By John Tully
Although the skinhead bashers of National Action have attracted a great deal of media attention, there are much more dangerous fascists in Australia. Known as the 'Citizens Electoral Councils' (CEC), they are the Australian arm of the Lyndon Larouche organisation, described by the ABC's 'Four Corners' as the 'new American fascism'. The group has organised with some success in rural areas and now hangs around the labour movement like a rotten smell. They turned up at the big trade union rally in Canberra in September 1996, and more lately they have been lurking round the Maritime Union picket at Webb Dock in Melbourne. They even send their propaganda to the Melbourne Trades Hall, drawing attention to their strange version of anti-privatisation to curry favour with the unsuspecting.
We must be on guard. This group is a virulent threat to everything the labour movement stands for. They must be exposed for what they are and sent scuttling back into their holes before they are able to do any damage. 'A pox on society'
Described by former members as a 'cult', 'a bastard organisation' and a 'pox on society' the group initially targeted debt-ridden Queensland farmers for recruits. They now turn up everywhere from university campuses to union rallies. They beaver away in the far-right gun lobby and sweet-talk conservative politicians. They run smear campaigns against opponents and have harassed Melbourne's Jewish community with their vicious propaganda. A favourite activity - surely designed only to intimidate - is to stuff thousands of copies of their paper, The Citizen, into letterboxes in Jewish areas. They even have 'intelligence officers' to spy on opponents!
CEC members pledge blind obedience to their Fuehrer, the convicted American crook and perennial presidential candidate, Lyndon Larouche. CEC boss Craig Isherwood admitted publicly that 'you cannot disagree with Mr Larouche and be part of this organisation', a state of affairs that he says is 'fine'. This means you must agree with a conspiracy theory so crazy that it would make even Hitler blush.
Larouchite ideology is a virulent stew of Christian fundamentalism and fascism. Like the Nazis they seek to influence workers - their rhetoric includes calls to stop 'union busting' and they have tried to latch onto the anti-privatisation bandwagon. They babble about human beings being created in the image of god and claim that the great battle is against the forces of materialism. In Larouche's wacko view, the Queen is a drug-pusher and there is a gigantic international conspiracy of Jews, Leftists and liberals to set up a world dictatorship. Only Larouche, whom they claim is 'the greatest thinker since Leibnitz', can stop it. When Larouche was doing five years prison for fraud, they printed a poster which said: 'Let Larouche go free. Stop World War III' (!)
And woe betide any CEC member who begins to question this paranoid vision. In common with religious cults such as the Moonies, the outfit does not baulk at splitting up families and harassing its enemies. As the distraught mother of some CEC members said 'You can be a member of the Liberal Party or the Labor Party or any party and keep your family. But not with the CEC. This is a cult.' The CEC has brainwashing sessions to stifle internal dissent. American-style 'psycho-babble' is used to disorient the victims. A favourite ploy is to accuse young men of having 'psycho-sexual relationships' with their mothers and to urge a split from their families to 'promote healing'.
The CEC also employs 'intelligence officers' whose job is to find ammunition for what has been described as 'stink bomb politics'. The technique is to find or manufacture material for 'dirty tricks' campaigns against opponents, particularly Jews and Leftists. And anything goes, including bugging opponents' meetings and building up dossiers. The Larouchites' chief spook in Australia is Michael Sharp. He learned his trade from his American counterpart Herb Quindy, who once boasted that he could 'get professional killers' for use against Basque separatists in Spain. They have come a long way from the time when Larouche was a small-time fascist who specialised in sooling thugs onto leftwing demonstrators.
The Larouchites now operate on five continents and surfaced in Australia in the 1980s when they set up their first CEC branch at Kingaroy in Queensland. They found fertile ground for their ideas among small farmers driven to desperation by drought and crippling bank charges. A CEC member named Trevor Perrett was elected to the Queensland parliament by playing on local sympathy for the notorious former state premier Jo Bjelke-Petersen. Further afield they recruited Dennis Collins, a right wing Northern Territory politician. But their greatest coup related to Ken Aldred, the former Liberal member for the federal seat of Deakin in Victoria. Former CEC members were present at meetings between Aldred and the group, and Aldred read large volumes of often libellous Larouchite-style propaganda into Hansard under parliamentary privilege. According to former members, the CEC even orchestrated Aldred's abortive attempt to become leader of the Liberal Party.
Larouche's intercontinental operations call for enormous sums of money. Larouche himself made millions of dollars selling computers and lives on a sumptuous ranch near Washington DC. But god's gift to humanity demands that his followers raise the cash themselves to finance his political operations. And he isn't fussy about how they do it - a fact which led to his 'seeing striped sunlight' for many years in a US federal penitentiary.
The Larouchites are particularly dangerous because at first they can appear sane and convincing. They can strike up an acquaintanceship on the basis of opposition to privatisation and attacks on unions and it is only gradually that the full kookiness of their views emerges.
The fact that this unsavoury outfit is seeking to penetrate the labour movement should send alarm bells ringing. Trade unionists are advised to be on their guard against any attempt by the CEC to insinuate itself into their confidence. It is high time that the movement launched a campaign against them. Once the facts are known, it is a safe bet that no decent trade unionist would have a bar of them.