New LaRouche Book
Exposing Neo-Cons
Shakes Up Japan

May 5, 2004 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche's new book in Japanese, “Neo-Con Beast-Men: The Ignoble Liars Behind Bush's No-Exit War,” published in a first run of 10,000 copies April 26, has already caused a stir in Japan and Korea. It was this author's pleasure to present the book, along with LaRouche's positive policy alternative, the Eurasian Land-bridge “Global New Deal,” during a tour of both countries April 15-May 3, 2004 and to watch the shock waves roll.

Within hours of publication, EIR held press conferences and seminars at three major thinktanks in Tokyo April 26-28. We had been told that “all mention of Leo Strauss has been forbidden in the Japanese press, under pressure from Washington,” as one angry Tokyo reporter put it, referring to the University of Chicago theorist for Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neo-cons. EIR's press releases therefore emphasized Strauss and his Satanic theories, as well as Strauss's two mentors, top Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and Jacobin Alexandre Kojeve.

The 381-page hardbound book features photos of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle on the cover. On the back cover is a large photo of LaRouche with his biography, highlighting his authorship of the Reagan SDI, the shocking political attacks and jailings of LaRouche and his associates starting in 1988-89, and the astonishing survival and growth of the LaRouche movement since then.

A trans-Pacific team of four Japanese LaRouche Youth organizers in Japan and the U.S. translated the press release into Japanese and spread it widely to the Tokyo media. There was much discussion with Tokyo media editors, but in the end, they dutifully boycotted the press conference. Another LaRouche supporter at Tokyo's prestigious Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) shed some light on the situation. She organized a luncheon and speech on the book at the FCCJ, with the support of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese reporters, only to have it cancelled at the last moment by the U.S. Associated Press Tokyo Bureau chief Myron Belkind, who pulled rank as FCCJ president.

“The event won't take place, but the debate about who are the neo-cons, really, is now all over the FCCJ—and that debate can't be stopped,” she reported. “We have a membership of 450 correspondents who report for 150 world newspapers, news agencies, TV, and radio; 60 major Japanese news media; and more than 1,800 associate members of FCCJ from embassies, Japanese corporations, banks, and other firms.”

At the thinktanks the explosive nature of the book became still clearer. After a slide presentation of the roots of the neo-cons in the Napoleonic cult of Synarchism and the fascism of the 1920s and '30s, the head of one prominent thinktank related to the Japanese Diet (Parliament) grabbed the five copies of the book brought as samples, and promptly sold them to the audience, which included several Members of Parliament.

The MPs were particularly receptive, inviting the author for a tour of the Diet building following the seminar, in which EIR and LaRouche's book were introduced to several other MPs and their offices.

The LaRouche book was presented at a major corporate thinktank, and at a new college in Tokyo to an eager audience of over 50 students, who stayed for four hours asking detailed questions and proposing future collaboration with EIR.

A fourth meeting, at Tokyo's Civic Center hosted by the translator Ohta Ryu, drew an audience of 60 from the general public. The book was also presented in outline just ahead of publication in three cities in South Korea April 15-24: Seoul, Namwon, and Gwangyang at the southern tip of the country. Several orders from Korea have been received by the publisher in Tokyo. Plans are afoot at a major South Korean magazine company to publish the book in Korean soon.