The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fascist Templars of the Corporate State part 1 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, 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. These secret police utilized a computer dossier system purchased by the late Representative Larry McDonald's Western Goals, the intelligence 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 (who 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 are such Cold Warriors as 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), recalls 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 America�s entry into the war, John Birch volunteered to join General Claire Chennault�s 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 a candy company in Massachusetts. Robert 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 director of the National Association of Manufacturers, the subject of many an essay from George Seldes, published in his anti-fascist newsletter, Facts and Fascism. Seldes found NAM, in the 1950s, to be a hive of reactionary corporate intrigues. The Birch Society's Web site opines 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. 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 a 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.'" And 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 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 gilded shahs. 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 "imperialism" 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 DoD for distributing Birch Society material to his troops. He was temporarily relieved of command pending 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 slipped into a number of footnotes in Camelot history. Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly attempted to kill him, and the general once made a bid for the White House 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, the 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). General Walker loudly proclaimed 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). End of Part 1
