User talk:SlimVirgin/Jeremiah Duggan draft
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Jeremiah 'Jerry' Duggan, a British student at the Sorbonne in Paris, was 22 years old when he died on March 27, 2003 near Wiesbaden, Germany after running out in front of cars on a busy road, apparently deliberately.
According to evidence heard in November 2003 in a British coroner's court, Jeremiah, who was Jewish, had been attending a conference and "cadre school" organized by the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Youth Movement, which are part of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. The 82-year-old former American presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was himself a speaker at the conference. This was Jeremiah's first involvement with the organization.
After spending six days with members of the movement in Wiesbaden, Jeremiah telephoned his mother in England to tell her: "I am in terrible trouble, deep trouble." His mother says he sounded terrified. Then they were cut off. Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead.
Wiesbaden is believed to be the center of the LaRouche network in Europe. Many Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, say the network is anti-Semitic and fascistic. LaRouche, a former Trotskyist, was released from jail in 1994 after serving five years of a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations (see United States v. LaRouche). The Schiller Institute is run by his German-born wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
The German police initially pronounced Jeremiah's death a suicide, but a British inquest held in Hornsey, north London, concluded there was nothing in the German police report or in Jeremiah's background that suggested suicide. Jeremiah had no history of mental illness, the court heard. The coroner, Dr. William Dolman, ruled that Jeremiah was in a "state of terror" just before he died. [1]
Dr. Dolman reached his conclusion after studying evidence presented by Jeremiah's mother, Erica Duggan, a retired school teacher living in Golders Green, London, who has conducted an 18-month investigation into her son's death. She has spent her life savings on legal fees, and has now sold her home to raise money to pursue the case.
Mrs. Duggan believes her son was a victim of mind-control techniques used by cults to snare people into joining them. She is being supported by the British Foreign Office in her quest for a new German investigation and is being represented by Nikolas Becker, the Berlin-based lawyer who represented former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker. Baroness Elizabeth Symons, head of Consular Services at the Foreign Office has helped Mrs. Duggan launch the Justice for Jeremiah campaign and website.
In court, Mrs. Duggan described the Schiller Institute as a "dangerous and political cult with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics." A Scotland Yard report submitted in evidence described the LaRouche organization as "a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections." Lyndon LaRouche has made statements implying that the British royal family is involved in the international drug trade; that the Secret Intelligence Service and Prince Philip killed Princess Diana; that rogue elements within the U.S. military were involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; and that the Beatles were "promoted" by agencies "controlled by British intelligence."
Jeremiah was in Paris when he first came into contact with the LaRouche movement. According to evidence presented at the inquest, he bought a copy of Nouvelle Solidarité, the French-language newspaper of the LaRouche movement, in the street outside the Sorbonne, and got chatting to the newspaper's editor, Benoit Chalifoux, who encouraged Jeremiah to join him and other LaRouche members in Wiesbaden for what Jeremiah believed was an anti-war conference being held to protest the United States invasion of Iraq, which had just begun.
He travelled to Germany on March 21, 2003 with Chalifoux and around eight other men in a convoy of cars. After attending the two-day conference, Jeremiah stayed on for what the inquest heard was a "cadre school" held by the LaRouche Youth Movement in a Wiesbaden youth hostel, attended by about 50 members.
During his stay in Wiesbaden, Jeremiah said in telephone calls to his parents and his French girlfriend, Maya, that the Institute was "very extreme," but he believed it had "solutions to problems he was worried about," his mother told the inquest. He also told her he had found the conference stimulating.
Mrs. Duggan told journalists that after her son's death, she met Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, a scientific adviser to the Schiller Institute, who said that Jeremiah had reacted strongly when he heard LaRouche members blame Jews for the Iraq war. Jeremiah allegedly stood up during one of the meetings and exclaimed: "But I'm a Jew!"
Six days after he arrived in Germany, in the early hours of Thursday, March 27, Jeremiah telephoned his girlfriend in France. In a statement to Scotland Yard, Maya said Jeremiah sounded incoherent and faint. He told her: "I'm under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more, or what are lies." He said his arms and legs hurt and he had discovered some "very grave things." He told her he would return to Paris the next day, though he had previously said he had no money for a train or plane ticket and could not get a lift with the LaRouche Youth Movement members until Sunday, March 30.
After this phone call, the inquest heard, Jeremiah telephoned his mother just before 4:30 a.m. and said: "Mum, I'm in terrible trouble, deep trouble. I want to be out of this. It's too much for me. I can't do this. I want out ..." His mother said he was speaking quietly, as though afraid of being overheard. The line went dead. He called back seconds later and said, "I am frightened." She told him she loved him. At this, he shouted, "I want to see you now," and began to spell out the name of the town he was in. At that point, the line went dead again.
Forty-five minutes later, Jeremiah ran out onto the Berliner Strasse, a busy road five kilometers from the youth hostel where he was staying, and was killed.
According to eye witness accounts pieced together by the German police, the first car only grazed him, knocking off the vehicle's wing mirror. It seems he ran for another kilometer down the road. A second car knocked him down, then a third car ran over him. The drivers told the police he looked as though he was running for his life, not trying to end it. The second driver who hit him said Jeremiah ran toward the car with his arms outstretched and his mouth open. His mother told the inquest she believes Jeremiah was trying to flag down someone to help him, and that his mouth was open because he was screaming.
Erica Duggan, whose father was a German Jew, told the London Times: "It is ironic that my father fled the Holocaust and my son ended up dying on Berliner Strasse." [2]
After her son had telephoned her, but before news of his death reached her, Erica Duggan managed to obtain a telephone number for the youth hostel Jeremiah was staying in. A woman she believes to be a manager at the Schiller Institute, Ortrun Cramer, came to the telephone. Ms. Cramer was among a group of international observers at the Michigan Democratic Caucuses on March 11, 2000 who watched the count of votes for Lyndon LaRouche. At the time, she was an authorized representative of the Vienna-based International Progress Organization. Duggan told the Times she heard Cramer say: "It's the mother." Duggan and Cramer had a brief conversation during which Cramer said Nouvelle Solidarité was a news agency and did not "take responsibility for an individual's actions."
The coroner's inquest heard that, after Jeremiah's death, Ms. Cramer was found to be in possession of his passport, which he would have needed to get home to France. One of the issues the family wants to resolve is whether Ms. Cramer took possession of Jeremiah's passport before his death, which would indicate the organization may have tried to restrict his movements.
The Duggan family's lawyer, Nicholas Becker, told a British newspaper: "There is enough evidence [Jeremiah] was probably in a hopeless psychotic situation [when he died] and there is no evidence that there was any mental illness in his family. It is known these kind of organizations produce this kind of psychotic breakdown."
Lyndon LaRouche wrote extensively during the 1970s on how psychoanalytic techniques might be used to alter the bourgeois consciousness of working class people to induce them to join a revolutionary movement like his own.
Under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche wrote in 1973 [3] that "the short-term focal objective of the Labor Committees' work in applied psychology is the willful development of powers of creative mentation in . . . the organization's cadres . . . The direct conscious perception of the fundamental emotion (love = creative mentation) . . . has been classically identified [in some cases] by the subject as an overwhelming (“oceanic”) and absolutely terrifying “non-erotic” feeling of “love-death” . . . Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion . . . Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse."
The LaRouche organization strongly denies any involvement in Jeremiah's death. In a June 2005, 2004 article [4] in the organization's weekly magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, Larouche's Director of Counter-Intelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, writes that Jeremiah had told his room-mates at the conference that he had been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), an illness that Steinberg alleges can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia.
Steinberg writes that Jeremiah had begun to show signs of emotional stress the day before he died, and had fled from the youth hostel where he was staying at 3:30 in the morning. On the Sunday prior to his death, according to Steinberg, Duggan had tried to find a pharmacy where he could obtain prescription drugs. When a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer telephoned Jeremiah's girlfriend, Maya, in Paris to ask whether she had heard from him, she allegedly asked, in what Steinberg calls a cynical tone: "Is there a river nearby?", the implication being that Jeremiah was already known to have suicidal tendencies. Maya has told reporters she asked this only because she was trying to find Wiesbaden on a map.
Steinberg also writes that Erica Duggan told reporters that she, Jeremiah and her divorced husband attended group counseling sessions at the Tavistock Clinic in London, a psychotherapy center, when Jeremiah was seven years old. Erica Duggan does not deny this. One of the claims of the Lyndon LaRouche organization is that the Tavistock Institute, which founded the Tavistock Clinic in the 1940s, is itself involved in mind control.
Steinberg also writes that, just after her son's death, Mrs. Duggan met with representatives of the Schiller Institute -- one of whom Erica Duggan says was Ortrun Cramer -- for several hours in what Steinberg describes as a "sympathetic" meeting. He alleges that Mrs. Duggan's attitude toward the Schiller Institute changed only after British minister Baroness Elizabeth Symons intervened in the affair. According to Steinberg, Baroness Symons is a member of the "trans-Atlantic" network that is out to get LaRouche because of his opposition to what LaRouche calls the Blair-Cheney war in Iraq.
Lyndon LaRouche himself has issued a statement saying the Duggan affair is a "hoax" constructed by supporters of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney. It is "such an obvious fabrication that no further comment is necessary," said LaRouche.
[edit] External links
- A Washington Post article on Jeremiah Duggan and allegations that the LaRouche organization uses "brainwashing" techniques on recruits
- A Guardian article on Jeremiah Duggan's inquest
- An Observer article on Jeremiah Duggan
- A London Times article on Jeremiah Duggan
- The Cult and the Candidate
- The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons. The LaRouche response to the press accounts of the Duggan case
- The Justice for Jeremiah website
- A summary by Jeremiah's family of the coroner's summing up
- Information about LaRouche on the Cults on Campus website
- BBC news article on Jeremiah Duggan's death
- Website of the Schiller Institute
- Website of the LaRouche publication Executive Intelligence Review
- Website of the LaRouche Youth Movement
- The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party by Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche)
- Beyond Psychoanalysis by Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche)
- Disinfopedia article on the Tavistock Clinic
