Total breakdown of reason and deeply corrupt activities persist regarding the LaRouche business. NPOV and Conflict of interest policies remain suspended in a condoned "Ignore All Rules" environment.

User:Georgewilliamherbert has locked Views of Lyndon LaRouche indefinitely in an unprecedented move, claiming on the admins noticeboard that it is subject to "a long-running sustained edit war". According to this Herbert, who is involved in the dispute himself, "Supporters of Lyndon LaRouche have clearly been attempting to turn that article (and others) into soapboxes for his political views." He promptly reverted the article to his preferred state before the indefinite locking, and his fellow admins who share his views applauded his "Ignore all rules" methods on the admins noticeboard.

A look at the article diffs shows a different story of course, and one doesn't need to know much about LaRouche to know that this is a complete racket. On no other subject on Wikipedia has NPOV been so openly suspended. Ignore all rules? You're not kidding.

In my continued mission to figure out this Wikipedia - LaRouche puzzle, which looks outrageous to any intelligent outsider from a distance, I delved into the background of the POV dispute and the latest developments. Some of LaRouche's historical analysis looks pretty poor in my view, and other ideas are way off kilter. But his opponent, Dennis King, who is involved in the POV dispute and long time anti-LaRouche activist is just absurd, and clearly not a reliable or legitimate source. Let alone someone who should be anywhere near a LaRouche article.

The latest dispute on the locked page led me to this site by Dennis King called LyndonLaRoucheWatch.org. I read some stuff and scrolled down the page until I caught something about Walter Lippman, who always catches my eye due to some of his later writings, and how a LaRouche piece about Lippman, alongside "Anti-Dirigism Is British Tory Propaganda," is evidence that LaRouche is using "British" as a code word for "Jews"!

According to King (left) when LaRouche refers to the British, he actually means Jews.
Ergo, LaRouche is spreading anti-Semite propaganda by criticising the British Empire.

You can't turn this kind of thing down, so I scanned more evidence, and absolutely none of this adds up. King is basing his piece on LaRouche's various theories about the Rothschild family’s historical influence in the financial sectors of London and other later bits and bobs including the early days of George Soros. But then who doesn't have theories about the Rothschilds and Soros? Hardly controversial and the Rothschild family remain extremely powerful to this day. They just happen to be Jewish. Other claims of "anti-Semitism" laid by Dennis King elsewhere include LaRouche criticisms of Kissinger, Leo Stauss and Paul Wolfowitz amidst his criticisms of others. I mean, who hasn't criticised Kissinger, Strauss and Wolfowitz other than their own mothers?

Before the article was locked, it was restored to state that LaRouche attacks "a cabal of mostly Jewish banking families in London". With the bolded wording readded. What I gather LaRouche was doing was talking about the leading historical figures in banking, the Rothschilds etc, some of whom happen to be Jewish. I could find no mention of "Jewish" in LaRouche's writings, and of course, if you were to criticise British capitalism over the past two centuries, there's no doubt you'd cover the likes of the Rothschilds. Everyone does.

This absolutely stinks.

Wikipedia admins such as Georgewilliamherbert, David Gerard, JPGordon and others who've been supporting Dennis King have been duped. They've been conned by unscrupulous propagandists: King and Berlet. And they don't know it. All they're doing is acting reflexively against perceived WP "trolls" and "outsiders", and have winded up pushing the most bizarre conspiracy theories on the page.

Let's just restate Dennis King's theory again: "When LaRouche refers to the British. He actually means Jews. Ergo, LaRouche is an anti-Semite!" And King's actually being allowed to spread his theory on biographical articles with the protection of WP admins.

This has been noticed by other commentators. According to the Wikipedia bio of LaRouche,

Pipes himself is no friend of LaRouche. But even for him, King's tripe is too much to take.

Isn't this "my adversaries speak in code and here is the real meaning" the worst of the worst of tin-foil-hat nutter conspiracy theories? With the proper word substitution you can prove anything. If "milk" is code for "the blood of babies" then the National Dairy Council wants you to drink the blood of babies. It is a resort to special revealed knowledge that is the death of reason. Why doesn't Morton Devonshire and the anti-conspiratorial cabal jump all over this nonsense? I guess they must actually have some other agenda than exposing bad reasoning.

Can anyone point to something specifically anti-semitic LaRouche has said or done? Or has he actually just criticised Israel and Israeli lobbying within the US?

I heard it on the Gripewhine …

Jonny

I don't know if he's a particular critic of Israel, perhaps Herschel can elaborate?

But the main point is: There isn't a hope that a professional or serious encyclopaedia would use Dennis King's "analysis" in a biographical article about this guy. It takes a very short space of time to realise what King is up to and why he's doing it. And it makes Wikipedia look really bad.

The fact that ignorant or unworldy WP admins still buy this claptrap pushed by King and Berlet, and then blindly support it without question, is the really disgraceful element.

He's aligned with the pro-negotiation elements in Israeli politics, has supported recent initiatives by Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, and is an admirer of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo accords.

Although the history of his conflicts with Berlet and King is long and tortuous, I think that I would summarize it as follows: Berlet and King are simply poison-pens-for-hire. The motive for siccing them on LaRouche was primarily LaRouche's relentless critique of the banking establishment. LaRouche is not the only target of these sorts of tactics; German vice-chancellor and SPD head Franz Muenterfering referred to hedge funds as "Locusts," and next thing he knew, he was being accused of anti-Semitism, because hedge funds involve bankers and as we all know, "bankers" is secret code for "Jews."

I think what LaRouche did that pissed them off the most was his 1971 debate with Abba Lerner. Lerner was a noted Keynesian economist who was there to defend certain policies, including "labor recycling" in Brazil, that LaRouche had characterized as a revival of the fascist economics of Hitler's Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht. LaRouche backed Lerner into a corner during the debate, to the point where Lerner said, "But if Germany had accepted Schacht's policies, Hitler would not have been necessary." The financial establishment had been striving to quietly revive Schacht's policies while maintaining a publicly "liberal" stance of opposition to fascism, and this debate was a major embarassment for them. It made LaRouche very unpopular in these circles, and one of the tactics that was chosen for the purpose of "dealing with LaRouche" was the charge of anti-Semitism (which is quite a pernicious charge -- even saying "I'm not anti-Semitic" makes you into a dubious character.)

People looking for hidden meanings in things sometimes hit the nail on the head and expose conspiracies and corruption. But without finding substantial non-hidden meanings beneath the surface, it ends up all looking like hogwash.

In this instance, saying that criticism of Britain is a codeword for criticism of Jews is just plain stupid.

I mean I have said elsewhere that I was very disappointed to learn that renowned conspiracy theorist Joe Vialls had at the end of 90% of his theories that "secretly the Jews did it", which indicated that most of the time his theories were a load of nonsense, even if everything bar the conclusion was well reasoned and in some cases had a lot of merit.

Such people do exist, and if LaRouche is the same, then I don't know how much credibility we should give him too.

But I am not convinced that LaRouche is another Vialls. If he is, there should be some clue, like there was with Vialls. There should be, in every single conclusion, or at least most of them, something along the lines of "Mossad agents were behind all of this" or something like that.

Australian B'nai B'rith clearly disapproves of LaRouche and his followers:

http://www.bnaibrith.org.au/images/%7BD50F...B7E8CBD2%7D.doc

Guy, I don't actually see any actual criticism in that at all except a quote pointing out that many neo conservatives are Jewish which is actually true. People who are Jewish are more likely to be supporters of Israel but obviously some, but probably a minority of Jews are openly critical of Israel.

Cheney and Rumsfeld aren't Jewish are they? I already mentioned the last bit. The fact that LaRouche seems to support the moderate elements within Israel such as Rabin was suggest that he is not anti-semitic.

B'nai B'rith sounds like a character in scifi/fantasy.

Gratuitous.

Jonny

According to some recent newspaper articles, Zionism is much less popular among younger American Jews than older ones, but still relatively popular among those who are particularly conservative. Those are the demographics; draw your own conclusions.

Al

The point here though is that Wikipedia admins are doing the dirty work of Dennis King, a blatant propagandist. A man who writes that LaRouche is "The American Hitler".

In this article, King writes:



LaRouche's piece, The Case of Walter Lippman, which Dennis King claims is an attack on Jews and gays is available here:

http://www.archive.org/details/TheCaseOfWa...dentialStrategy

I had a look at it, which is probably more than any of these Wikipedia admins have managed to do. Though some of it is pretty bizarre, at no point in the 200+ pages does LaRouche mention Jews or gays, or even vaguely implies that “the human race has to assert itself against assorted subhumans”. He attacks all kinds of institutions and government activities in a myriad of tenuous connections, and his main targets are the decidedly un-Jewish nor gay Rockefeller family and the British establishment. The article does not remotely imply King's conclusion.

Dennis King is using wikipedia to spread smears without any foundation, and seems to be hoping that no one actually checks his claims. And it’s as clear as day if you do. Wikipedia admins who haven’t bothered to do their homework have fallen for these tricks.

Dopes!

I don't mean any disrespect toward LaRouche or his followers, but my first response is why go about a "code attack" when addressing the fabric of tentative connections should be an effective rebuttal to LaRouche's positions? But then I realize that once you gain acceptance of this type of attack the sky is the limit. You can attack any opponent on any issue without regard to the merits. I think they select LaRouche because his complexity and convoluted nature of his arguments will deter any examination of the merits and make Berlet's and King's "revealed knowledge" an attractive alternative to sorting things out. Once you get your audience used to accepting your "revealed knowledge" you can apply the attack to targets with whose merits could otherwise be appreciated. It truly is a case of first they came for the LaRouchies, but I was not a LaRouchie..."

I know. It wouldn't be difficult to criticise many of LaRouche's assertions using contradictory evidence. But why bother? If you can make up a load of old false crap about his views, call the guy "the American Hitler", and get all kinds of neutrals on your side to support you based on this, who needs reasoned critiques?

If these people are so against Larouche, then why are they giving him almost 200,000 bytes of webspace (between the main bio page and the "views of" page--the "views of" page being one of the shining examples of POV pushing ever to grace Wikipedia)à to explain everything that he ever said? Wouldn't it be much more effective to give him a little less than the 70.000 bytes allocated to Karl Marx or the 47.000 given to Schopenhauer?

I mean, are they really against this if they want to go on at such great lengths to discuss everything that the man has said and done? And aren't most people who are already for this kind of thing already going to think that this is peachy-keen regardless of what they say?

It seems to me that the agenda here is not exactly what one might think at first glance....

I was just saying elsewhere that I only heard of him via Wikipedia. Actually, the likeliest explanation is that the anti-LaRouche people just aren't thinking what they're doing.

it seems to me that the best "anti"-Larouche course of action would be to cut the articles down to a strict minimum and play him down as a "marginal" figure, rather than building him up as this huge villain.

I probably bear a good deal of responsibility for this state of affairs. I would be delighted if Wikipedia had only one, short, factual article on LaRouche. However, the Dennis King/Chip Berlet stuff was being stuffed into the articles early on by people like Adam Carr -- before King and Berlet became editors and began self-stuffing -- and since I lost the argument that they were not Reliable Sources, I responded by adding rebuttal material from LaRouche himself under NPOV. It became a vicious circle of me adding more quotes from LaRouche to refute their innuendo, and them adding more yet innuendo. I got banned, but by then the LaRouche Youth Movement was growing rapidly, and as is well known, young people use the internet, so others came forward to battle Berlet and King (and get banned for their troubles.) I think that a short bio with no crap would be a lovely solution.

Adam Carr as we recall was an ex-Communist turned "Neo-Conservative" writer who worked for a Melbourne politician. He was unashamedly a POV bully with some crazy ideas of his own, and again, hardly a sober analyst (despite his insistence that a PhD in 18th century European history meant that he could hold sway on all manner of topics).

I have yet to examine his role in the LaRouche debacle, but I imagine it isn't pretty.

These kinds of episodes are just so ugly. A small number of extremists like Carr and King talk a good game to the right people, and before you know it they've entrapped uninformed young goons like Georgewilliamherbert to do their bidding. Herbert's other areas of editing, besides blundering into the complex political machinations of LaRouche, are on WikiProject Role-playing games. He has created articles on the Inverness Yacht Club (California) and the FIA GT Motor Championship!

I didn't think George William Herbert was all that young. We once scraped a Wikipedia article on him, but it was soon deleted from Wikipedia. Will look to see if our copy is still around.

Yup, here it is — George William Herbert

Jonny

If he isn't young, what is he doing playing "Role-playing games"? ....

Oh wait, these are Wikipedia editors we're talking about. Sorry. Should have known.

Fred seems to think extraordinary action is needed on the LaRouche article because he fears a coup of the American government by LaRouche.

The main edit war which caused the unprecedented indefinite lock was over Dennis King adding this section to the Views of LaRouche article. The material, which seems to stem solely from King's own interpretations of LaRouche's writing is clearly against WP:SYN and WP:NOR policies. None of it appears in WP:Reliable sources. King selects tiny quotes from LaRouche to forward his position.


But the dopes at Wiki-en list have looked at this and concluded the following of the 2-3 LaRouchies who have been arguing over this over the last few weeks (It hardly looks like a furious edit war):













And this is after a couple of people reverted some clear Original Research by an editor Dennis King who believes "British" is a code word for "Jews" and which didn't appear in any WP:RS. Why have WP gone so loopy over this? Why are they talking about changing the policies of wikipedia itself to counter a few correct deletions by editors who as far as we know have not broken any rules? Why are WP admins going to such lengths to support people like Dennis King?

One more time we have a Wikipediot Trustee — in the prison slang "Screw" sense of the word — seriously proposing systematic legal threats against other editors, all with complete impunity. This is the kind of thing for which I've seen naive Wikipeons get banned on sight, all for nothing more than a slip of the tongue that appeared to hint at a legal threat.

If we have no respect left for Wikipediot rules, it is because we have had the best possible teachers in that disrespect.

Jonny

Yes, very funny! In all seriousness though, the history of assassinations that create martyrs is actually quite pleasant indeed.

I'm tellin' ya, ever since they added that new InsertRandomDisturbingRemark() subroutine to the production version and subscribed it to the mailing list, the JoshuaZ AI construct has been a neverending source of great quotes!

Hey, I wonder if he has an "About..." box we could look at?

To be fair to Fred, I don't think he fears it. He probably thinks it would be funny.

Still, why isn't he taking a similar attitude to other groups trying to overthrow elected governments by force, ones that are far more credible?

Irony plays out on many levels. Fred may mock LaRouche by a dead pan declaration of a coup threat. I may mock Fred by a dead pan acceptance of his fears at face value. At the end of the day Fred and company are running around with their heads cut off claiming to fear assassination plots because a couple of editors with an unpopular POV made a handful of edits in response to a ridiculous assertion by an influential editor with a license to grind axe.