Views of Lyndon LaRouche and The LaRouche Movement - PANIC Proposal and AIDS

PANIC Proposal and AIDS

In 1974, an organisation affiliated to LaRouche predicted that there would be pandemics in Africa. When AIDS was first recognized as a medical phenomenon in the early 1980s, LaRouche activists were convinced that this was the pandemic about which the task force had warned. LaRouche and his followers stated that HIV, the AIDS virus, could be transmitted by casual contact, citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida. LaRouche said that the transmission by insect bite was "thoroughly established". John Grauerholz, medical director of the BHTF, told reporters that the Soviet Union may have started the epidemic and that U.S. health officials aided the Soviets by not doing more to stop AIDS.

AIDS became a key plank in LaRouche's platform. His slogan was "Spread Panic, not AIDS!" LaRouche's followers created "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), which sponsored California Proposition 64, the "LaRouche Initiative", in 1986. Mel Klenetsky, co-director of political operations for the Larouche-affiliated National Democratic Policy Committee and LaRouche's campaign director, said that there must be universal testing and mandatory quarantining of HIV carriers. "Twenty to 30 million out of 100 million people in central Africa have AIDS," Klenetsky said. "It is spreading because of impoverished economic conditions, and that is a direct result of IMF policies that have destroyed people's means of resisting the disease." Klenetsky said that LaRouche believed that not only drug users and homosexuals are vulnerable to the disease.

The measure was met with strong opposition and was defeated. A second AIDS initiative qualified for the ballot in 1988, but the measure failed by a larger margin. In response to a survey which predicted that 72% of voters would oppose the measure, a spokesman called the poll "an obvious fraud", saying that pollsters deliberately worded questions to prejudice respondents against the initiative. He additionally said that the poll was part of a "big lie...witch hunt" orchestrated by Armand Hammer and Elizabeth Taylor.

As early as 1985 NDPC members ran for local school boards on a platform of keeping infected students out of school. In 1986 LaRouche supporters traveled from Seattle, Washington to Lebanon, Oregon to urge the school board there to reverse a policy that would allow children with AIDS to enroll. In 1987 followers tried to organize a boycott of an elementary school in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, sending a van with loudspeakers through the district. They disrupted an informational meeting and according to press accounts told parents, "The blood of your own children will be on your hands if you allow this child with AIDS in your school," or shouted at opponents, "He has AIDS! He has AIDS!"

LaRouche purchased a national TV spot during his 1988 presidential campaign, in which he summarized his views and proposals with respect to the AIDS epidemic. He said most statements about how AIDS is spread were an "outright lie" and that talk of safe sex was just propaganda put out by the government to avoid spending the money required to address the crisis.

LaRouche-affiliated candidates used AIDS as an issue as late as 1994.

Opponents characterized it as an anti-gay measure that would force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine, or create "concentration camps for AIDS patients." According to newspaper reports, the LaRouche newspaper New Solidarity said the initiative was opposed by Communist gangs composed of the "lower sexual classes" and he warned of the recruitment of millions of Americans into the ranks of "AIDS-riddled homosexuality".