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Helga Zepp-LaRouche (born August 25, 1948, Trier) is a German political activist, wife of controversial American political activist, Lyndon LaRouche, and founder of the LaRouche movement's Schiller Institute and the German Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität party (BüSo) (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity).
She has run for political office several times in Germany, representing small parties founded by the LaRouche movement, but has never been elected.
Biography
According to the Schiller Institute and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität websites, Zepp-LaRouche left high school in 1968 to work as a volunteer journalist in Hamburg and Hannover, later becoming a freelance. In 1971, she traveled through China as one of the first European journalists there, just after the highpoint of the Cultural Revolution. When she returned to Germany, she studied political science, history and philosophy at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin and at Frankfurt am Main.
On December 29, 1977, Helga Zepp and Lyndon LaRouche were married in Wiesbaden. Since then, she has traveled with her husband to promote his proposals for monetary reform and large-scale infrastructural development, and has met with former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and former Mexican president José López Portillo.
The Schiller Institute website says that Zepp-LaRouche is "one of the world's leading authorities on Friedrich Schiller and on Nicolaus of Cusa ... Her scientific work extends from the German Classical period, to the humanist tradition of universal history, and Confucianism." Zepp-LaRouche's expertise in these areas has not been independently verified.
The same website also says that, in 2000, she "exposed the murderous intent of the violent video culture, and particularly the Pokémon cult."
In Dancing on My Grave (1986), ballerina Gelsey Kirkland describes her encounter with Zepp-LaRouche's ideas, as the former was battling her drug addiction:
In spite of her extreme point of view, her unyielding radicalism, this woman provided a crucial turning point for me. Her zealous devotion to the classics and her political war against drugs emboldened me to act, yet in my own way. Her scathing criticism of modern art gave me a clue about the relation between imitation and addiction. She wrote in the June 1980 issue of the Campaigner: 'If art were merely imitation and both the artist and the audience became whatever they imagined themselves to be, then all lawfulness in art would disappear, and absolutely anyone could simply set down on paper, canvas or score whatever his state of mind happened to be at the time, and that would be art.' Had not I been taught during my early years that the best dancer was the one who offered the best imitation?
Political life
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When she founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, Zepp-LaRouche said of it:
We need a movement that can finally free Germany from the control of the Versailles and Yalta treaties, thanks to which we have staggered from one catastrophe to another for an entire century.
Zepp-LaRouche is an outspoken opponent of the Clash of civilizations doctrine of Samuel P. Huntington. Following the September 11 attacks, she has campaigned world-wide against the idea that there is a fundamental antagonism between U.S. and Europe on the one side, and Islam or Asian culture on the other. She has called for a "Dialogue of Cultures" as opposed to a "Clash of Civilizations."
During the January 1979 broadcast in Germany of the NBC television mini-series Holocaust, Zepp-LaRouche wrote the following in Neue Solidarität:
Whereas nobody in the USA has the slightest illusions concerning the power which the Zionist lobby exerts especially upon the current administration, in Germany only a few political persons in the know are aware of the influence of a more secretly operating undercover Zionist lobby, but not the German public. And therefore we must take the hypocritical bogus Holocaust-spoof as an occasion to get rid of these foreign agents.
In June 2001, Zepp-LaRouche spoke before the Russian State Duma hearings on Measures to Ensure the Development of Russia's Economy under Conditions of Global Financial Destabilization. Her theme was the assertion that Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach's program for productive employment, had it been adopted in 1931, could have ended the depression and prevented the Nazis' rise to power, and that the adoption of the Eurasian Land-Bridge proposal today can avert a similar disaster. Zepp-LaRouche's presentation was published in 2007 in the Russian magazine Forum, after the government of Russia announced its intention to build a tunnel under the Bering Straits, which is a key component of the Land-Bridge proposal.
Cult allegations
In October 2003, a British inquest heard that the Schiller Institute was described by the London Metropolitan Police as a "cult with sinister and dangerous connections" that may have used mind-control techniques to recruit a student, Jeremiah Duggan. Duggan died after running across a busy road in Wiesbaden. He had just attended a Schiller Institute conference and was attending LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). The Institute strongly denies the allegations.
Notes
- Gelsey, Kirkland. Dancing on my Grave, Doubleday, 1986. ISBN 0-385-19964-3
- In German: "Wir brauchen eine Bewegung, die Deutschland endlich aus der Kontrolle der Kräfte von Versailles und Jalta befreit, die uns schon ein ganzes Jahrhundert lang von einer Katastrophe in die andere stürzt."
- "Der zionistische Holocaust heute ("The Zionist Holocaust today"), Neue Solidarität, January 25, 1979. In German: "Während in den USA niemand auch nur die geringsten Illusionen über die Macht der zionistischen Lobby über vor allem die gegenwärtige Administration hegt, ist der Einfluss einer verdeckt operierenden zionistischen Lobby in der Bundesrepublik bisher nur wenigen eingeweihten politischen Persönlichkeiten bekannt, nicht aber der breiten Bevölkerung. Und deshalb müssen wir den scheinheiligen Holocaust-Schwindel zum Anlass nehmen, um diese ausländischen Agenten auffliegen zu lassen." See also The Hitler Book.