Kursk Affair an Excuse for New FBI,
Birch Society Slander of LaRouche
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 13, 2000
Joel Skousen, a nephew of Cleon Skousen, the former senior FBI official, Elder of the Mormon Church, and leader in John Birch Society circles for many years, issued a ludicrous slander of Lyndon LaRouche in the latest issue of his newsletter. Ostensibly reporting on the various theories about the sinking of the Russian submarine, the Kursk, Joel Skousen launched into an attack on LaRouche. The Kursk affair merely served as a pretext for Skousen, a neo-conservative "authority" defending the views of the London-Wall Street financial oligarchy, to attack LaRouche as the opponent of their increasingly genocidal monetary system.
Skousen wrote, in a non sequitor, "Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said that a collision with a foreign submarine remained his prime hypothesis for the loss of Russia's Kursk nuclear submarine and its 118-man crew, but there is other evidence that the Russians are looking for any excuse to cover up their own internal mistakes. Lyndon LaRouche claims to have insider knowledge that the U.S. and Russia were on the verge of World War III over the issue. He claims that it took Clinton 25 minutes on the phone to talk Putin out of attacking the U.S. This is hogwash. LaRouche and his wife have ties to far-left and Communist factions in Europe. I've always suspected LaRouche to be a leftist rather than on the right. I don't trust his claimed sources, which are most likely passing on Russian disinformation."
The rest of the Skousen piece was a typical bit of "official" disinformation about the Kursk affair, asserting that it was "very probable" that the Kursk sank as the result of an internal torpedo explosion, and that the Russian Ministry of Defense is desperate to cover up their own errors.
In the 1980s, Joel Skousen was the editor of Conservative Digest, and the head of the Conservative National Committee; he now publishes the World Affairs Brief, where the smear of LaRouche appeared. Skousen's main business, by his own account, is building fallout shelters. His latest book is Strategic Relocation--North American Guide to Safe Places. Skousen has written in his newsletter that the Soviet Union never collapsed, and that Russia is secretly preparing for a nuclear, chemical, and biological first-strike against the United States.
On the Subject of the Skousen Newsletter
More than two decades ago, my wife Helga and I were the guests of Cleon Skousen and his wife. During those several days, I met with the President of the Mormon Church and elders. The courtesies were numerous, and the hospitality notable otherwise, but for one sour note: an axiomatic difference respecting, explicitly, my definition of a Christian view of human nature, and my opposition to following the British monarchy in the matter of the Isis cult. In light of that background, the line deployed against me from those Salt Lake City and related John Birch Society circles, should be recognized as an intentional fraud. The recent hoax circulated by Joel Skousen's newsletter, is typical of those hoaxes.
The background to my receipt of the invitation from Cleon Skousen et al., involves his former role as an FBI official, who was thus qualified to appreciate the way in which the FBI had coordinated its 1973-74 operations aimed to bring about my physical elimination, through the FBI's use of its assets within the Political Committee <ntof the Communist Party U.S.A. Subsequently, this FBI role in using the Communist Party, was admitted in a crucial way, by a released FBI official internal document of 1973. The January-February 1974 intervention of the New York Times, to cover up this FBI operation, is also notable in this connection. This, together with my fight against the influence of the Frankfurt School moral degenerates (such as the followers of Theodore Adorno and Hannah Arendt), attracted the interest of Cleon Skousen, et al.
The break came like a sudden chill, in the course of my discussion with elders gathered at Cleon's home. Soon afterward, I ceased to be perplexed as to the reason for that unexplained chill. Cleon's book, published earlier, attacking the notion of Aeschylus' Prometheus, made everything suddenly and conclusively clear to me. That was the only issue of importance between Skousen's circles and me; the charges of "leftism" made ritually by sundry John Birch and related circles, are simply a lying ruse, employed to avoid mentioning the actual issue. The issue is made clear to any intelligent person, simply by comparing both Cleon's argument on the matters of Prometheus and the British monarchy, and virtually any and all of my published writings bearing on those topics.
