If the JBS is a front group for the Judeophobic European right, I don't believe it started out that way. The JBS seems to have been founder Robert Welch's own idea and I see no evidence that he was part of any anti-Semitic movement.
In The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1959) which is essentially a transcript of the two-day presentation that he gave in which he set up the organization, Welch urges Christians to be better Christians, Jews to be better Jews and Moslems to be better Moslems. During the years I was a member, I collected Birch publications and never read anything Judeophobic in any of them. Judeophobes were quickly purged, as was a prominent writer for their house organ American Opinion after he made an anti-Jewish speech in 1966.
However, it seems that Judeophobes infiltrated the organization, but I wouldn't know how deep they penetrated. Several of their American Opinion bookstores carried books by the British fascist Nesta Webster. One chapter chairman in Europe that I knew was a fan of hers and defended her when I complained about the rabid Judeophobia that she expressed in her book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).
However, in 1968, the JBS publishing house Western Islands published The Suicide of Europe by Michael Sturdza, a prominent Romanian fascist, which tells the story of World War II from a fascist point of view. Some of the statements in this book are eye-opening, such as when he takes at face value the Nazi description of the killing of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by the Jewish refugee Herschel Grynszpan, which touched off the Reichskristallnacht pogrom in 1938.
However, what eventually turned me off to the JBS were the silly "master conspiracy" theories that it was promoting and still does, and I left after five years.
See below.
In The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1959) which is essentially a transcript of the two-day presentation that he gave in which he set up the organization, Welch urges Christians to be better Christians, Jews to be better Jews and Moslems to be better Moslems. During the years I was a member, I collected Birch publications and never read anything Judeophobic in any of them. Judeophobes were quickly purged, as was a prominent writer for their house organ American Opinion after he made an anti-Jewish speech in 1966.
The writer you mention was Revilo P. Oliver who was one of the eleven men who with Welch founded the Society on December 9, 1958. Yes, he was expelled, but you're missing the point . . . he took some people with him. Through him the JBS exposed people who had never had an anti-Semitic thought in their heads to the "Jewish international bankers run Communism" theory. Willis Carto was also a member at one time, as were many out-and-out neo-nazi leaders. Ben Klaassen, who hated G-d and the Bible with a passion and who railed against it as "alien" to the white race, started out in the Society and was kicked out. But all these people took others with them.
However, it seems that Judeophobes infiltrated the organization, but I wouldn't know how deep they penetrated. Several of their American Opinion bookstores carried books by the British fascist Nesta Webster. One chapter chairman in Europe that I knew was a fan of hers and defended her when I complained about the rabid Judeophobia that she expressed in her book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).
Perhaps you are unaware that Welch himself approved the printing of Nesta Webster's evil poison and characterized them as "splendid sources." Furthermore, the issues sold by Western Islands ("western" as in "European Man") were actually illegal pirate editions because the people who held the legal copyright at the time were out-and-out Nazis. So they sold illegal copies of anti-Semitic works without letting them actually carry the publishing mark of the people who actually owned them! What do you think of Robert Welch now?
However, in 1968, the JBS publishing house Western Islands published The Suicide of Europe by Michael Sturdza, a prominent Romanian fascist, which tells the story of World War II from a fascist point of view. Some of the statements in this book are eye-opening, such as when he takes at face value the Nazi description of the killing of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by the Jewish refugee Herschel Grynszpan, which touched off the Reichskristallnacht pogrom in 1938.
That wasn't the only book of his they carried. Another was Betrayal by Rulers (he also wrote Teddy Bare under the pseudonym "Zad Rust"). One of these books begins with a blatantly anti-Israel chapter on the battlefields of "palestine" and the Rockefellers. The Sturdza stuff angered me more than anything else. And Welch was in total control back then.
However, what eventually turned me off to the JBS were the silly "master conspiracy" theories that it was promoting and still does, and I left after five years.
The conspiracy theory of history ultimately originates from the chrstian notion of an good G-d of Heaven and His war against an alleged evil "'gxd' of this world" (though I'm sure chrstianity did not originate this concept). Some Jews believe in this "master conspiracy" and belief in it is far less offensive than the promoting the evil works of Webster and Sturdza.
Anyway, thank you for sharing you experience in the Birch Society. I left after four years myself.