Posted on 03/22/2006 7:26:16 AM PST by sinkspur
Who says time travel isn't possible?
I got a bona fide '60s flashback last week when I attended a meeting of the John Birch Society.
Remember them?
Frankly, I was astonished to learn the Birch Society still exists. Shouldn't it have crumbled along with the Berlin Wall?
For those too young to remember, the Birch Society was one of many groups fighting the global menace of communism.
But of all the patriots standing foursquare against communism, the Birchers were always the ones in tin-foil hats.
Or so it seemed. Bless their hearts, they were sort of the kooky cousins of anti-communism – the folks who never met a conspiracy theory they didn't bite.
And sure enough, last week's meeting had barely started before there was a sneering reference to the Council on Foreign Relations.
I got a nostalgic little shiver. How cute! They still hate the CFR.
You know in the cartoons how the Super Friends always battled the evil Legion of Doom?
Well, for Birchers, the starchy Council on Foreign Relations is the Legion of Doom. It's part of the nefarious "invisible government" that really runs the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
We're the folks who would be social without security, .
We're Barry's Boys..
Now his hat's in the ring, where Westbrook Pegler once was king.
Now he's too left-wing..
So, if you don't want to recognize that old Red China,.
Or Canada, or Britain, or South Carolina, .
You, too, can join the crew. Tippecanoe and Nixon, too..
Back to Barry, back to cash and carry,
Back with Barry's Boys.
sorry, wikipedia won't do it.....wikipedia is as likely to be false and misleading as it is to be right and forthright.
Wikipedia is little more than a free-for-all blog.....
I won't expect an apology, but would appreciate you striking my name from your list of known Communist conspirators.
why did you find it necessary to rack on a sentence YOU wrote onto what I wrote, and then comment on the sum?
I wrote this:
Get U.S. Out of the UN!" is more valid today than it was back in the 60's.
the rest is yours.
The fish don't know they're wet, that's why!
Because right wing screwballs are screwballs non-the-less.
I meant to put the other quotation mark at the end of your sentence which would have been repeating what you said. I agree with your words.
Actually that is not true. It's a good idea to take whatever you read on Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but that is true of everything one reads. At least Wikipedia has procedures for ensuring that false statements can be corrected.
In the statement I quoted, they stated specifically where Robert W. Welch called Eisenhower a communist. You can consult this book yourself and find out whether this is true.
Furthermore the article mentions that William F, Buckley, Jr. criticized the accusations of Welch. Buckley is not an unknown person and it would be easy for you to determine whether he said these things. So you can see that Wikipedia has provided information that allows you to focus your research.
I don't care what somebody else is supposed to have said about what JBS is supposed to have said....
I asked for proof that JBS said it!
Nothing yet.
Some Light reading;
Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.- Karl Marx
Among other "groups" like this.
It sure puts a lot of the posts on some of these threads into perspective, doesn't it?
The downside to any centrally controlled organization is that when the leadership goes off on a tangent, it is difficult to be a dissenter. If you are lobbying for veterans' rights, administering children's hospitals, or distributing Bibles to hotels and schools, it is relatively easy to stay on task. Because politics is not focused on a single issue, staying on task is more difficult.
Robert Welch and his associates began going off track in the early 1960s, between their earlier anti-Communism and their later anti-"Conspiracy" beliefs. They noted, and correctly so, that liberals like Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller had many of the same goals as Marxists: centralized power, radical egalitarianism, support for international government over national sovereignty, and a cradle to grave welfare state. They also correctly believed there were financial and business links between Communists and very wealthy Americans and Europeans. These dealings were documented by the former Hoover Institute historian Antony Sutton in several books in the 1970s.
Robert Welch, Gary Allen (author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy) and others made the assumption that since there was philosophical common ground between modern liberalism and Communism and much evidence of commercial connections, there must also be an organizational linkage. Welch and Allen drew heavily from the writings of Nesta Webster, an early 20th Century British author who was a favorite of British and Continental fascists. They kept her central theme of a secret elite society dating from the 1700s with the goal of world domination. However, they gleaned out the anti-Semitic elements in her writings.
Welch and his associates never found a "Joe Valachi" who could tie all the groups together. At best they had a few statements by the historian Carroll Quigley, the reading of which he disputed, and some quotes attributed to various famous people, like Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Kennedy. However, the Birch Society leadership decided that the "Conspiracy" message was so important that it outweighed the "nuts and bolts" issues like socialized medicine, Federal regulation of private business, appeasement of the Soviets, etc. They opposed these matters, to be sure, but their literature invariably incorporated their core belief that the "Conspiracy" was behind all of them.
That insistence on pushing conspiracy theory was the Birch Society's undoing. The tight command structure, while it did weed out racists and anti-Semites, also imposed a sort of group think on the members. That pattern, combined with an unprovable conspiracy theory regarded as "fringe" by most other conservatives, inhibited the recruitment necessary to fill the ranks to replace "burned out" members.
In the early 1960s, Robert Welch wrote a tract called "The Neutralizers", where he condemned the sort of tangentalism, such as single issue advocacy and millennialism, that neutralized political activists. The irony is that Welch's conspiracy theories were themselves neutralizers.
Prepare to be surprised:
Republican mainstream unhappiness with the Birch Society intensified after Welch circulated a letter calling President Dwight D. Eisenhower a possible “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” Welch went further in a book titled The Politician, written in 1956 and published by the JBS in 1963, which declared that Eisenhower’s brother Milton was Ike’s superior within the Communist apparatus and alleging that other top government officials were also Communist tools.
P.S.
check post 78.....you can see right there that somebody nefariously attributed his own words to me.
to wit:
"Of course, now that Bolton is there everything will be just so soft and comfy for the BushBot FReepers."
(tacked on to the end of what I DID say)
Whoa...Harry flashback!
In other words, I've scratched many Birchers on FR and their comeback is always "The JOOOOOS are to blame."
Thanks for the post.
I still have my grandpop's "Blue Book of the John Birch Society" from 1959. It is a real jaw dropper, especially from the perpective of 2006. It is an amazing read. Having grown up in an era where we had regular, "A-Bomb-get-under-the-desk drills" in elementary school, it is understandable where the JBS was coming from in those days, especially in an ominous cold war atmosphere.
I don't know what they are doing today.
"Prepare to be surprised:"
why am I not surprised that THIS time its a letter, and the BOOK statement now changes to "Milty"?
Maybe you could explain.
Look......calling Ike a commie is absolutely incongruent with everything JBS the organization has stood for all these years, as well as the history of IKE himself.
C'mon, dearest, fluat me an email that puts words into somebodys mouth and I might believe it.....but an organization? don't think so.
I often heard growing up that the JBS people were extreme cases, but I figured that might be liberal exaggerations. A few years ago the JBS set up a booth at a large gun show in Houston. I examined their literature and easily decided they are certifiably nuts.
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