For the Exoneration of the Most Beautiful Soul in American History

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this article]

The following is the introduction to the soon-to-be-published LaRouche PAC mass-circulation pamphlet calling for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. It will then be translated into many other languages by groups and individuals furthering this effort across the globe.

There is no one in the history of the United States to my knowledge, for whom there is a greater discrepancy between the image crafted by the neo-liberal establishment and the so-called mainstream media, through decades of slanders and covert operations of all kinds, and the actual reality of the person himself, than Lyndon LaRouche. And that is saying a lot in the wake of the more than two-year Witch Hunt against President Trump. The reason why the complete exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is synonymous with the fate of the United States, lies both in the threat which his opponents pose to the very existence of the U.S.A. as a republic, and thus for the entire world, and also in the implications of his ideas for America’s future survival.

Naturally, most people will think that I, as Lyndon LaRouche’s widow after 41 years of marriage, cannot be objective in my views about him. Nevertheless, I can say that Lyn was the most creative person of his age. There was virtually no important field of knowledge in which he could not measure up to or excel the best experts—be it in science, Classical music and poetry, history, or philosophy. He was one of the few economists worldwide who actually deserve that title, because he placed “physical economy,” as it had been developed by Leibniz, onto a scientific basis, founding it on the theories of Bernhard Riemann, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Albert Einstein. His analysis of the international monetarist financial system was based on this theory of physical economy, which enabled him to precisely forecast all the major economic disasters since the 1950s.

As early as 1975, he designed a new international credit system, the International Development Bank, which he elaborated over the years into a New Bretton Woods system. For the past 50 years he has taken the lead in drawing up comprehensive development and industrialization programs for five continents, which today resonate in the extension of the New Silk Road into the World Land-Bridge, which 126 nations have now joined. Beginning in 1976, he ran for U.S. President a total of eight times, seven of them as a Democrat. These were not isolated election campaigns, but rather a unified attempt to free not just the Presidency itself, but also the institution of the Presidency as the keystone of the American System fought for and won by the War of Independence, from control by the British Empire under which it had fallen, by and large, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

Elements of the apparatus, often misleadingly referred to as the “Deep State” (which in reality is the deep penetration of the American institutions by the British Empire’s secret services), already had LaRouche on their radar in the 1960s, due to his nonconformist way of thinking. But it was beginning in 1982 that this apparatus orchestrated a campaign against him, using the same method as the “Russiagate” operation against President Trump. In the eyes of this Anglophile establishment, LaRouche had crossed the Rubicon: Not only had he proposed strategic concepts to solve the Pershing-II SS20 Medium-Range Rocket Crisis, and the global financial crisis, but a number of nations’ heads of state were even beginning to implement these concepts.

1982-1983 Shocks Begin

On September 1, 1982, when former Mexican President López Portillo implemented elements of LaRouche’s plan for the economic integration of Latin America, “Operation Juárez,” and introduced capital controls to stop capital flight out of the peso, absolute panic gripped Wall Street for 30 minutes. The fear was that Latin America would set off the “debt bomb,” thereby forcing a reorganization of debt payments. At the same time, with the Reagan Administration’s consent, LaRouche entered into back-channel negotiations with Moscow to explore the possibility of a new strategic agreement. His proposal to replace NATO’s concept of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) with a joint neutralization of nuclear weapons and “mutually assured survival,” was essentially declared official U.S. policy by President Reagan one year later, on March 23, 1983. In the same period, LaRouche met with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who intended to implement his proposed program for a 40-year development perspective for India.

The British imperial powers regarded these initiatives—the effort to implement a permanent peace policy with Russia, and the concept of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing sector through concrete programs for industrialization—as existential threats to their system. On August 27, 1982, the British government sent a letter to the FBI demanding that an investigation of LaRouche be opened.

Even though this letter’s text is still classified, the response of then FBI Counterintelligence Chief James Nolan should remind us of the fraudulent nature of the allegations by Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and company against Trump. Nolan wrote that it is “entirely plausible” that the Soviets were using LaRouche to promote “Soviet foreign policy objectives.” From January 1983 onward, the aforementioned apparatus was thus set into motion against LaRouche by Henry Kissinger and his accomplices on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, under the full protection and guidance of then Vice President George H.W. Bush. In 1986, after representatives of the LaRouche wing of the Democratic Party won the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois, and after the same Robert S. Mueller of later Trumpgate fame had taken over the persecution of LaRouche, the attacks escalated.

On October 6, 1986, four hundred FBI agents and security forces, with armored cars and helicopters, launched a raid on LaRouche’s offices and residence. One of the agents later admitted that the objective had been to kill LaRouche in the course of this assault, which was only prevented by an intervention from President Reagan’s White House. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark later called the subsequent legal prosecution “a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.” —Ramsey Clark

Clark also said:

In what was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focused on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. . . . The purpose can only be seen as destroying—more than a political movement, more than a political figure—it is those two; but it’s a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.

The first trial in Boston collapsed because the defense was able to demonstrate the existence of a dirty operation concerning the government’s submission of evidence, after which the very same indictment was used (which is illegal) and reintroduced for “a railroad trial” in the infamous court in Alexandria, Virginia. At this “Freisler trial,”[fn_1] LaRouche was not even questioned, and for an alleged white-collar crime, was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. This was accompanied by an unprecedented international slander campaign in the mainstream media, supported by private foundations, and used in order to stigmatize LaRouche throughout the entire trans-Atlantic world.

The enormity of this crime against LaRouche lies not only in its violation of the human rights of LaRouche and his associates by depriving them of their freedom—a great blot on the reputation of the United States to this day—but above all, in the fact that these actions prevented the population of the United States and other nations from grappling with LaRouche’s ideas without bias and pre-judgment. The implementation of his solutions was forestalled, and it is no exaggeration to state that as a direct result, millions of people have lost their lives, such as in the developing countries, which were unable to industrialize.

Since 1976, infrastructure development of the African continent has been among my husband’s most passionate, heartfelt objectives. A comprehensive plan for Africa was presented for the first time at a conference in Paris and appeared in book form in 1978. The development of Africa was always a core feature of his Presidential campaigns, and was the subject of numerous seminars in many European cities with representatives of African nations.

Rev. Wade Watts

In 1992, as LaRouche, guiltless, sat in prison, Reverend Wade Watts, Executive Director of the Oklahoma State NAACP, wrote in his contribution to the Festschrift for LaRouche’s 70th birthday:

He said that if he became President of the United States, he would make the Sahara Desert in Africa bloom like a rose. He said he would build lakes to trap the water when it fell, he would cut canals out from Lake Chad into the Sahara Desert and start an irrigation program. He said he would also cut canals from the Nile River to the Sahara Desert, and they could raise food enough to feed 85% of the entire world. He said he would put tractors over there, combines, bulldozers, and modern farm equipment, and stop those Africans from having to use those old wooden plows and oxen. He said he would start a fertilizer program and rotate the crops and declare war on the pests and control them with a substance that is not harmful to man. He said that the average country that goes into Africa goes in not to help them but to exploit them. I wondered what kind of mind he had. He predicted things in the future that sometimes would come true like a clockwork.

On Sept. 8, 1997, in a contribution to his 75th birthday, Reverend Watts added:

You also spoke about Ethiopia and the capital Addis Ababa, and you said only it had paved roads, only 40 miles outside of the capital each way, north, south, east, west, and then it turned into dirt roads and cattle trails. And this was in a time where Ethiopia was in starvation.

Thanks to Chinese investments, the industrialization of Africa has now gotten seriously under way, but in the meantime, many children and adults have starved to death, and many refugees have died while attempting to reach Europe. This, too, goes onto the list of charges against LaRouche’s persecutors.

But thankfully, the imperial mafia has not been able to fully contain LaRouche’s ideas. Even though, over the long life granted to my husband, many of his co-fighters in many nations of the world have already passed away, nonetheless the number of people, both ordinary and influential, who have come into contact with him and his life’s work in the course of the last half century is extremely impressive. His ideas flowed through a multitude of channels: speakers and participants at numerous conferences on five continents, addressing various themes—from the need for a new world economic order, to the necessity of a renaissance of Classical Culture. Thousands of prominent people committed themselves to his release from prison and exoneration, including former heads of state and ministers, former chiefs of staff and union leaders, cardinals, bishops, scientists, and artists.

LaRouche’s Immortal Legacy

My husband has left behind an enormous body of work expressing not only his inspiring ideas for the next fifty years of humanity and beyond, but also his groundbreaking scientific, artistic, and philosophical concepts. Their publication will follow as quickly as possible. Yet his impact was, and still is, not through his writings alone, which he worked on with the passion of a genius even into old age, often writing sixty to eighty pages a day, ready for print, with all footnotes appended. He also had an enormous, immeasurable effect, not only in public speeches, but above all through personal discussions, whereby often only a single encounter sufficed to permanently affect the life of his discussion partner. Numerous contributions for his decennial birthday Festschriften over the last 30 years, and recently a flood of condolences on the occasion of his passing, reflect the deep effect that he had on many people throughout the world.

For the countless people who had the fortune to know him personally, he opened the way to their own creativity in a manner that only geniuses in history are capable of. “Thank you, you have changed my life,” is the message to him in eternity from thousands. Many have indicated that even though without him, they might have known Plato, Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven, Kepler, Gauss, Einstein, or Vernadsky—to name but a few in a long tradition of scientific, philosophic, and artistic ideas which were LaRouche’s element—but that these thinkers, poets, and composers would never have become so dear to their hearts without him. Without LaRouche’s own in-depth understanding, far removed from any academic narrow-mindedness, and without his own philosophical dimension, they would never have come to know in the same way the essence of the thinking of these great men. It is not an exaggeration to say that LaRouche brought forth a revival and deepening of the understanding of the best traditions of Classical art and of Western civilization’s scientific heritage. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a Renaissance man.

In the 1960s, as the “Flower Power” movement assaulted a largely vulnerable population, he recognized that the rock-drug-sex counterculture would destroy society’s cognitive potential, and so in 1977 he publicized his warning that the drug epidemic would ruin the United States.

There is not enough space here to point out all the precious insights and discoveries that Lyndon LaRouche bestowed on his contemporaries and posterity. As a representative selection, we name here but a few.

Precious Insights

The great Russian scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov proposed that in the tradition of great discoverers whose scientific breakthroughs were named after them—as for example the ampere, named after the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère, and the volt, after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta—so should Potential Relative Population Density, the measure discovered by LaRouche for physical economy, be named the “La” in his honor.

Norbert Brainin, the founder and first violinist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet, told my husband that he not only read his works every day, but wrote to him in prison:

Somehow I cannot help thinking, in this connection, about the revolution in the history of musical composition wrought by Haydn and Mozart in the late 18th Century, and ponder the fact, that there was a time, when Haydn and Mozart were the only people in the world aware of this crucial development, the introduction of this rigorous principle of Motivführung (thematic development); the parallel of today being, that now there are also only two people aware of this revolutionary breakthrough, namely you and I. I think this augurs well for the future. With all my love. Yours, Norbert.

Lyndon LaRouche also had that precious quality of “truth-seeking” which Brainin so treasured as the prerequisite for genius—what Friedrich Schiller described as the “philosophical mind,” who, Schiller said, loves Truth more than his system. I know of no person to whom the following citation from Schiller’s writings on universal history applies more, than to Lyn:

How entirely differently the philosophical mind comports itself! As meticulously as the bread-fed scholar distinguishes his science from all others, the latter strives to extend the reach of his own, and to reestablish its bond with the others—reestablish, I say, for only the abstracting mind has set these boundaries, has sundered these sciences from one another. Where the bread-fed scholar severs, the philosophical mind unites. He early convinced himself, that everything is intertwined in the field of understanding as well as in the material world, and his zealous drive for harmony cannot be satisfied with fragments of the whole. All his efforts are directed toward the perfection of his knowledge; his noble impatience cannot rest until all of his conceptions have ordered themselves into an organic whole, until he stands at the center of his art, his science, and until from this position outward he surveys its expanse with a contented look.

New discoveries in the sphere of his activities, which cast the bread-fed scholar down, delight the philosophical mind. Perhaps they fill a gap which had still disfigured the growing whole of his conceptions, or they set the stone still missing in the edifice of his ideas, which then completes it. Even should these new discoveries leave it in ruins, a new chain of thoughts, a new natural phenomenon, a newly discovered law in the material world overthrow the entire edifice of his science, no matter: He has always loved truth more than his system, and he will gladly exchange the old, insufficient form for a new one, more beautiful. Indeed, if no blow from the outside shatters his edifice of ideas, he himself will be the first to tear it apart, discontented, to reestablish it more perfected. Through always new and more beautiful forms of thought, the philosophical mind strides forth to higher excellence, while the bread-fed scholar, in eternal stagnation of mind, guards over the barren monotony of his school-conceptions.

There is no fairer judge of the merits of others than the philosophical mind. Shrewd and imaginative enough to make use of every activity, he is also equitable enough to honor the creation of even the smallest contribution. All minds work for him—all minds work against the bread-fed scholar. The former knows how to transform everything around him, everything which happens and is thought, into his own possession—among thinking minds an intimate community of all goods of the mind is in effect; what is obtained in the kingdom of truth by one is won for all. The bread-fed scholar fences himself in against all his neighbors, whom he jealously begrudges light and sun, and keeps worried watch over the dilapidated barrier which but weakly defends him against victorious reason.

For everything the bread-fed scholar undertakes, he must borrow incentive and encouragement from others; the philosophical mind, in his diligence, finds in his subject matter itself his incentive and reward. How much more enthusiastically can he set about his work, how much more lively will his eagerness be, how much more tenacious his courage and his activity, because for him work rejuvenates itself through work. Even small things become grand under his creative hand, because he always has the grand objective, which they may serve, in view, while the bread-fed scholar sees even in great things only that which is petty. It is not what he does, but how he treats what he does, which distinguishes the philosophical mind. Wherever he may stand and work, he always stands at the center of the whole; and however far the object of his labors may draw him away from his other brothers, he is allied with them, and near them through a harmonically working understanding; he meets them where all enlightened minds find one another.

Music and Poetry

Of all of the many spheres of LaRouche’s intellectual activity, Classical music played a very special role. The wonderful contralto Gertrude Pitzinger once performed a rendition of Schumann’s “Er, der Herrlichste von allen” in Lyn’s honor during a visit to her apartment, which was her poetical and musical way of expressing her appreciation for him. The great tenor Carlo Bergonzi wrote to Lyn on the occasion of Lyn’s launching of the campaign to return to the “Verdi tuning,” which hundreds of the best singers of the world supported in the 1980s:

I was glad to meet you last November in Busseto, in the house where Giuseppe Verdi lived, for the presentation of “Canto e Diapason,” together with Piero Cappuccilli. Your initiative to go back to scientific tuning is very important for opera, and particular for young singers, which my Academy of Verdi Voices in Busseto is very concerned with.

LaRouche inspired many Classical choruses and orchestras in many countries, and encouraged them to continuously improve, and many young people discovered Classical music because of him. This was a characteristic, just as was his love for Classical poetry, which earned him the admiration of Boleslaw Barlog, the former superintendent of the Berlin Theater and friend of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Infinitely precious were the many Musikabende (musical evenings) and workshops with Sylvia Olden Lee, the first African-American vocal coach to be engaged by the Metropolitan Opera, and William Warfield, the American bass-baritone. From their collaboration with LaRouche came the inspiration for the current “Manhattan Project,” the founding of choruses across New York City with 1,500 singers. If the U.S. is to come out of its deep moral crisis, which has particularly gripped the younger generation, it is certainly this tradition which must be revived.

The list of things one could say about Lyndon LaRouche is endless. Perhaps the most important is that behind all his multifarious activities was an abiding, boundless love for mankind. He was absolutely selfless and infinitely generous when it came to fostering the creative potential in his fellow man. Today, many of his ideas and programs are about to become reality. His vision of a system of building the global economy so as to create a dignified life for all people on this planet, finds its echo today in China’s program for building the New Silk Road—which is not surprising when one considers Benjamin Franklin’s enthusiasm for Confucius, and the affinity between the Chinese economic model and Alexander Hamilton’s American System. Likewise, the Moon-Mars program recently announced by President Trump, is a clear reflection of the vision which Lyndon LaRouche outlined in his 1986 program, “The Woman on Mars: How a 40-Year Mission to Colonize Mars Would Transform the United States.”

As I said at the beginning: There is no greater contrast than what we see between the statesman, economist, scientist, and person Lyndon LaRouche, and the image that the malicious minions of the British Empire paint and spread about him. And consequently, Schiller’s characterization from the Prologue of Wallenstein applies to Lyn as well: “Confused by the parties’ favor and hate, the image of his character has been obscured in history.” Schiller is here referring to the defamation of Wallenstein in the Habsburgs’ historiography.

Whether this image will be set aright, whether this unprecedented violation of human rights and of freedom will be punished, and whether the citizens of the United States and the rest of the world will have unbiased access to Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas: these, I am deeply convinced, are what will determine whether peace in the 21st century can be secured and sustained, and if the United States can once again become a beacon of hope for the entire world.

I appeal to you: Sign and distribute the petition for the complete exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche!

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

April 2019

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