The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fasist Templars of the Corporate State Part 3 The John Birch Solon "There must be two Americas ..." ‹ Mark Twain JB Society leader Thomas Anderson, a hardened advocate of racial segregation, gave the game away when he griped 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? Of critical importance to the anti-communist wars of the Birch Society was Welch's relationship with the 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. decamped, 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 assets 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. The country's parishes evidently swarmed with spies and dupes bent on destroying democracy. 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 about the conspiracy, an alternate universe of extreme right-wing briefings. Medford Evans, former editor of the National Review and the Birch Society's Texas coordinator, published a Hitlerian tour-de-force in Human Events magazine (January 26, 1957): "Why I Am an Anti-Intellectual." 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 period, 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 put out a couple of tracts for the John Birch Society. The nascent publishing concern also printed up William F. Buckley¹s 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." A reminder: Western Goals was a creation of the John Birch Society. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan "appointed Alfred Regnery to help dismantle the Justice Department¹s 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 today¹s 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 Soviet bloc, 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 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 and a "Patriot," 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). And so on. 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 the internal saboteurs and dupes, "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 ‹ 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), and founded 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. The government, Sutton confides, under the influence of international bankers, have kept the lid on machines that produce free energy and "acoustical levitation." 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 echoed by the Phillip Corso ‹ in the 1960s a charter member, under Charles Willoughby, the aforementioned YAF co-founder, of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta in New York State, a fraternal order patterned after the military order of the Vatican. The YAF, of course, was organized by the Birch Society.) End of Part 3
