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OK Eastbound...I understand now. ANYTHING which differs from your personal political preferences is what you consider "Communist", "socialist" "liberal" or "leftist".

In your scheme of things, Americans have only SINGLE options from which to choose, and those single options just happen to conform to what you currently believe.

Are you familiar with Albert Canwell? He was the first Chairman of the Washington State UnAmerican Activities Committee. He was an ardent supporter of Sen. Joe McCarthy and, in later years, he was a speaker for the Birch Society's American Opinion Speakers Bureau plus wrote articles for American Opinion at the specific request of its editor, Scott Stanley.

I am copying below an excerpt from Canwell's Oral Interview about his career which can be found online at:

http://www.secstate.wa.gov/oralhistory/canwell.pdf

Since you are anti-socialist and anti-Communist and anti-leftist, let's see if you agree with Canwell's assessment of Robert Welch?

Mr. Canwell: The issues were that Robert Welch was not an anti-Communist. He was an opportunist, a world socialist actually, and he was doing a very dishonest job. He would gather some very fine people about him. He was a member of the National Manufacturers Association. So he sold them the idea that he was anti-Communist and that he had this program going and then he got quite a number of them to join his group. But what he was actually doing was getting people who were well identified as anti-Communist and able Americans, he’d get them to go along in his society and then he would smear them, destroy them. And that was what his object was.

Mr. Frederick: Why was he doing that?

Mr. Canwell: Because he was an international socialist. I went to work in looking into his background when I began to have trouble with him. And I found that he had attended the London School of Economics, the top socialist school in the world. It became very obvious to me that he was able to acquire this leadership position by moving into the anti-Communist movement and pretending to be something that he was not. And then some of his own kind of people helped him do that: Drew Pearson, and others, who all of
a sudden were attacking Robert Welch and giving him reams of free publicity. And the so-called Americans or anti-Communists thought, “Well, if Drew Pearson is against him, he must be all right.” Actually Pearson and Welch were hand-in-glove.

Another phase of this that I turned up was that Robert Welch was a long-time member of the American Civil Liberties Union, which would and did surprise a lot of people when I released that information. They denied it and he eventually made the statement that he belonged merely to get their publications, but that wasn’t the case. There was friction on that level....

...They got Westbrook Pegler to write for them for awhile and then they started the damnedest smear on him that you could imagine. I could see the pattern and I became acquainted with some of the national members of his board, Dan Draskovich and others, and Welch did the same thing to all of them. He’d get them to identify with the Birch Society either on the speakers bureau or on their board or on the writing level and then he’d circulate information about them, derogatory information that was damaging to them. You talk about a sophisticated espionage operation, that was it. I would say that ninety percent, ninety-five percent of the Birch Society members were just downright good Americans, nothing wrong with them at all.

Mr. Frederick: Was he a head case?

Mr. Canwell: A head case? I don’t know. I suspected that he was on drugs, and I say that from having observed him in two or three meetings where he was talking and he’d leave the meeting and take some pills. I don’t know what kind or what for but I suspected that might be the case.

Are these international socialists psychopathic or what? You know they just aren’t pro-Americans. They aren’t supportive of our system. This is all news to you, I imagine. You may think I’m psychotic, but on this I’m not. I have correspondence. I told him that because of his activity he couldn’t get his name in the paper any more and that I was going to put him back on the front page. But I just didn’t have time to work on him properly.