REFLECTIONS OF AN AMERICAN POLITICAL PRISONER by Michael O. Billington (Guyana)

Reflections of an American Political Prisoner: The Repression and Promise of the LaRouche Movement
by Michael O. Billington (Guyana & Thailand 1967-71)
EIR News Service
2015
435 pages
$9.99 (Kindle); $19.99 (Paperback)

As part of a book tour for his autobiography Reflections of An American Political Prisoner: The Represssion and Promise of the LaRouche Movement, as seen by Michael O. Billington,  Billington, the last of the LaRouche political prisoners to be released on parole, after ten years in jail–two years in Federal prison, and an additional eight years as a inmate of the Virginia Correctional system (his sentence in Virginia was 77 years!), wrote a personal account of his political, philosophical, and moral development over nearly 35 years, including his work in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s. Most of the book is dedicated to his life and work, over the period since he became, in 1972, an activist in the political movement of Lyndon LaRouche. Mike talks about his incarceration and the political fight the LaRouche movement has waged that brought the full weight of the establishments efforts at crushing us and implementing a genocidal Malthusian utopia.

Billington graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1967. He then joined the Peace Corps, where he taught mathematics and music, first in Guyana, then in Thailand. Upon returning to the U.S. he joined the LaRouche movement in 1972, in the early stages of the movement’s history. His wife, Gail, his brother, Joe, and his sister, Margaret Greenspan, were also members of the movement. Billington’s book provides an “insider” look at the history of this highly controversial movement. Billington ran on the U.S. Labor Party platform for County Executive of Westchester County, New York in 1977, and for New York’s 24th congressional district in 1978

The LaRouche movement is a political and cultural network promoting the late Lyndon La Rouche and his ideas. It has included many organizations and companies around the world, which campaign, gather information and publish books and periodicals. LaRouche-aligned organizations include the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the Schiller Institute, the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement and, formerly, the U.S. Labor Party. The LaRouche movement has been called “cult-like” by The New York Times.^[1]

The movement originated within the radical leftist student politics of the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of candidates ran in state Democratic primaries in the United States on the ‘LaRouche platform’, while Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly campaigned for presidential nomination. From the mid-1970s, the LaRouche network would adopt viewpoints and stances of the far-right.