John Train's Press Sewer:
Is Goebbels on Your Campus?
by Anton Chaitkin and Jeffrey Steinberg
In the span of less than a week in late September and early October 2006, a pair of almost identical slanders appeared in the pages of campus-linked newspapers at the University of California in Los Angeles and Boston University, both maliciously and falsely targetting the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) as a "political cult." The two smear pieces came at a time when evidence was already dropping from the proverbial tree, about a major reactivation of the John Train "Get LaRouche salon." This Anglo-American "bankers CIA" apparatus had teamed up with corrupt Federal prosecutors to frame Lyndon LaRouche and a dozen of his close colleagues during the late 1980s, after an Oct. 6, 1986 attempted government-led "Waco-style" assassination of LaRouche was thwarted, in part, through the personal intervention of then-President Ronald Reagan, with whom LaRouche had worked closely on the Strategic Defense Initiative.
As the result of the UCLA and Boston University slanders, an EIR investigative team, including members of the LYM, has unearthed a major neo-conservative assault on academic freedom and university political activism, leading right to the doorstep of Mrs. Lynne Cheney, the wife and intellectual controller of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mrs. Cheney had chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities—a Federal government-created and -funded cultural warfare agency—from 1986-93, which was the period of incubation for most of the campus thought-police organizations. Mrs. Cheney went on to found ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, one of the key organizations in the "open conspiracy" to purge the campuses of opponents of the "Conservative Revolution."
The apparatus behind this "out-Goebbels Goebbels" black propaganda and intimidation drive includes many of the neo-conservative "usual suspects"—the Bradley Foundation; John Train's own Northcote Parkinson Fund; Stalinist turned right-winger David Horowitz; Campus Watch guru Daniel Pipes; the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, and Mont Pelerin Society founder Edwin Fuelner; and such veterans of the 1980s Train salon apparatus as former High Times magazine Washington bureau chief Chip Berlet and scam artist turned "anti-cult deprogrammer" Rick Ross. The fact that Ford Foundation-funded "leftist" Chip Berlet and Bradley Foundation funded radical rightist David Horowitz regularly engage in media-hyped food fights against one another, but morph into the same "Get LaRouche" operation, just serves to underscore that the LaRouche movement is a priority target of the top levels of the financier oligarchy. When it comes to targetting LaRouche, the usual left-versus-right fakery goes out the window, and all assets are called up to the front line to combat LaRouche's growing influence among campus intellectuals who come from all political persuasions.
That the smear campaign against LaRouche has been launched on university campuses nationwide on the eve of the most important mid-term Congressional elections in American history is no coincidence. College-age youth constitute a vital portion of the electorate, and in 2004, they overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Democratic Party Presidential nominee John Kerry, out of disgust for everything that the Bush-Cheney Administration stood for. Since November 2004, the performance of the Administration, highlighted by the quagmire in Iraq, the current threat of an "October Surprise" U.S. preventive military strike on Iran, and the no-future economic dogma and lies, has deepened the hatred and greatly increased the stakes in the upcoming mid-term vote. And with LaRouche Youth Movement organizers fanning out on university campuses all over the country, to energize an even larger youth turnout on Nov. 7, the Dick Cheney and Karl Rove White House tricksters have gone flight-forward.
Indeed, the open involvement of Lynne Cheney and the ACTA organization that she co-founded with Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Leo Strauss/Allan Bloom crony Saul Bellows, in the apparatus of front-groups behind the campus drive to silence all anti-Bush/Cheney voices, underscores that desperation.
Unraveling the Goebbels Apparatus
One of the first indications of a coordinated activation of slanders directed at university students, was the surfacing of UCLA student neo-con Garin Havannisian at several LYM meetings in the Los Angles area, feigning political interest in order to spy on the LaRouche group. Similar efforts to infiltrate LYM events and chapters had already taken place in Boston, Washington, D.C., Oakland, and Seattle, and already, career LaRouche-slanderer Chip Berlet and his Political Research Associates had been implicated. In the Spring of 2006, Berlet had delivered the latest fractured fairy-tale slander of LaRouche at the annual conference in Denver, of the American Family Foundation (AFF), a nominally private "anti-cult" organization that actually was spawned out of the secret government experiments in mind control and drug interrogations from the 1950s through the 1970s. In the past, the AFF-linked Cult Awareness Network (CAN) had been busted by police all over the United States as a kidnap-for-hire ring at the disposal of wealthy families.
Havannisian published the slander on LaRouche on Sept. 29, in the right-wing campus newspaper the Bruin Standard, which he had co-founded. The publication is part of a nationwide network of 90 neo-conservative and ultra-rightist campus-based "independent" newspapers, the Collegiate Network, which is run, top down, by some of the leading neo-con figures from the Bush Administration orbit.
Among the advisors to the Collegiate network's CAMPUS Magazine Online is Midge Decter, the wife of one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement, Norman Podhoretz, who is also the mother-in-law of White House neo-con Elliott Abrams and the longtime treasurer and board member of John Train's Northcote Parkinson Fund.
Havannisian, it emerged, is a protégé and asset of David Horowitz, the John Train collaborator and founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center). Havannisian is regularly published in Horowitz's frontpagemag.com. A shorter version of his Bruin Standard slander also appeared in the November 2006 issue of Larry Flynt's Hustler, a hard-core porn magazine. So much for David Horowitz's self-promotion as the defender of "family values" in Hollywood's mass culture industry.
Havannisian is also head of the UCLA chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a nationwide campus-based organization whose explicit goal is to end what they call "the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission," a Horowitz euphemism for the suppression of student and faculty opposition to the imperial policies of the radical right, including, most emphatically, the permanent war dogmas of the Bush-Cheney regime. Horowitz was the founder of Students for Academic Freedom.
Just days after the publication of Havannisian's articles in the UCLA Bruin Standard and Hustler, a very similar smear on LaRouche and the LYM appeared in the Daily Free Press, another neo-conservative "independent" campus newspaper circulated at Boston University. Philip Goldstein, the author of the article, openly acknowledged that he had composed the slander in collusion with well-known "Get LaRouche" operatives Chip Berlet, Rick Ross, and Pricilla Coates, all of whom were part of the 1980s Train-led "Get LaRouche" salon operation. Ross and Coates were identified by Goldstein as Cult Awareness Network affiliates.
All told, in the past several months, a large number of almost identical slander stories have been planted against the LYM and Lyndon LaRouche in campus-oriented publications, including a nationwide chain of weekly throwaway urban papers that profess to be "intellectual," but make their money from pornography and dating service advertising.
As you will discover, in the pages that follow, from top to bottom, all of these slanders have been emitted from one single sewer—a sewer that is out to crush all anti-Bush, anti-Cheney, anti-neo-con thought from the universities and colleges of America—all in the name of "freedom of speech" and "academic integrity." The ghosts of Goebbels and Joe McCarthy are stalking your campus, and it is in your hands to make sure that they are driven out by the spotlight of truth.
