The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fascist Templars of the Corporate State Part 4 By Alex Constantine Hey, Hey, JFK ‹ How Many Birchers Gunned You Down Today? Guy Bannister, a Birch Society pamphleteer (High Times, September, 1991), was Lee Harvey Oswald's "handler" at 544 Camp Street. Bannister employed an investigator, Jack S. Martin, a co-conspirator with his boss and Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach, the man who arranged the bombing of Pearl Harbor (according to Charles Higham, the best-selling biographer in the country, in American Swastika), went on to an assignment as General MacArthur's intelligence chief in Korea, and YAF official (with William F. Buckley of the CIA) at Birch Society behest, in the Kennedy assassination, say Mae Brussell, Dick Russell and others. Bannister was a drunkard, a former FBI agent and Naval Intelligence officer. He published a racist newsletter. He choreographed the activities of a group of anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He died nine months after the murder of John Kennedy. Jim Garrison investigated Oswald's connection to Bannister and CIA pilot David Ferrie. The devout, alcoholic anti-communist had Oswald passing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers on street corners. What, I wonder, would Bannister and his fellow Birchers say if they could speak openly, without the Jeffersonian platitudes and shaggy-dog tales? In a privately published paper about Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach ("Looking for 'Hate' in all the 'Right' Places"), political researcher William Morris McLoughlin can't resist speaking for them: "We have been sitting on our hands and 'gnawing the rug' since 1945, when, as far as we are concerned, World War III actually began, with the murder of our hero, John Birch in manchuria, China" The war has been waged "entirely by members of various national and international right-wing, militantly extremist groups still united under the auspices and control of the World Anti-Communist League. Its U.S. affiliates include the U.S. Council for World Freedom and the American Security Council, part of the Liberty Lobby, as well as other organizations," including the Birch Society . The JBS waged its grass-roots, even populist approach to the war with much scape-goating. In The Radical Right (Random House, 1967), Epstein and Arnold offer that at the 1965 convention of the Christian Crusade, another fascist front, General Walker, "in speaking of the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin, urged his listeners not to forget that Ruby's name was Rubenstein, and they can't change that fact no matter how often they refer to him as Ruby." Overall, Generalissimo Robert Welch tried to keep the race question out of the discussion. He insisted alsways that the enemy was the left, not the Jews. Nevertheless, there was no holding back the anti-semitism that many JBS members, cryptically or not, felt the need to convey. There was, for instance, Florida Bircher Bernard "Ben" Klassen, author of The White Man's Bible. And William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, cut his ideological teeth as a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society. Pierce left the Birch Society to shift the thrust of his "research" to the "international Jewish conspiracy," the very source, he maintained, of communism, the true Insiders behind the Insiders. (Pierce, "Enemies on the Right," National Vanguard Magazine, August 1996). Pierce: "One thing I am grateful to the Birch Society for is that it directed me to a number of books on Communism, and from those books I learned enough about the nature and background of Communism that I knew I wanted to learn much more. That was really the beginning of my education: the start of my quest for understanding about history, race, politics, and, in fact, nearly everything except the physics and mathematics to which I had devoted myself until that time. The half-dozen or so other members of the chapter seemed to be decent enough, if not very stimulating, fellows. The term that best characterizes them is 'middle class.' They were pretty much the sort one can meet in any American Legion hall, except they were a little more intense‹especially when talking about the Communist Conspiracy, which was practically the only thing they talked about." End of Part 4
