' or other- wise was not clearly stated).

What odds would you lay against the nominees of such a group being elected to serve as candidates for secretary of state and lieutenant governor, on the Democra- tic Party official slate, in the great state of Illinois? Late last month, that is exactly what happened. The candidate for gov- ernor, Adlai Stevenson III, bears one of the most illustrious Democratic names and traditions. But with the kooks on his ticket, he may now have to run as an independent. And this, mark you, in Illinois, where the joke about weighing the Democratic votes rather than counting them is thought to have started.

The two interlopers, Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild, are members of a venomous cult group deceptively named the National Democratic Policy Committee. I know from experience that to be rung up by this outfit, with its plausible name, is confusing. The confusion stops when the questions about 'the British monarchical drug mafia' begin. And electoral success did not soil the purity of Hart and Fair- child. They instantly demanded mandatory testing of all adults for Aids (with quaran- tine for the victims) and announced that they would put tanks on the street to deal with 'traitors' like the Rockefeller family. You could gauge the shock to the old order by seeing Mike Royko, lifetime scourge of the old Mayor Daley machine, as he publicly lamented that it wouldn't have happened in the old boy's time.

The National Democratic Policy Committee is the creature of a deeply weird man named, for the moment, Lyndon Larouche. In his previous embodiment as an extreme Leninist sectarian, he called himself Lyn Marcus in the hope of subliminal identification with Marx and Lenin. Nobody knows quite what turned him into a xenophobe of the extreme Right, but in 1972 his constant companion left him for an Englishman and some ex-members speculate that this made him moody as well as anti-British. He now keeps company with the tempestuous Frau Helga Zepp, whom he met on a recruiting foray in West Germany, and one of his many front organisations is impertinently named 'The Schiller Institute'.

Larouche has all the symptoms — obsession with disease, delusions about assassination, conviction that Zionist organisations today 'resurrect the tradition of the Jews who demanded the crucifixion of Christ'. In the 1984 election he ran for President and raised $6.1 million from God knows where, which entitled him to $494,000 in federal matching funds. As you would expect, he lives on a large secluded estate in Leesburg, Virginia, and pays many bodyguards. In the course of his campaign for the 1984 nomination, he presumably attracted as many people by calling Walter Mondale an agent of the KGB as he repelled by calling Henry Kissinger a planner of genocide. There can't have been many votes in his contention that 'Israel is ruled from London as a zombie nation'.

The whole fiasco in Illinois, where turn- out was extremely low and where there is a tendency to vote for names like Hart and Fairchild rather than, say, names like Pucinsky and Sangmeister (the defeated authentic Democrats) has provoked a mix- ture of alarm and schadenfreude. Some say the Democratic machine had it coming, which it did. Others, sometimes the same as some, worry about the galloping decay of party allegiance and even of voting. With only a few months until the mid-term congressional elections, the Democratic Party has been revealed as moribund and farcical in its own heartland. Adlai Stevenson looked like a man who had swallowed a whole plate of bad oysters. Whoever said that primaries were vox populi?

Democratic committees all over the country have suddenly woken up to the fact that Larouche supporters are on their ballots. With the horrid energy of the committed sectarian, these people have created something like a party within a non-party.

Their success in down-state Illinois is in part explained by the farm debt crisis, which creates an audience for those who rail against faceless bankers. In other states and cities, and depending upon the local grievance, the pitch is different. Only those who take the trouble to read the literature can see what is coming — a very pure and special version of the fascist persecution complex. (In Washington, the Larouche acolytes wear pin-stripe suits and proselytise for Star Wars, which also counts as exploiting local unrest.) Just the other day, I was walking past the Dirksen building in the Senate area and saw Larouche's enthusiasts mount a rally. On this occasion, it was an outstandingly loony topic involving Senator Helms, freemasonry and the Panama Canal. The Illinois primary was then a few days away, so maybe I'm imagining things when I recall an unusual glee and fervour on the clever-stupid faces of the faithful. But maybe not. Like the sleep of reason, the sleep of politics brings forth — only kooks, I hope.