Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (born September 8, 1922 as Lynn Marcus) is an American political figure, and a perennial candidate for President of the United States. While he associates himself with the Democratic Party, he has never been that party's nominee for office. He is a candidate for 2004 US Presidential Election.
His political views are extremely controversial and are characterized by his belief in a number of complex conspiracy theories, involving global plots to establish a frightening New World Order, involving such figures as the British Royal Family (especially the Duke of Edinburgh) and George H.W. Bush.
Somewhat unusually LaRouche began his political career within a far left organisation and was a member of the Socialist Workers Party from 1948 until 1965. Although he was noted as being very inactive within that activist oriented millieu. In 1965 he left the SWP and was briefly associated with first Tim Wohlforth American Committee of the Fourth International and then Jim Robertsons Spartacist League.
After these brief entanglements he formed his own National Committee of Labor Committees recruiting from the collapsing New left. The NCLC was very strongly catastrophist claiming that economic crisis was on the immediate horizon. For this reason the NCLC had to build a leadership to prepare for the onrushing crisis. This led them to act in a very sectarian fashion towards rival leftist groups. This culiminated in Operation Mop Up in which the NCLC decided to eliminate the Communist Party by attacking their meetings. After this no one regarded the NCLC as a legitimate part of the left.
The germ of all his political views is an understanding of what he terms "the complex domain". By this, scientists such as Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann mean the domain of the universal physical principles, or natural laws, pertaining to both science and art, the interaction of which with man's sense organs produces the apparent, but paradoxical sensible universe. The resolution of such paradoxes by the method of creative hypothesis and proof-of-principle experiment, is the source of all knowledge.
From this platonic understanding, LaRouche identifies the only true political conflict, as that between oligarchism, which declares man a kind of domesticable herd animal, and government based on the general welfare, which declares him made in the mental image of the Creator. In the latter, the only efficient agenda is the development of mankind's characteristic faculty for discovering, transmitting, and employing universal physical principles.
In December of 1988, LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud in regards to the methods used by his organization to solicit approximately $34 million in loans. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison in Minnesota, though he was given a early release in 1993 after serving five years. He ran his 1992 Presidential campaign from prison.
"The complex domain"
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