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Biography: Anton Chaitkin


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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.

Our political organizing for a new renaissance and against that oligarchy, and our research and publishing operation, grew into a worldwide initiative.

For my part, around 1979 I read an atrocious piece in the New York Times celebrating Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton's killer, as a misunderstood romantic rebel. Wondering why the New York Establishment would side against such a pillar of the naton as Hamilton, I began reading the original sources - the works of Hmailton and other pro-republic historical leaders. I found that the historiography in our era did not simply misplace these historical figures on the political spectrum, but that the philosophical-political mental map of these former leaders was several orders of magnitude more profound and more pro-human than anything in the mental map of our era's available politics. There is a legacy and a tradition of republicanism, and republican leadership in science, art and statecraft, from Greece and Egypt and revived and expanded later, which has always been responsible for human progress.

As you may know, by 1986 the demand for our scalps from Henry Kissinger and others (the George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn breed of bankers) had grown to hysteria, with many thousands of press attacks at once. Kissinger wrote to the FBI that we were a national security threat. On October 6, 1986, 400 men from federal and state police agencies, with helicopter and armored car, raided our publishing offices in Leesburg, Virginia. Seven days after George Bush Sr. took office as President, LaRouche was imprisoned. A couple of dozen others were jailed, with sentences of up to 40-50 years. When Clinton came into office, LaRouche was released, and all the others were in time released as well.

I have a certain specific family background which helped spur me into historical and investigative work

In the early 1930s, my father, Jacob Chaitkin, a young, pro-Franklin Roosevelt, New York lawyer, took the cases of citizens who owned small bonds issued by private german coporations. These companies had stopped payment on the bonds under a decree of Hitler that had been arranged by the NY bankers'

representative John Foster Dulles personally in Berlin. My father argued that this was not a proper debt moratorium since it didn't aid poor debtors but only enriched Hitler's war preparations.

Many of the cases involved companies jointly owned by the Hitler government and the Brown Brothers Harriman bank, whose New York manager was Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. My father won every case.

Because of his notoriety from these cases, the American Jewish Congress hired my father as the legal counsel and strategist for their Joint Boycott (with the American Federation of Labor) against Nazi Germany. This was initially a very big and effective boycott, with rallies at Madiosn Square Garden, etc.

At that time, the (German-British-U.S.) Kuhn Loeb Bank, run by the Warburg family, was issuing new bonds at lower interest, for the Hitler government. Max Warburg was then the largest stockholder in I.G. Farben, and the Warburgs worked with the Morgans, Harrimans and their senior political partner in the pro-Nazi faction, Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman.

The Warburgs' bank, Kuhn Loeb, ran the American Jewish Committee, which together with the B'nai B'rith (in which the NY TImes owners, the Sulzbergers, had great influence) held press conferences denouncing the anti-Hitler boycott, thus splitting the Jewish community. (The Times is better these days.)

So I got, in my upbringing, a family tradition of viewing Wall Street as the enemy, and a sense of the realities of power politics entirely outside the realm of what is put before the public.

On the JFK assassination: in a sense, it was the coup against the country, and specifically against the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, perpetrated by the authors of the murder, that led to our political initiative. I have done a certain amount of sharply original work around the Lincoln assassination, and our Executive Intelligence Review pioneered the work that helped propel the Garrison investigation on a fruitful international track.

Not much useful investigative work can be done in public affairs that does not reference a very long historical contest involving the participants and the underlying ideas on both sides of an event.

LaRouche's {Executive Intelligence Review} the 72 page weekly magazine publshed since the early 1970s, has a staff acknowleged by enemy and friend as the best array of intelligence and historical minds in private life, period. With many international bureaus, we collaborate with the pro-national leadership in many countries, and have been an increasingly influential leadership force for the FDR legacy (pro-peace, pro-industrial develpment) within the Democratic party and within the military and intelligence communties.

In that collaborative environment, before I wrote the historical sections of {George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, I had written {Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman} 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. I am the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.

The Bush biography came out in 1992 before Bush Sr. was re-nominated for President. The Bush forces worked hard to get the book exculded from book stores, and pushed it out of Borders where it was selling well. But it had already flooded into Texas, for the Republican convention, and into the hands of all nationally significant U.S. politicians. Though Bush won the nomination, the new odor of Hitlerism around the Bush family and their banker faction, from the book, added a certain edge to the decision of many influential Republicans and contributors, to sit on their hands in the 1992 election.

In the recent few years I have contributed something of the core investigative work going into the downfall of the Abramoff-DeLay-Religious-Right gang, and hopefully to the removal of Cheney et. al. soon.

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