JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY A FASCIST FRONT
Alex Constantine
Fascist Templars of the Corporate State
By Alex Constantine
"The new America will not be Capitalist in the old sense,
nor will it be Socialist. If at the moment the trend is toward
Fascism, it will be an American Fascism, embodying the
experience, the traditions and the hopes of the great
middle-class nation."
ã E.F. Brown, associate editor,
Current History Magazine, July 1933
"We have absorbed into our own legal system the
German tyranny that we fought and inveighed against.
The approach, copied from the Nazis, works this way:
The press and radio first lay down a terrific barrage
against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of
evidence shriek of atom bomb spies or plots to overthrow
the government, of espionage, of high treason, and of
other bloodcurdling crimes.
"We are now ready for the second stage: the pinning
of the label 'Red' indiscriminately on all opposition."
ã Abraham Pomerantz,
U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel, Nuremberg Trials
An Ornery Bunch Lays Down
a Terrific Barrage Against the Red Menace
If you live in southern California and traveled with any liberal
organization in the early 1980s, chances are your name appeared on a
secret file. On May 25, 1983, L.A.'s Public Order Intelligence Division
(PDID) was exposed to the world as a clearinghouse of spies gathering
intelligence on the left. The PDID kept files on thousands of
law-abiding citizens at a cost of $100,000 in tax revenues. The PDID
utilized a computer dossier system purchased by the late Representative
Larry McDonald's Western Goals, the intelligence gathering branch of the
John Birch Society. McDonald was the national leader of the Birchers.
Late political researcher Mae Brussell noted in "Nazi Connections to the
John F. Kennedy Assassination" that the Birch Society officer (he
perished in the Flight 007 shootdown) was "exceedingly active in Dallas
preceding the Kennedy assassination. Western Goals has offices in
Germany run by Eugene Wigner that feed data to the Gehlen BND [post-WW
II Nazi intelligence group]. On the board of Western Goals sat Edward
Teller, Admiral Thomas Moorer [Reporter Bob Woodward's superior officer
in the Naval wing of the Pentagon within a year of the Watergate series
published by the Washington Post], and Dr. Hans Senholt, once a
Luftwaffe pilot."
The Birchers had much in common with their extreme-right cousins in
Germany. Fred J. Cook, in The Warfare State (MacMillan, 1962), writes
that the Birch Society was named after an obscure Christian missionary
and "OSS captain who was murdered by Chinese Communist guerrillas ten
days after World War II ended." The JB Society's Web site provides more
background on Birch: "Shortly after Americaπs entry into the war, John
Birch volunteered to join General Claire Chennaultås 14th Air Force,
known also as the Flying Tigers. Birch was of particular value in the
war because of his facility with various Chinese dialects and it was
thus that he was assigned primarily to intelligence work." The society
named after Birch, Cook wrote, "is a completely monolithic organization,
as authoritarian in its own way as any Communist dictatorship....
Welch's John Birch Society is as secret as the Ku Klux Klan, as
monolithic and unbalanced as the Nazi Party of Hitler, with many of
whose ideas and methods it would find itself quite compatible."
What would the Cold War have been without the inebriating
nationalism of the Birchers, dismissed as "yahoos" by most observers,
frightening to those who looked into them?
The Birch Society was founded in 1959 by Robert Welch. Welch
attended the U.S. Naval Academy and studied law at Harvard for two
years. He was vice president of the James O. Welch candy company in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Welch was vice chairman of the Massachusetts
Republican Party finance committee in 1948. He made an unsuccessful bid
for the office of Lt. Governor in the 1950 Republican primary. He was
also a ranking director of the National Association of Manufacturers,
the subject of many an essay from George Seldes, published in his
newsletter, Facts and Fascism. Seldes found NAM, in the 1950s, to be a
hive of reactionary corporate intrigues.
The Birch Society's Web site observes that in Welch time,
"self-reliance, good manners, moral uprightness, respect for hard work,
and especially rigorous honesty were as pervasive among Americans then
as watching television and collecting welfare are for a great many of
them today." Welch's funding came primarily from Texas oil billionaire
H.L. Hunt, a "patriot" with a radio program, Lifeline, that aired in 42
states, Pew's Sunoco, and NAM's corporate constituents.
He "learned," according to the JBS Internet site, that "the
Conspiracy is more deeply rooted than he had previously thought, and
supported this thesis by tracing its origins back over a century to an
occult group known as the Illuminati, founded on May 1, 1776 by a
Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt. Tenaciously tracking back through the
pages of obscure books and dusty old documents, he found that this
conspiratorial band had participated in the French Revolution of 1789,
which infamous uprising, as we know, struck out with intense savagery
against God and civilization and resulted in the murder of roughly a
million human beings. Clearly, the upheavals and atrocities of 1789
served as a model for revolutions to come, especially the Bolshevik
Revolution."
Robert Welch introduced his vision of the John Birch Society at a
meeting of twelve "patriotic and public-spirited men" in Indianapolis on
December 9, 1958. The first chapter was formed in February 1959. "The
core thesis of the society," reports Political Research Associates in
Somerville, Massachussetts, "was contained in Welch's initial
Indianapolis presentation, transcribed almost verbatim in The Blue Book
of the John Birch Society, and subsequently given to each new member.
According to Welch, both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by
the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy
bankers and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside
the US government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United
Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a 'one-world
socialist government.'" This was the game ã substituting "fascist" with
"socialist," reversing the perceived polarity of corporatism. The Birch
Society "incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed
to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector."
Welch's Society had a corporate foundation ã primarily oil
companies and miliitary contractors ã and served as a line of defense
from the left. Before the war, B. Palme Dutt, in Fascism and Social
Revolution (International Publishers, 1935), found that capitalism "can
no longer maintain its power by the old means. The crisis is driving the
whole political situation at an escalating pace." The rise of the labor
unions and social movements threatened to usurp the power, wealth and
privilege of the ruling class. Every segment of society was affected by
this clash. The Lords of Industry, with one eye askance at developments
in the Russian satellites and the Far East, was "driven to ever more
desperate expedients to prolong for a little while its lease on life."
Fascist organizations like the Birch Society were a "desperate
expedient" of social control, undermining any attempt to trespass on the
authority and wealth of the country's ruling barons.
In the wings of the Birch Society, with its insistent rejection of
"collectivism," lurked corporate-military sponsors. In an address to the
Cooperative League of the United States, T.K. Quinn, a former vice
president of General Electric, an "Insider," shared his view of the
corporate sector that created the Society and supported it: "In forms of
organization and control, these giants are essentially collectivistic,
fascist states, with self-elected and self-perpetuating officers and
directors, quite like the Russian politiboro in this respect. Their
control extends directly over production, over tens of thousands of
small supplying manufacturers and subcontractors, and over thousands of
distributors and dealers. Indirectly, the control of these giant
corporations influences legislation through paid lobbies in state
capitals and Washington, and it is seen and felt in the magazines,
newspapers, radio and television stations, all dependent upon these
giants and their associates for their existence" (George Seldes,
"Postscript: NAM and the John Birch Society," in Never Tire of
Protesting, Lyle Stuart, 1968, p. 124).
The ranking corporations were unified by the National Association
of Manufacturers (NAM). Robert Welch had been an officer of NAM. NAM and
related organizations didn't score too badly in their lobbying efforts
in a sample year:
WON LOST PERCENT
NAM 6 0 1,000
Committee for Constitutional Government
7 1 .875
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
6 2 .750
Other lobbying groups didn't fare so well. The American Federation of
Labor won three lobbying campaigns and lost seven. The League of Women
Voters was successful in one attempt to see legislation passed, but lost
four. The Farmers' Union was 1-in-8. The Veterans of Foreign Wars,
1-in-5 (Seldes, pp. 124-125, from a Congressional Quarterly scorecard).
Seldes observed that NAM, "the richest and most powerful lobby in the
nation, got all the laws it sponsored passed by Congress." The Committee
for Constitutional Government, "called 'America's No. 1 fascist
organization' by Congressman Wright Patman, won seven in eight that it
sponsored" (p. 125). Clearly, favoritism at the legislative level
favored the fascist corporate fronts, not the left.
The Birch Society was an arm of NAM and its constituent
corporations ã General Motors, DuPont, Sunoco, U.S. Steel and so on.
"Another organization," Seldes wrote, "apparently founded with the
intention of the Birch Society to unite reaction in a vast and powerful
political weapon, calls itself Americans for Constitutional Action and
unites NAM leaders, the owners of the Reader's Digest, and Birchites; it
is reaction's answer to Americans for Democratic Action" (p. 121).
Reader's Digest? This brings up another directorate locked into
such groups ã the CIA. In the Eisenhower period, propagandists on the
Agency payroll were featured on a regular basis in the Digest, including
Allen Dulles, Carl Rowan, James Burnham, Brian Crozier and Stewart
Alsop. The magazine remains a glib tool of CIA propaganda.
Another is the National Review, in the early days indistinguishable
from Birch Society propaganda. It was edited by William F. Buckley, a
close friend of Welch's. In the first issue, released on November 19,
1955, Buckley printed a "Publisher's Statement" in which he declared
war on "the Liberals, who run the country." The Review, Buckley
boasted, "stands athwart history, yelling Stop!"
In March, 1956, John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote: "Last
November, newstands throughout the country offered the first issue of a
new magazine, National Review, with described itself as 'frankly,
conservative.'" But the magazine's first half-dozen issues made it clear
that the Review "was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism
... [and] like most of the extremist little magazines, it seems to be
aimed at an audience of True Believers." NR's readership were "emotional
people who throw themselves frantically into a cause ã often to make up
for some kind of frustration in their private lives. They form the hard
core of many religious, nationalist and revolutionary movements: they
have great capacity, in Hoffer's words, for 'enthusiasm, fervent hope,
hatred and intolerance ... blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.'
They are the opposite of conservatives" (Rusher, pp. 47-48).
Dwight MacDonald, a staff writer for the New Yorker, opined, "NR
seems worth examining as a cultural phenomenon: the MaCarthy
nationalists ã they call themselves conservative, but that is surely a
misnomer ã have never before made so heroic an effort to be
intellectually articulate. Here are the ideas, here is the style of the
lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated ... who responded to Huey Long,
Father Coughlin and Senator McCarthy.... These are men from underground,
the intellectually underprivileged who feel themselves excluded from a
world they believe is ruled by liberals (or eggheads ã the terms are,
significantly, interchangeable in NR)."
William F. Buckley held himself up to the world as an independent
thinker, journalist and publisher. But documents declassified by the
Assassination Records Review Board dismissed any such notion. In
Watergate "Plumber" Howard Huntπs Office of Security file, Dan Hardway
of the House Select Committee found a number of documents regarding
William F. Buckley. He was not merely a CIA agent. He was a ranking
officer, stationed for a spell in Mexico City to direct the action.
Buckley attempted to conceal his CIA rank with Hunt's assistance.
Documents subpeoned by Congress mention that some articles published by
the National Review were actually written by the CIA's E. Howard Hunt,
eg. a review of The Invisible Government, by David Wise, a book highly
critical of the Agency. When Buckley left the CIA to publish the
National Review, he maintained a subdued relationship with Howard Hunt.
(Jim DiEugenio, "Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa," Probe,
January-February 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2).
Buckley also distanced himself publicly from Robert Welch in the
April 21, 1961 issue of the Review. There was growing interest in the
Birch Society, Buckley claimed, because "the Liberals, and to the extent
their programs coincide, the Communists, feel threatened by the revived
opposition. Accordingly they have taken hold of a vulnerable
organization and labored to transform it into a national menace." It
could be argued that the Society itself had something to do with this
reputation, that the left did not have to "labor" too strenuously.
Buckley himself admitted in his next breath that the Birch Society was
"an organization of men and women devoted to militant political
activity."
"I myself have known Robert Welch since 1952," he admitted. "I have
read all his books, and most of his articles and editorials. He bought
stock and debentures in National Review in its early years (less than
one percent of our original capital). We have exchanged over a dozen
letters, and spoken from the same platform on two occasions. I have
always admired his personal courage and devotion to the cause."
But, Buckley wrote, he had to part with Welch's conclusion that
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a willing agent of the Soviet Union, though
Buckley believed "most definitely" that the "Communist conspiracy" was a
"deadly serious matter." In the future, he hoped that the Birch Society
"thrives," so long as "it resists such false assumptions as that a man's
subjective motives can automatically be deduced from the objective
consequences of his acts."
Buckley hoped to salvage the organization's political usefulness to
the fascist cause by plotting to separate his "old friend" Welch from
the Birchers. George Seldes notes that Welch's "paranoid and idiotic
libels" of President Eisenhower caused a stir in the Republican Party:
"It resulted in an attempt to separate Welch from Birch and set Welch
adrift. Editor William Buckley of the National Review, and the favorite
Birch radio orator, Fulton Lewis, Jr. (who outdid all the Birchites by
favoring lynching, not merely indicting, the chief justice), joined in a
suggestion that Welch resign and thus purge the John Birch Society,
which would then continue in their favor. They did not succeed" (Seldes,
Never Tire of Protesting, p. 220).
Welch was not one to forget a little slight like a coup attempt.
He'd been betrayed by the Skull-and-Bones CIA Yalie. His affairs were
tangled up with Buckley's, though, and the connection went far beyond a
minor stock holding in the National Review. Welch had influence at YAF,
founded in September 1960. Young Americans was a group replete with
Birchers. It also served as a front for incoming Nazi spies from Munich,
Germany (Russell).
And it's leadership was loyal to William F. Buckley. In the summer
of 1961, Robert Welch enlisted the aid of Nelson Rockefeller (in Birch
lore, the country's most powerful closet "Communist") and launched a
counter-coup of the student organization. Together, William Rusher
recalls, an unlikely alliance, "Welch and Rockefeller, in league,
through their youthful agents, [attempted] to wrest control of the
national board of YAF from the friends of National Review!" In the end,
the fanatical Birch faction was outvoted and the Buckley crowd remained
in control of the radical right student union (Rusher, pp 115-116).
Birchers have never been content to sit idly by, swapping tales of
phantom communist conspiracies. They took an active hand to throttle the
anti-capitalist "imperialists" threatening God's chosen people. (Never
mind that the U.S. has interfered in the politics of every country on
earth, installed fascist dictators in most and often assassinated any
leaders who rejected the American corporate model.)
General Edwin A. Walker resigned from the Army in November 1961
after he was admonished by the Pentagon for distributing Birch Society
material to his troops. He was temporarily relieved of command pending
investigation. Walker ã the head of Committee for the Defense of
Christian Culture, a group with chapters in Bonn, Germany established by
a Nazi, and a devoted Bircher ã ultimately buffooned his way into a
number of footnotes in Camelot history. Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly
attempted to kill him, and the general once made a bid for governor but
finished last in the 1962 Democratic runoff. In The Man Who Knew Too
Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), Dick Russell recalls, "Late in September,
1962, the general made headlines around the world. James Meredith was
seeking to become the first black ever admitted to the University of
Mississippi. It was a landmark moment in the fight against racial
segregation. Meredith's entry was mandated by a federal court order, and
when Mississippi governor Ross Barnett set out to block it, Kennedy
ordered National Guardsmen deployed on Meredith's behalf. That was when
General Walker called for ten thousand civilians to march on Oxford,
Mississippi, in opposition. Walker was on the scene when rioting broke
out against four hundred federal marshals escorting Meredith onto the
campus." Two people were killed in the melee, and 70 were wounded. The
next morning, "Walker was arrested by federal authorities on four
counts, including insurrection, and flown for psychiatric observation to
the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri." The
Liberty Lobby hastened to General Walker's defense, and blamed the
Kennedys for waging a campaign against Walker to "reduce his prestige"
and "asset value to the anti-Communist cause." (p. 309).
Back in 1957, General Walker made the cover of Time magazine and
was credited with furthering the cause of racial integration after he
led federal troops integrating the schools in Little Rock, Ark.
Actually, Gen. Walker led the troops only after President Dwight
Eisenhower refused his resignation, historian Don E. Carleton, author of
Red Scare, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
"He did not want to carry out that order," Mr. Carleton said. "He
did not believe in racial integration" (General Walker obituary, AP
release, November2, 1993).
He flew the U.S. flag upside down to express his anger over the
perceived "communist" leanings of Kennedy and other government
officials, according to Darwin Payne, a former Dallas newspaper
reporter. "He was not a good speaker. He was a poor campaigner and
finished last in a field of six [in the gubernatorial race], which was a
surprise because he had so many ardent followers in the right wing," Mr.
Payne says (Walker obituary).
General Walker loudly declared himself a martyr in the war against
creeping Marxism. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in
1962, he testified that the "conspiracy" was, in the words of columnist
Jack Anderson, "clearing the way for world communism by systematically
slandering and discrediting its effective opponents. The cast of victims
of this 'hidden policy' ran to thousands ... and he undertook to name
the brightest of the fallen: General Douglas MacArthur, Defense
Secretary James Forrestal, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Senator Joseph
McCarthy, General George Patton, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas. Walker's
litany of martyrs was standard among the 'anti-communist' right; it
could have been liften intact from the speeches of Senator Joseph
McCarthy or Gerald L.K. Smith a decade earlier, just as it would be
reproduced a decade later in the pamphlets on the fanatical fringe,
except that in the latter case the roster of unheeded prophets would be
updated by the addition of Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and
Representative Michael Feighan of Ohio (Jack Anderson, Confessions of a
Muckraker, Random House, 1979, pp. 100-101).
Liberals, even within the Republican Pary, were targeted by the
JBS. Thomas Kuchel, U.S. senator for 16 years and the last major liberal
Republican to hold office in California, was one of them. Senator Kuchel
expressed particular pride in his support of civil rights bills for
enfranchisement of blacks and desegregation of public facilities during
the Johnson administration. In 1994, the Los Angeles Times reported that
Kuchel "said with characteristic disdain, the main feature of 'right
wing Republicans,' as he understood them, 'was militant anti-Communism.
'They seemed convinced we were about to be invaded by the Communists.'
Mr. Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right to his
response to a surge of mail he got from members of the then-obscure John
Birch Society shortly after John F. Kennedy became president. 'I got
thousands of letters telling me that Chinese Communists were in Mexico
preparing to invade California,' he recalled. After checking with
military authorities, Mr. Kuchel wrote a short form letter in response:
'We have no evidence of Communists gathering in Mexico, Chinese or
otherwise.' Shortly thereafter, Mr. Kuchel learned that he was being
labeled a 'Comsymp,' a term he had not heard of until that time. 'I got
a little teed off, and prepared a carefully researched speech critical
of the John Birch Society and that kind of mentality,' he remembered. 'I
kicked them around, and they never forgave me'" (Kuchel obituary,
November 23, 1994, L.A. Times).
An editorial writer for the Times Record News in Witchita Falls
followed the political machinations of the Birch Society from an early
age ("A Society of Hate," Oct. 25, 1998), and observed that JBS founder
Robert Welch "was not in government but despised most of those inside
it, was never stopped, and his influence grew even as McCarthyπs bulb
dimmed and died out." Birchers in Texas were politically hyperactive in
those days, and gained a foothold in local politics, "and thatπs how I
know they were an ornery bunch. The first person I actually came to know
as a Bircher was a kid Iπd gone through school with who showed up one
day outside the schoolhouse with the trunk of his car loaded down with
boxes of paperback books. He was standing there with the trunk lid up
handing out free books to anybody whoπd take one. I could kick myself
now for not taking one then because it would be interesting to have it
just to show my kids what mean times those were. If you think the Starr
Report made President Clinton look bad, you shouldπve seen this book.
The name of the book was A Texan Looks at Lyndon. I came to know quite a
number of Birchers in various contexts, some through church, some
through groups my parents socialized with, some through my job as a
journalist, but I didnπt know them as Birchers until I started
connecting the dots.
"They were a sneaky bunch, and mean, and at one time they ran the
government in my hometown, and used their offices to preach against
communism and socialism as though evil was right there at the city
limits threatening to come in and take over. I never ran across a
communist or socialist back then, so maybe the Birchers were successful
≠ I dunno. A little later, they tried to take over the entire Republican
Party in the county where I lived by putting stealth candidates on the
ballot for every position at the last minute. I guess they knew so much
about communist infiltration that theyπd become experts at it. The ones
I knew were a humorless bunch, sullen, suspicious and stiff-necked. They
saw America going straight to hell right before their eyes, and they
resented the fact that so few heeded their doomsday predictions."
An exception to the general apathy that met Welch's cultic bund was
William Kintner, a former CIA officer who castigated critics of the
extreme right in the the May, 1962 issue of Reader's Digest. Kintner
maintained that the "campaign" waged against radical right havens like
the John Birch Society began when "dossiers in Moscow's espionage
headquarters were combed for the names of unsuspecting persons in the
United States who might do the Kremlin's work." Anyone maligning the
home corporate-military state was therefore a suspected Soviet agent
hawking "disinformation."
But the Birch Society's ambitions went far beyond control of local
politics. One one occasion members of the JBS who took objection to
Kennedy's Communist "appeasement" policies plotted the overthrow of the
government. In 1962, Dallas officials of the JBS attended a meeting with
H.L Hunt, General Edwin Walker, Robert Morris, leader of the Defenders
of American Liberty, president of Plato University in New Jersey and
former chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
(!), and Larrie Schmidt, a veteran of two tours of duty with the Army in
Munich who idolized Hermann Goering. Back home, Schmidt, his head
teeming with the Birch Society propaganda disseminated by General Walker
back in Germany, took a position at United Press International. He had
made plans while stationed in the Rhineland to start an organization he
called CUSA, short for Conservatism U.S.A.
By the summer of 1962, Schmidt organized a squad of zealots from
the Military Police and Counter-Intelligence Corps. Look magazine
(January 26, 1965) reported that Schmidt "trained a small, disciplined
band of soldier-conspirators to follow him stateside and do, he hoped,
'whatever is necessary to accomplish our goal.'" Schmidt's coup plan
called for infiltrating conservative organization around the country,
and marshalling them to overthrow of the Kennedy government. The core
of this seditious army was to be the first organization drawn into
Schmidt's plan ã Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a Birch Society
offshoot that boasted some 50,000 members ã by arrangement with
Heidelberg-born Major General Charles Willoughby, true name Weidenbach,
a YAF founder, alleged by Dick Russell to be one of the central
participants of the John F. Kennedy assassination.
The coup plot was exposed when Warren Commission investigators
happened upon Schmidt's role in the purchase of a newspaper ad ã framed
with a thick, black border ã that ran in the Dallas Morning News the day
Kennedy was shot, pronouncing the president guilty of treason for
alleged diplomatic dalliances with the Russians (Russell, The Man Who
Knew Too Much, pp. 320-24).
The name Kennedy riled good Birchers everywhere. Ronald Reagan,
president of the Screen Actors' Guild and FBI snitch, under secret
contract with MCA management, emerging political star in Hollywood, was
closer to the mark. After the 1964 presidential election, Democratic
Party officials crafted a plan to take on right-wing extremists in the
public arena, including one of Reagan's support groups, Citizens for
Constitutional Action ã a conservative, grassroots organization that had
backed Goldwater in his presidential run ã and thereby splinter the
Republicans.
As it happened, both Goldwater and the John Birch Society received
lavish support from J. Howard Pew, owner of the Sun Oil Company (see
Colby and Dennett, The Will Be Done, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 453).
The Republicans countered with measures tailored to ensure party
unity. Reagan was cautioned not to allow himself to be defined as either
a moderate or conservative. "During one secret strategy meeting," Curt
Gentry (in The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California
Putnam's, 1968) wrote, "John Rousselot, national public relations
director of the John Birch Society, approached Stuart Spencer with a
coldly pragmatic offer: the society would be glad to endorse Reagan or
denounce him, whichever would help most" (p. 125). When Reagan was sworn
in as governor of California on January 2, 1967, he was congratulated by
Robert Welch himself. Welch proudly proclaimed that the Birch Society
was, "in large part," deserving of credit for Reagan's electoral
victory.
"We had chosen California as a state in which to concentrate,
practically since the beginning," Welch said. "As a rule, about fifteen
percent of the total field staff we could afford, and hence at least
fifteen percent of out total membership has been in California" (Gentry,
p. 285).
The ascent of Reagan occurred in the Society's halcyon period,
before public opinion forced conservative politicians to distance
themselves from Welch's hyper-vigilant Red hunters. But the Birch
Society remained symbiotic with the very corporate-military elite it
denounced. The Editorial Advisory Committee of Welch's American Opinion
magazine claimed four past presidents of the National Association of
Manufacturers. Other editorial advisors: General A.C. Wedemeyer from the
Pentagon's War Plans Division under the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Colonel
Laurence Bunker, formerly the ranking aide-de-camp to General Douglas
MacArthur; and the Honorable Spruille Braden, a shoe-in for "Insider" as
former undersecretary of state (Mike Newberry, The Yahoos, Marzani &
Munsell, 1964, p. 21).
The Birch Society identified the Council for Foreign Relations
(CFR) as the beating heart of the world Marxist conspiracy. Ironic,
again, that many of the leaders of the JBS also sat on the CFR,
according to Who's Who, including William Grede, founder of the Birch
Society National Council, director of the 7th Federal Reserve Bank, an
arm of the much despised CFR; William Benton McMillan, the first Life
Member of the Birch Society and ramrod of the St. Louis Committee of the
CFR; Robert Waring Stoddard, a JBS Council member and chairman of the
Board of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a newspaper that employed
editors belonging to the local committee of the JBS National Council.
Braden was a fixture of the CFR, sat on the Council and was a director
of the W. Averell Harriman Securities Corporation.
The John Birch Solon
"There must be two Americas ..."
ã Mark Twain
JB Society leader Thomas Anderson, a hardened advocate of racial
segregation, kind of gave the game away when he whined in Straight Talk:
"Invariably, hiding behind the sanctimonious cries of 'freedom of the
press,' and 'academic freedom' are defenders of Alger Hiss, Fifth
Amendment addicts, attackers of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, people who urged barring Mein Kampf from distribution. In
short, the enemies are: Criminals, Socialists and Communists" Mein
Kampf? How did that get there?
Of critical importance to the anti-communist wars of the Birch
Society was Welch's relationship with Dr. J.B. Matthews, the former
chief investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC). When Joseph McCarthy announced that he held a list of Soviet
agents "in my hands," he referred to one of Matthew's compilations. When
McCarthy fell into disrepute, J.B. strolled off into the gloaming,
taking his files on known "communist subversives" with him, moved on to
become Robert Welch's aide-de-camp. "My opinion of various characters,"
Welch wrote in his Blue Book of the Birch Society, "formed entirely
independently, has [proven] to coincide with the opinion of J.B.
Matthews." Welch boasted that he had "a fairly sensitive and accurate
nose" for rooting out agents of the communist underground.
Dr, Matthews pushed the number of "agents," "subversives" and
"travellers" among the nation's clergymen in Birch Society files from
1,000 to 7,000. American parishes evidently swarmed with spies and
dupes. In July 1961, the Birch Society Bulletin claimed that there were
no less than "300,000 to 500,000 Communists in the United States"
(Newberry, p. 89). Welch and Matthews dreamed of collecting files of all
of them.
The American Opinion reading room was the place to learn all about
the conspiracy, an alternate universe of extreme right-wing briefings.
Medford Evans, a former editor of the National Review and the Birch
Society's Texas coordinator, published a critical tour-de-force in Human
Events magazine (January 26, 1957): "Why I Am an Anti-Intellectual."
Human Events was a CIA front. Evans once served under Admiral Lewis
Strauss at the Atomic Energy Commission. The dossiers of J. Robert
Oppenheimer and Edward Teller were cleared by the AEC's
"anti-intellectual" chief of security (Newberry, p. 138).
In its halcyon phase, the John Birch Society was allied with
William Regnery, whose name appears on American Security Council (ASC)
incorporation papers. The ASC was a domestic covert operations arm of
the military-industrial complex, closely aligned with the JBS, Libery
Lobby and other sons of the anti-communist revolution. Regnery and a
pair of pre-war America First isolationists began the Human Events radio
program and the Regnery publishing house in the mid-1950s. The first two
books published by Regnery were critical of the Nuremberg Trials and the
third found fault with allied bombing campaigns against the Nazis.
In 1954, Regnery published a couple of tracts for the John Birch
Society. The nascent publishing concern also printed up William F.
Buckleyπs God and Man at Yale, subtitled, The Superstitions of Academic
Freedom. "In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books," SpritOne
Information Services comments, "it is interesting to note that Regnery
Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The
reader is reminded to remember [the] point ... concerning the CIA and
its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery, along with
Bunker Hunt, funded Western Goals." Western Goals was a creation of the
John Birch Society.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan "appointed Alfred Regnery to help
dismantle the Justice Departmentπs Office of Juvenile Justice. In the
1990s, [Regnery] has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears (I
would use the word 'books' but that would be a lie by any measure)
attacking President Clinton. [A] direct linkage between the past
pro-Nazi groups of the 1930s and todayπs right wing has been fully
established" (http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930s.htm).
Gary Allen, one of the foremost propagandists in the Bircher
pantheon, was the author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a "'76 Press"
productm, a Birch Society bible and a stunning success that has sold
over four million copies, according to a publisher's blurb. Picture, if
you will, the nation's corporate elite driving for a "Great Merger" with
the Kremlin, and poisoning the entire world with Communism. This is
among the central themes of The Rockefeller File (1976), Allen's
critique of the most powerful family in the world, the dreaded CFR and
the United World Federalists. At first glance, Allen's books may seem a
confused clot of political fantasies. He claims that the Carnegie and
Rockefeller money machines have "jumped into the financing of education
and the social sciences with both Left feet" ã as though these
foundations traveled with Molly Ivans, when in fact they have proven
time and again to serve as funding conduits of the CIA, an agency with
interests that do not exactly line up with liberalism. The result, Allen
laments, has been "a sharp Socialist-Fascist turn" (p. 45). Decipher
this one, and you have clambered onto the eerie, fog-bound island of
ultracon conspiracy theories, teeming with paranoia and Bible-thumping
nationalism. The Union Theological Seminary, the reader learns, turns
out armies of "Christian-Communists." Dan Smoot, an infamous fascist
organizer, "scholar," a former FBI agent, like Skousen, was, from
Allen's perspective, a heroic David who stood his ground against the
evil Environmental Protection Agency (p. 142). The New York Times is a
clearinghouse of left-wing mind control (p. 66).
Allen's oblique reasoning was often identical to Adolph Hitler's
anti-democratic tirades. "The present democracy of the West," wrote
Germany's Fuhrer, "is the forerunner of Marxism which would be
unthinkable without it. It is democracy alone which furnishes this
universal plague the soil in which it spreads." How many communists
plagued the soil of democracy? The John Birch Society Bulletin of July
1961 let on that there were "not more than a million allies, dupes and
sympathizers." Welch proposed compiling a list of these internal
saboteurs, "the most complete and most accurate files in America on the
leading Comsymps, Socialists and liberals" (Newberry, pp. 89-90),
presaging the Western Goals database of known leftists.
Another "scholar" of the extreme right who fed the Birch Society's
anti-communist hysteria was Antony Sutton, author of National Suicide:
Military Aid to the Soviet Union, and a series of chapbooks on Yale's
Skull and Bones fraternity. Antony Sutton was once employed as a
research fellow at the arch-conservative Hoover Institute. To this day,
he publishes in The New American, a Birch Society publication. He also
turned out books for the "'76 Press," a fascist-right small press that
featured the "America First"-style manipulations of W. Cleon Skousen,
the former FBI agent and author of The Naked Capitalist, a revival of
Carroll Qugley's views of worldwide economic subversion by British
elitists. Skousen was the chief of police in Salt Lake City until the
Mayor, a Bircher himself, dismissed him in 1960, explaining that the
outgoing Chief was "an incipient Hitler" (Group Research Reports, 1980,
Washington, D.C., Group Research, Inc., p. 20). Skousen had no qualms
about publishing in the Sun Myung Moon organizations American Freedom
Journal, despite his "America for Americans" posturing. Other "'76
Press" writers included the vigorously anti-EPA Phyllis Schlafly ã who,
in 1960, hotly denied that she was a member of the Birch Society ...
after Welch announced that she was "one of out most loyal members"
(Carol Felsenthal, Phyllis Schlafly, Doubleday, 1981, p. xviii) ã
founder of the Eagle Forum. Then there was nuclear strategist Admiral
Chester Ward, a former law school professor, architect and Naval Judge
Advocate, commended by President Eisenhower for his courageous
opposition to "the Communist conspiracy." (Felsenthal, p. 221).
Antony Sutton has always been very concerned about who is funding who ã
yet it doesn't appear to sink in that the Birch Society is a front
organization organized and funded with seed money from the same domestic
fascists that supported Hitler before WW II. The same propaganda front
that claimed the Rockefellers and Morgans to be closet communists and
frightened the religion out of its many followers among the Boobocracy
by claiming there is a massive conspiracy afoot to turn the U.S. into a
Lenin-style Superstate.
Sutton's approach to conspiracy genera was spliced with the
anti-communist venom of Robert Welch and his theory of the "Hegelian
Dialectic," the strategy of left-right tensions. He, Allen and
millennialist Gary North frequently quoted each other in circular
fashion. Sutton's racial views were certainly curious for one who wore
his patriotism on his sleeve. He was an advocate of separation between
the races in South Africa. His passages on the CFR and Illuminati flirt
with anti-Semitism and echo the fiercely anti-communist sentiments of
Skousen, Ward, Allen, Dan Smoot and other proponents of the fascist
right. Sutton, who publishes a newsletter, The Future Technology
Intelligence Report, contends that "possible advanced alien technology"
has been reverse-engineered and is squandered by the federal government.
(The "reverse engineering of ET technology" schtick was first whistled
up by Phillip Corso ã in the 1960s a charter member, under Charles
Willoughby, the aforementioned YAF co-founder, of the Shickshinny
Knights of Malta in Pennsylvania, a conspiratorial fraternal order
patterned after the military order of the Vatican. YAF was organized by
the Birch Society.)
Guy Bannister, a Birch Society pamphleteer, was Lee Harvey
Oswald's "handler" at 544 Camp Street. Bannister employed an
investigator, Jack S. Martin, a co-conspirator with his boss and Charles
Willoughby-Weidenbach, the man who arranged the bombing of Pearl Harbor
(according to Charles Higham, the best-selling biographer in the
country), went on to an assignment as General MacArthur's intelligence
chief in Korea, and YAF official (with William F. Buckley of the CIA),
in the Kennedy assassination, say Mae Brussell, Dick Russell and others.
Bannister was a drunkard, a former FBI agent and Naval Intelligence
officer. He published a racist newsletter. He choreographed the
activities of a group of anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He died nine
months after the murder of John Kennedy.
Jim Garrison investigated Oswald's connection to Bannister and CIA
pilot David Ferrie. The devout, alcoholic anti-communist had Oswald
passing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers on street corners.
What would Bannister and his fellow Birchers say if they could
speak openly, without the Jeffersonian platitudes and shaggy-dog
geopolical tales? In a privately published paper about Charles
Willoughby-Weidenbach ("Looking for 'Hate' in all the 'Right' Places"),
political researcher William Morris McLoughlin can't resist speaking for
them: "We have been sitting on our hands and 'gnawing the rug' since
1945, when, as far as we are concerned, World War III actually began,
with the murder of our hero, John Birch in Manchuria, China"
The war has been waged "entirely by members of various national and
international right-wing, militantly extremist groups still united under
the auspices and control of the World Anti-Communist League. Its U.S.
affiliates include the U.S. Council for World Freedom and the American
Security Council, part of the Liberty Lobby, as well as other
organizations," including the Birch Society .
The JBS waged its grass-roots, populist approach to psywar with
much scape-goating. In The Radical Right (Random House, 1967), Epstein
and Arnold offer that at the 1965 convention of the Christian Crusade,
another fascist front, General Walker, "in speaking of the man who
killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin, urged his
listeners not to forget that Ruby's name was Rubenstein, and they can't
change that fact no matter how often they refer to him as Ruby."
Overall, Robert Welch tried to keep the race question out of the
discussion. He insisted always that the enemy was the left, not the
Jews. Nevertheless, there was no holding back the anti-semitism that
many JBS members, cryptically or not, felt the need to convey. There was
Florida Bircher Bernard "Ben" Klassen, author of The White Man's Bible.
And William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, who cut his
ideological teeth as a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society.
Pierce left the Birch Society to shift the thrust of his "research" to
the "international Jewish conspiracy," the very source, he maintained,
of communism, the true Insiders behind the Insiders. (Pierce, "Enemies
on the Right," National Vanguard Magazine, August 1996).
Pierce: "One thing I am grateful to the Birch Society for is that
it directed me to a number of books on Communism, and from those books I
learned enough about the nature and background of Communism that I knew
I wanted to learn much more. That was really the beginning of my
education: the start of my quest for understanding about history, race,
politics, and, in fact, nearly everything except the physics and
mathematics to which I had devoted myself until that time. The
half-dozen or so other members of the chapter seemed to be decent
enough, if not very stimulating, fellows. The term that best
characterizes them is 'middle class.' They were pretty much the sort one
can meet in any American Legion hall, except they were a little more
intenseãespecially when talking about the Communist Conspiracy, which
was practically the only thing they talked about."
The world certainly seemed to be going to the dogs. Thanks so much,
communist conspirators.
General Albert Wedemeyer, a guest on the Manion Forum, a radio
program hosted by Clarence Manion of the Birch Society's national
council, claimed the seeds for the advancing Red Tide were planted when
Roosevelt entered the war against the Axis: "The Soviet colossus would
not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war ã
at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other."
(A realistic expectation? One side, perhaps the Germans, would have
prevailed, or so some pre-war "isolationists" hoped.) "But Franklin D.
Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy, was as successful as
any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in
ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which
flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had re-elected him
only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war"
("Historical News and Comment," Journal of Historical Review, undated,
vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 495-499).
But a social backlash against the antics of the "Yahoos" was
mounting. In 1965, a group of moderate Republican governors met with the
Party's coordinating committee to urge a statement denouncing the John
Birch Society. On December 24, the New York Times reported that the
committee voted in the interest of party unity to adopt a "diplomatic
resolution." The GOP would "reject membership in any radical or
extremist organization ... which seeks to undermine the basic principals
of American freedom and constitutional government." Former House
Representative John Rousselot, a Christian Scientist ã also the John
Birch Society's national director of public relations ã told the press
that the resolution meant communists and the KKK would be denied access
to the Republican Party, but not members of the Birch Society.
The GOP, after all, had scores of Birchers in the ranks, and many
of them were "high-minded" loyalists to the Party. Why, the JB Society
bestowed awards on policemen who acted heroically in the line of duty.
This endeared police officers around the country to the front
organization. A reporter in New York noticed that most of those
attending one Birch Society rally sported "Police Benevolent
Association" badges. Well-known law enforcement officials were drawn to
Society-sponsored media events, including L.A. Police Chief Willam
Parker, who turned up for an interview on the Manion Forum. In 1966,
Sheriff James Clark ã a Bircher who found fame for his resistance to the
civil rights movement ã was voted president of the national sheriff's
organization by the rank and file. (Seymour-Martin Lipset and Earl Raab,
The Politics of Unreason, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 317-18).
Not publicized were the lives they led behind the hoopla. General
Walker, one of the most visible of Birchers, kept up his relationship
with Gerhard Frey back in Germany. Walker phoned Frey's newspaper after
Oswald was identified as the poor marksman who fired four shots through
his window. Frey was the publisher of the Deutsche National-Zeitung und
Soldaten-Zeitung.
Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany mentions that
Frey's weekly newspaper "has become a central organ of all ultra-right
neo-fascist forces in West Germany and defames each and every movement
advocating a realistic policy. Thus von der Heydte, SS man and parachute
officer of the nazi Wehrmacht, called for long sentences of penal
servitude for 'renunciation politicians,' meaning those forces striving
for normal relations with the neighboring peoples in the east and
south-east of Europe. This paper advocates with peculiar zeal a general
amnesty for nazi and war criminals."
Frey's sheet applauded the acquittal of Erich Deppner, an SS storm
trooper who ordered the murder of 65 Russian prisoners, a "turning point
in the trials of war criminals" (Brown Book, p. 338-39).
Another prominent Bircher with a secret life was Edward Hunter, the
CIA mind control operative who coined the word "brainwashing" back in
1950. The word quickly, John Marks observed in The Manchurian Candidate:
The CIA and Mind Control, "became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines."
Hunter, an OSS veteran and CIA propagandist employed as a "journalist,"
wrote scores of books and articles on the emerging science of mind
manipulation. His many readers responded with outrage at the communist
menace he detailed in his articles, and its insidious mind control
tactics. The enemy had developed methods "to put a man's mind into a fog
so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue," Hunter
reported, "what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did
not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot
for the Communist manipulator" (pp. 125-26). The country's elected
representatives had no choice but to allow the Agency to conduct its own
inhumane experiments on unconsenting human subjects.
There was, however, no brainwash like Birch Society brainwash.
In 1962, Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government exposed as fronts for
international Bolshevism a number of policy groups. Democracy was
teetering. Smoot had unearthed the enemies in our midst: the Committee
for Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council
(formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory Council
and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot, incidentally, reported to FBI
headquarters in Washington before he was bitten by the bug to publish
his neo-fascist newsletter, The Dan Smoot Report. "Somewhere at the top
of the pyramid in the invisible government," he wrote, "are a few
sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America
to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship under the control
of the Kremlin" (Political Research Associates).
The rabble rousing of Welch, Manion, Smoot and other Birch Society
celebrities was understandably disturbing to some of the political
targets of the abuse.
President John Kennedy responded to the noisy extremists of the
Birch Society in an address delivered at a fund-raising dinner hosted by
the Democratic Party at the Hollywood Paladium on November 18, 1961. "In
recent months," Kennedy said, "I have spoken many times about how
difficult and dangerous a period it is through which we move. I would
like to take this opportunity to say a word about the American spirit in
this time of trial. In the most critical periods of out nation's
history, there have been those on the fringes of out society who have
sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution,
an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat." Political extremists, he
said, sought the easy explanation for every national crisis and ignored
political complexities. A downturn in the econmy "could be explained by
the presence of too many immigrants." Wars are orchestrated by
"international bankers." China ended trade relations with the world not
as a result of internal conflicts, but due to "treason in high places."
With their rhetoric, "these fanatics have achieved a temporary success
among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant facts or
unresolved problems."
Cold War is oppressive, Kennedy acknowledged, and "the discordant
voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are
unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the
real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors
and their leaders. They call for 'a man on horseback' because they do
not trust the people."
The extreme right equated the Democratic Party with "the welfare
state," said Kennedy. They object, "quite rightly, to politics intruding
on the military ã but they are anxious for the military to engage in
politics." He urged his supporters, "Let us not heed these counsels of
fear and suspicion.... Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation
of confidence rather than crusades of suspicion" (Entire speech
published verbatim in William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right, William
Morrow, 1984, pp. 121-123).
In 1965, a Republican leader told the Arizona Republic that eighty
percent of all Birch Society members were "dedicated, patriotic and
frightened Americans. More than 19 percent are nuts whose brains and
judgment are warped. And the remaining people frighten me to death."
Many conservative Americans found the "crusade of suspicion"
irresistible. Most Birch Society members, about 60,000 all told, lived
in cozy suburbs in the south and southwest (Rusher, p, 118).
The Phoenix chapter of the Society was founded in 1960, and six
more popped up within two years. By 1965, there were 100 chapters in the
state and some 2,000 members. Most of them lived in the suburbs around
Phoenix.
They came in all ages, but one of the youngest and most receptive
to the call was young Robbie Jay Matthews of Phoenix, Arizona, a
prototypical middle-class American kid who, as an adult, went on to
muster a group he called The Order, the neo-nazi cell that murdered
radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.
Twnety years before, on October 25, 1964, Una Matthews, his
mother, drew Robbie's attention to a tabloid insert in the Arizona
Republic entitled, The John Birch Society: A Report. In The Silent
Brotherhood (Signet, 1989), reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt
describe the momentous day that Robbie Matthews, age 12, became a
fascist: "Una flipped through the magazine's pages, each marked
'advertisement' at the top.... The article described how the society was
composed of local chapters with ten to twenty members, usually formed by
someone in the neighborhood who was concerned about communism. A
full-time coordinator gave assistance and direction to the chapters."
"This group really wants to do something about it," Una Matthews
told her son, who took the magazine to his room and studied it
thoroughly. "He didn't understand everything, but he understood enough
to become increasingly alarmed. These people he'd been hearing about,
these Russian communists, wanted to take over the world." Young Matthews
thought of the implications. He feared for his family. Reading: "How are
we reacting to the realities of our world? What do we think of the
steady gain of communism ã of the millions killed, tortured and enslaved
by this criminal conspiracy? De we still laugh at Kruschev's claim that
our children will live under communism? Do we shrug off Cuba? Will we
shrug off Mexico? Do we watch with curiosity? De we pull down the
curtains on these disturbing thoughts?" Robbie Matthews, a future "man
on horseback," clipped the coupon and sent the Birch Society $5.00 for a
copy of Robert Welch's Blue Book, the group's manifesto.
"No more," Flynn and Gerhardt write, "would the world be just what
he could see up and down West Lawrence Lane" (p. 29-30).
Mbstorage
I didn't think they even existed anymore.
Christopher C. Lapp
you muster.
----------
In article <alexx12-4E814C...@nntp.we.mediaone.net>, Alex
Constantine <ale...@mediaone.net> wrote:
> The Early Days of the John Birch Society:
> Fascist Templars of the Corporate State
>
>
> By Alex Constantine
>
> "The new America will not be Capitalist in the old sense,
> nor will it be Socialist. If at the moment the trend is toward
> Fascism, it will be an American Fascism, embodying the
> experience, the traditions and the hopes of the great
> middle-class nation."
> ‹ E.F. Brown, associate editor,
> Current History Magazine, July 1933
>
> "We have absorbed into our own legal system the
> German tyranny that we fought and inveighed against.
> The approach, copied from the Nazis, works this way:
> The press and radio first lay down a terrific barrage
> against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of
> evidence shriek of atom bomb spies or plots to overthrow
> the government, of espionage, of high treason, and of
> other bloodcurdling crimes.
> "We are now ready for the second stage: the pinning
> of the label 'Red' indiscriminately on all opposition."
> ‹ Abraham Pomerantz,
> background on Birch: "Shortly after Americaąs entry into the war, John
> Birch volunteered to join General Claire ChennaultŚs 14th Air Force,
> socialist government.'" This was the game ‹ substituting "fascist" with
> "socialist," reversing the perceived polarity of corporatism. The Birch
> Society "incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed
> to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector."
> Welch's Society had a corporate foundation ‹ primarily oil
> companies and miliitary contractors ‹ and served as a line of defense
> corporations ‹ General Motors, DuPont, Sunoco, U.S. Steel and so on.
> "Another organization," Seldes wrote, "apparently founded with the
> intention of the Birch Society to unite reaction in a vast and powerful
> political weapon, calls itself Americans for Constitutional Action and
> unites NAM leaders, the owners of the Reader's Digest, and Birchites; it
> is reaction's answer to Americans for Democratic Action" (p. 121).
> Reader's Digest? This brings up another directorate locked into
> such groups ‹ the CIA. In the Eisenhower period, propagandists on the
> Agency payroll were featured on a regular basis in the Digest, including
> Allen Dulles, Carl Rowan, James Burnham, Brian Crozier and Stewart
> Alsop. The magazine remains a glib tool of CIA propaganda.
> Another is the National Review, in the early days indistinguishable
> from Birch Society propaganda. It was edited by William F. Buckley, a
> close friend of Welch's. In the first issue, released on November 19,
> 1955, Buckley printed a "Publisher's Statement" in which he declared
> war on "the Liberals, who run the country." The Review, Buckley
> boasted, "stands athwart history, yelling Stop!"
> In March, 1956, John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote: "Last
> November, newstands throughout the country offered the first issue of a
> new magazine, National Review, with described itself as 'frankly,
> conservative.'" But the magazine's first half-dozen issues made it clear
> that the Review "was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism
> ... [and] like most of the extremist little magazines, it seems to be
> aimed at an audience of True Believers." NR's readership were "emotional
> people who throw themselves frantically into a cause ‹ often to make up
> for some kind of frustration in their private lives. They form the hard
> core of many religious, nationalist and revolutionary movements: they
> have great capacity, in Hoffer's words, for 'enthusiasm, fervent hope,
> hatred and intolerance ... blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.'
> They are the opposite of conservatives" (Rusher, pp. 47-48).
> Dwight MacDonald, a staff writer for the New Yorker, opined, "NR
> seems worth examining as a cultural phenomenon: the MaCarthy
> nationalists ‹ they call themselves conservative, but that is surely a
> misnomer ‹ have never before made so heroic an effort to be
> intellectually articulate. Here are the ideas, here is the style of the
> lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated ... who responded to Huey Long,
> Father Coughlin and Senator McCarthy.... These are men from underground,
> the intellectually underprivileged who feel themselves excluded from a
> world they believe is ruled by liberals (or eggheads ‹ the terms are,
> significantly, interchangeable in NR)."
> William F. Buckley held himself up to the world as an independent
> thinker, journalist and publisher. But documents declassified by the
> Assassination Records Review Board dismissed any such notion. In
> Watergate "Plumber" Howard Huntąs Office of Security file, Dan Hardway
> investigation. Walker ‹ the head of Committee for the Defense of
> Christian Culture, a group with chapters in Bonn, Germany established by
> a Nazi, and a devoted Bircher ‹ ultimately buffooned his way into a
> it, was never stopped, and his influence grew even as McCarthyąs bulb
> dimmed and died out." Birchers in Texas were politically hyperactive in
> those days, and gained a foothold in local politics, "and thatąs how I
> know they were an ornery bunch. The first person I actually came to know
> as a Bircher was a kid Iąd gone through school with who showed up one
> day outside the schoolhouse with the trunk of his car loaded down with
> boxes of paperback books. He was standing there with the trunk lid up
> handing out free books to anybody whoąd take one. I could kick myself
> now for not taking one then because it would be interesting to have it
> just to show my kids what mean times those were. If you think the Starr
> Report made President Clinton look bad, you shouldąve seen this book.
> The name of the book was A Texan Looks at Lyndon. I came to know quite a
> number of Birchers in various contexts, some through church, some
> through groups my parents socialized with, some through my job as a
> journalist, but I didnąt know them as Birchers until I started
> connecting the dots.
> "They were a sneaky bunch, and mean, and at one time they ran the
> government in my hometown, and used their offices to preach against
> communism and socialism as though evil was right there at the city
> limits threatening to come in and take over. I never ran across a
> communist or socialist back then, so maybe the Birchers were successful
> I dunno. A little later, they tried to take over the entire Republican
> Party in the county where I lived by putting stealth candidates on the
> ballot for every position at the last minute. I guess they knew so much
> about communist infiltration that theyąd become experts at it. The ones
> Schmidt's plan ‹ Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a Birch Society
> offshoot that boasted some 50,000 members ‹ by arrangement with
> Heidelberg-born Major General Charles Willoughby, true name Weidenbach,
> a YAF founder, alleged by Dick Russell to be one of the central
> participants of the John F. Kennedy assassination.
> The coup plot was exposed when Warren Commission investigators
> happened upon Schmidt's role in the purchase of a newspaper ad ‹ framed
> with a thick, black border ‹ that ran in the Dallas Morning News the day
> Kennedy was shot, pronouncing the president guilty of treason for
> alleged diplomatic dalliances with the Russians (Russell, The Man Who
> Knew Too Much, pp. 320-24).
> The name Kennedy riled good Birchers everywhere. Ronald Reagan,
> president of the Screen Actors' Guild and FBI snitch, under secret
> contract with MCA management, emerging political star in Hollywood, was
> closer to the mark. After the 1964 presidential election, Democratic
> Party officials crafted a plan to take on right-wing extremists in the
> public arena, including one of Reagan's support groups, Citizens for
> Constitutional Action ‹ a conservative, grassroots organization that had
> backed Goldwater in his presidential run ‹ and thereby splinter the
> ‹ Mark Twain
> Buckleyąs God and Man at Yale, subtitled, The Superstitions of Academic
> Freedom. "In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books," SpritOne
> Information Services comments, "it is interesting to note that Regnery
> Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The
> reader is reminded to remember [the] point ... concerning the CIA and
> its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery, along with
> Bunker Hunt, funded Western Goals." Western Goals was a creation of the
> John Birch Society.
> In 1986, President Ronald Reagan "appointed Alfred Regnery to help
> dismantle the Justice Departmentąs Office of Juvenile Justice. In the
> 1990s, [Regnery] has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears (I
> would use the word 'books' but that would be a lie by any measure)
> attacking President Clinton. [A] direct linkage between the past
> pro-Nazi groups of the 1930s and todayąs right wing has been fully
> established" (http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930s.htm).
> Gary Allen, one of the foremost propagandists in the Bircher
> pantheon, was the author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a "'76 Press"
> productm, a Birch Society bible and a stunning success that has sold
> over four million copies, according to a publisher's blurb. Picture, if
> you will, the nation's corporate elite driving for a "Great Merger" with
> the Kremlin, and poisoning the entire world with Communism. This is
> among the central themes of The Rockefeller File (1976), Allen's
> critique of the most powerful family in the world, the dreaded CFR and
> the United World Federalists. At first glance, Allen's books may seem a
> confused clot of political fantasies. He claims that the Carnegie and
> Rockefeller money machines have "jumped into the financing of education
> and the social sciences with both Left feet" ‹ as though these
> Press" writers included the vigorously anti-EPA Phyllis Schlafly ‹ who,
> in 1960, hotly denied that she was a member of the Birch Society ...
> after Welch announced that she was "one of out most loyal members"
> (Carol Felsenthal, Phyllis Schlafly, Doubleday, 1981, p. xviii) ‹
> founder of the Eagle Forum. Then there was nuclear strategist Admiral
> Chester Ward, a former law school professor, architect and Naval Judge
> Advocate, commended by President Eisenhower for his courageous
> opposition to "the Communist conspiracy." (Felsenthal, p. 221).
> Antony Sutton has always been very concerned about who is funding who ‹
> yet it doesn't appear to sink in that the Birch Society is a front
> organization organized and funded with seed money from the same domestic
> fascists that supported Hitler before WW II. The same propaganda front
> that claimed the Rockefellers and Morgans to be closet communists and
> frightened the religion out of its many followers among the Boobocracy
> by claiming there is a massive conspiracy afoot to turn the U.S. into a
> Lenin-style Superstate.
> Sutton's approach to conspiracy genera was spliced with the
> anti-communist venom of Robert Welch and his theory of the "Hegelian
> Dialectic," the strategy of left-right tensions. He, Allen and
> millennialist Gary North frequently quoted each other in circular
> fashion. Sutton's racial views were certainly curious for one who wore
> his patriotism on his sleeve. He was an advocate of separation between
> the races in South Africa. His passages on the CFR and Illuminati flirt
> with anti-Semitism and echo the fiercely anti-communist sentiments of
> Skousen, Ward, Allen, Dan Smoot and other proponents of the fascist
> right. Sutton, who publishes a newsletter, The Future Technology
> Intelligence Report, contends that "possible advanced alien technology"
> has been reverse-engineered and is squandered by the federal government.
> (The "reverse engineering of ET technology" schtick was first whistled
> up by Phillip Corso ‹ in the 1960s a charter member, under Charles
> intense‹especially when talking about the Communist Conspiracy, which
> was practically the only thing they talked about."
> The world certainly seemed to be going to the dogs. Thanks so much,
> communist conspirators.
> General Albert Wedemeyer, a guest on the Manion Forum, a radio
> program hosted by Clarence Manion of the Birch Society's national
> council, claimed the seeds for the advancing Red Tide were planted when
> Roosevelt entered the war against the Axis: "The Soviet colossus would
> not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war ‹
> at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other."
> (A realistic expectation? One side, perhaps the Germans, would have
> prevailed, or so some pre-war "isolationists" hoped.) "But Franklin D.
> Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy, was as successful as
> any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in
> ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which
> flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had re-elected him
> only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war"
> ("Historical News and Comment," Journal of Historical Review, undated,
> vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 495-499).
> But a social backlash against the antics of the "Yahoos" was
> mounting. In 1965, a group of moderate Republican governors met with the
> Party's coordinating committee to urge a statement denouncing the John
> Birch Society. On December 24, the New York Times reported that the
> committee voted in the interest of party unity to adopt a "diplomatic
> resolution." The GOP would "reject membership in any radical or
> extremist organization ... which seeks to undermine the basic principals
> of American freedom and constitutional government." Former House
> Representative John Rousselot, a Christian Scientist ‹ also the John
> Birch Society's national director of public relations ‹ told the press
> that the resolution meant communists and the KKK would be denied access
> to the Republican Party, but not members of the Birch Society.
> The GOP, after all, had scores of Birchers in the ranks, and many
> of them were "high-minded" loyalists to the Party. Why, the JB Society
> bestowed awards on policemen who acted heroically in the line of duty.
> This endeared police officers around the country to the front
> organization. A reporter in New York noticed that most of those
> attending one Birch Society rally sported "Police Benevolent
> Association" badges. Well-known law enforcement officials were drawn to
> Society-sponsored media events, including L.A. Police Chief Willam
> Parker, who turned up for an interview on the Manion Forum. In 1966,
> Sheriff James Clark ‹ a Bircher who found fame for his resistance to the
> civil rights movement ‹ was voted president of the national sheriff's
> on the military ‹ but they are anxious for the military to engage in
> steady gain of communism ‹ of the millions killed, tortured and enslaved
Alex Constantine
> Put a sock in it. Your ideas are baloney, no matter how many idiotic
> quotes
> you muster.
Christopher: The article is factual and has no "ideas" in it. The
"baloney" quotes are from George Seldes, Dick Russell and other
reputable journalists. On the other hand, your "astroastrology" posts
are pure troll baloney, and your "ideas" are completely self-indulgent
and schizophrenic is expression. ‹ Alex