John Birch Society

This is a link to an article on HuffPo by Andrew Reinbach entitled The John Birch Society's Reality.

It's pretty scary stuff. Barry Goldwater considered the JBS too extreme; William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative icon, effectively pushed them to the political sidelines with an article in The National Review pronouncing them beyond the pale.

JBS founder Robert W. Welch Jr. published an essay in 1996 entitled The Truth in Time, which enunciated the society's principles, and it's a frightening mishmash of far-right paranoia that is becoming increasingly mainstream conservative thought today.

The article linked above contains a 110-minute video of Welch presenting his ideas (I don't think that's going to get too many viewers). But he also presents a short summary of The Truth in Time that is instructive.

"The one great job left for the Communists is the subjugation of the people of the United States," wrote Welch. "So their exhaustive strategy for achieving their final goal includes the following methods.

(a) The deliberate and insidious breaking down of all morality and of every sound sense of values;

(b) the distortion and destruction of religious influences, especially on the lives of the young;

(c) the constant indoctrination of young and old alike, through our educational system, and through our communications and entertainment media, in a preference for "welfare" and "security" against responsibility and opportunity;

(d) making an ever larger and larger percentage of American industry, commerce, agriculture, education, and individuals accustomed to receiving, and dependent on, government checks;

(e) a constant increase in legislation, taxation, and bureaucracy, leading directly towards one hundred percent government;

(f) the gradual conversion by judicial fiat of our republic into a democracy, as the one best legalistic road to a mobocratic dictatorship;

(g) the creation of riots and the semblance of revolution under the guise and excuse of promoting "civil rights";

(h) developing this "Negro Revolutionary Movement," as the Communists describe it, into a broader "proletarian revolution" of the "have-nots" against the "haves";

(i) destroying the power of local police forces to preserve law and order;

(j) carrying on and steadily "escalating" a completely phony foreign war in Vietnam (because the Communists are actually running both sides of it), as an excuse for gradually establishing more and tighter government controls over every detail of our dally lives;

(k) under carefully contrived conditions of famine and the threat of starvation, using ration cards as leverage to bribe and coerce the heads of families to submit to a Communist regime....

(1), eventually bringing about "peace" -- a few years from now -- by surrendering all remaining American sovereignty to the United Nations, and enabling that Communist one-world government to "police" our country with foreign troops and mercilessly suppress all opposition, with exactly the same cruelties and terror that have already been used in dozens of other countries.

The summary is a wild rant that explains a lot of present-day wingnuttery, culminating with this little gem:

"Most important of all of these gigantic reversals of the truth, in the realm of strategy, has been the cruel pretense, all over the world and to the American people, that the United States was the one great enemy of Communism. The fact has been exactly the opposite. Since early in 1945 the most powerful single force in promoting Communism everywhere, and in turning one nation after another over to Communist tyranny... has been the help of the United States Government to that end."

As Reinbach says, "Bet you didn't know that."