| Anton Chaitkin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1943 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | writer and historian |
| Known for | founding the Lyndon LaRouche movement |
Anton "Tony" Chaitkin (born 1943) is an author, historian, conspiracy theorist, and political activist with the LaRouche movement. He serves as History Editor for Executive Intelligence Review.
Chaitkin's father was Jacob Chaitkin, who was the legal counsel and strategist for the boycott against Nazi Germany carried on by the American Jewish Congress in the 1930s.[1][2][3] His late sister, Marianna Wertz, and his brother-in-law, William F. Wertz Jr., have also been active in the LaRouche movement.[4]
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Chaitkin became a founding member of the LaRouche movement in the mid-1960s, and describes it as follows:
In New York about two years after the JFK assassination, I saw a poster on the street for an ad hoc "Free University" conducted in a loft on 14th Street. I attended an economics class taught by Lyndon LaRouche. He said the change then being pushed through our national strategy by Anglo-American financiers– away from industry in the advanced countries, toward cheap labor, would lead to fascist policies and a systemic collapse. We agreed to form a philosophical/political association whose purpose would be to take the world out of the hands of that oligarchy. We took the approach that the underlying axioms of twentieth century thought in science (Newtonian, Euclidian); literature, art and music (various types of existentialism and fascism); economics (all of it exclusively British imperialism), psychology and philosophy, and academia generally. were beyond bad. They represented an attack against classic humanist thought, against the most beautiful accomplishments of our civilization.[1]
In 1973 Chaitkin was a candidate for Mayor of New York City, representing the National Caucus of Labor Committees.[5][6] He also ran for Governor of New York in 1974, and for Pennsylvania's 2nd congressional district in 1978.[7]
During the early 1970s Chaitkin was repeatedly cited for disrupting meetings. Chaitkin was among ten NCLC members arrested for participating in a melee at a Newark city council meeting. The group was asserting, among other things, that two local political figures, activist and poet/playwright Imamu Imir Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones) and Anthony Imperiale were tools of the CIA.[8][9] Due to his heckling, Chaitkin was forcibly ejected from a press conference held by a competing candidate for U.S. Senate, Ramsey Clark, on October 18, 1973.[10] Chaitkin was arrested for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass on April 21, 1975, for trying to sneak into a conference of mayors posing as an accredited journalist.[11]
He was quoted in an organization publication as saying "we intend to disrupt the campaigns of our major opponents." He was quoted in the movement's New Solidarity speaking about "Operation Mop Up", saying "many CPers [Communist Party members] have been sent to hospital after jumping Labor Committee members in the CP's own meetings."[12]
During the 1990s, Chaitkin helped to lead a campaign that called for the removal of the statue of Albert Pike from federal property in Judiciary Square, located in Washington, D.C. Chaitkin charged that Pike, a leader of the Scottish rite of Freemasonry and author of Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was an important founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Chaitkin, along with the Rev. James Bevel, participated in weekly non-violent protests at the site of the statue throughout the 1990s,[13] and was arrested in November 1992 by Federal Park Police for "statue climbing."[14][15] According to the Citizens Electoral Council they "beat the trumped-up charges," while according to the Washington Post both were found guilty of a misdemeanor and sentenced to one week in jail.[13][16]
Chaitkin ushered in the LaRouche movement's campaign against the health care reform proposal of U.S. President Barack Obama. At an open panel session that included Ezekiel Emanuel held June 10, 2009, Chaitkin said:
President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939, that began the genocide there. ... Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and other avowed cost-cutters on this panel also lead a propaganda movement for euthanasia... They shape public opinion and the medical profession to accept a death culture... to let physicians help kill patients whose medical care is now rapidly being withdrawn in the universal health-care disaster.[17]
In reporting the incident, journalist Max Blumenthal described it as "the opening volley of an orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to link [Emanuel] and the White House’s health-care reform proposals to the T-4 mass euthanasia program of Adolph [sic] Hitler."[17] See also Views of Lyndon LaRouche#Health care policy.
Chaitkin authored Treason in America– from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman. The basic premise of the book is that the American Revolution was not successfully concluded, because a significant Tory faction has persisted in US politics which is philosophically opposed to the ideas of the Revolution, and has sought to undermine them. According to Chaitkin, this faction has included Wall Street financiers, Boston Brahmins, and Confederate secessionists. Chaitkin describes the book as "a 600-page history of the struggle between the American nationalists and the tory-British-racist-imperialist faction from the Revolution to the Harriman-Dulles years."[2]
With Webster Tarpley, Chaitkin co-authored The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, which claimed to expose the ties of Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman with the Nazi Party of Germany.
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