A truly terrifying article on Lyndon LaRouche in today's WaPo Sunday magazine:

The desperation in her son's voice jolted Erica Duggan fully awake.

"Mum, I'm in big trouble," Jeremiah, a 22-year-old college student, said into the phone quietly, as though trying not to be overheard . . .

It was March 27, 2003, the eighth day of the war in Iraq. Antiwar sentiment was high across Europe. Erica's idealistic son had gone to Germany to attend an antiwar protest and conference with a group called Nouvelle Solidarité. All Jeremiah told his mother about the group before he left was that its views were "extreme" and that it was affiliated with an American presidential candidate she'd never heard of, a man named Lyndon LaRouche. Now her son's phone call made it clear that something had gone wrong.

"This involves Solidarity," Erica recalls her son saying before he added: "I can't do this. I want out. It is not something I can do.''

Alarmed, she tried to assure her son that he didn't have to do anything with this group that he didn't want to. Then the line went dead. Almost immediately, Jeremiah rang back.

"I'm frightened," she remembers him saying, his voice hushed and strained.

"What is it?" his panicked mother demanded. "Tell me!"

Jeremiah seemed to be having trouble speaking. "He sounded terrified," Erica says. "Because of that I found myself saying, 'I love you.' It just came out. I thought his life was in danger.

"When I said, 'I love you,' then he said to me in a very, very loud voice, 'I want to see you NOW.' "

"Where are you?" his mother cried.

"Wiesbaden," he said.

She had difficulty making out the name of the German city, and she asked him to spell it. Erica's father, a German-born Jew, had fled Hitler's Germany. Most of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Now her only son was somewhere in Germany, and was telling her that he was in peril.

Jeremiah began spelling Wiesbaden. He wasn't halfway through the letters when the line cut off again.

Thirty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead. He lay crumpled on a roadway into town, his arms stretched out before him as if he were a boy again, reaching to catch a ball.

Here's the whole piece.

Brainwashing people, encouraging his followers to contemplate killing themselves for him and his cause, inciting people to hatred and violence -- shouldn't LaRouche be in jail for something more serious than mail fraud?

Posted by Laura at October 24, 2004 11:22 AM