The Thin... uh... Yellow Line Between Political Movement and Wacked-out Cult

So I was walking around, sort of exploring my surroundings in the city. I had plans to go up St-Denis and maybe check out some of the record stores along the way, as well as just enjoying the street (St-Denis is the street to check out in Montreal). In the end, I went on a rather winding tour of some places I had never wandered before, including down Duluth, through Parc Lafontaine (which is this big, awesome green park with a wonderful pond and fountain in the middle right smack dab in the city), up Ontario St., down St-Denis, and back again. All in all, an awesome walk.

Anyway, as I was walking through the UQAM campus and back up St-Denis, I noticed a fairly lanky and emaciated longhaired student waving a placard and shouting to pedestrians passing by. Not that this is a strange occurence in downtown Montreal, but my eyes locked on to the message written on his placard. It said, simply (and this is a rough translation): "Dick Cheney will cause the end of the world. Impeach him. Larouche Youth Movement."

Now normally, I wouldn't have thought much about this, except that I remembered an incident from a year ago where a middle-aged man had stopped me on St-Laurent and had entangled me in something like a 20 minute long conversation about this guy named Lyndon LaRouche, and how he was calling for the resignation of most of the Bush administration, and how he was running as a Democratic candidate. He shoved some literature at me, and I didn't think much more about it.

But when I saw the longhaired student set up in a rather similar fashion to the middle-aged man in St-Laurent, I realized this must be something bigger -- a cult, perhaps? Intrigued, I looked Lyndon LaRouche up on Wikipedia when I got back home, and the man has a long and intriguing history. He's been called a communist (he was a Marxist at one point). an American fascist, a Reaganite, an anti-Semite, and yes, a cult-leader. It seems one guy even had his son kidnapped and deprogrammed!

LaRouche's movement had me thinking: how fine a line is their between a political movement such as this and a cult? Both look for converts; both try and attract the young. Is the only difference the message they're preaching? It scared me, in a way. Do radicals and cultists have that much in common?

[/pointless and long rant]