[Correction to Part 3: Shickshinny is in Pennsylvania, not New York State, as stated.] ��������������������������������� The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fascist Templars of the Corporate State Part 5 By Alex Constantine "I am opposed to the secret government which infringes upon the public interest � which holds up vital legislation needed by the public and by union members, as a result of secret decisions secretly reached." � John F. Kennedy, (New York Times, July 30, 1958) The world certainly seemed to be going to the dogs. Thanks so much, communist conspirators. Albert Wedemeyer, a guest on the Manion Forum, a radio program hosted by Clarence Manion of the Birch Society's national council, claimed the seeds for the advancing Red Tide were planted when Roosevelt entered the war against the Axis: "The Soviet colossus would not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war � at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other." (A realistic expectation? One side, perhaps the Germans, would have prevailed, or so some pre-war "isolationists" hoped.) "But Franklin D. Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy, was as successful as any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had re-elected him only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war" ("Historical News and Comment," Journal of Historical Review, undated, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 495-499). But a social backlash against the antics of the "Yahoos" was mounting. In 1965, a group of moderate Republican governors met with the Party's coordinating committee to urge a statement denouncing the John Birch Society. On December 24, the New York Times reported that the committee voted in the interest of party unity to adopt a "diplomatic resolution." The GOP would "reject membership in any radical or extremist organization ... which seeks to undermine the basic principals of American freedom and constitutional government." Former House Representative John Rousselot, a Christian Scientist � also the John Birch Society's national director of public relations � told the press that the resolution meant communists and the KKK would be denied access to the Republican Party, but not members of the Birch Society. The GOP, after all, had scores of Birchers in the ranks, and many of them were "high-minded" loyalists to the Party. Why, the JB Society bestowed awards on policemen who acted heroically in the line of duty. This endeared police officers around the country to the front organization. A reporter in New York noticed that most of those attending one Birch Society rally sported "Police Benevolent Association" badges. Well-known law enforcement officials were drawn to Society-sponsored media events, including L.A. Police Chief Willam Parker, who turned up for an interview on the Manion Forum. In 1966, Sheriff James Clark � a Bircher who found fame for his resistance to the civil rights movement � was voted president of the national shefriff's organization by the rank-and-file. (Seymour-Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 317-18). Not publicized were the lives they led behind the hoopla. General Walker, for example, one of the most visible of Birchers, kept up his relationship with Gerhard Frey back in Germany. Walker phoned Frey's newspaper after Oswald was identified as the poor marksman who fired four shots through his window. Frey was the publisher of the Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung. Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany mentions that Frey's weekly newspaper "has become a central organ of all ultra-right neo-fascist forces in West Germany and defames each and every movement advocating a realistic policy. Thus von der Heydte, SS man and parachute officer of the nazi Wehrmacht, called for long sentences of penal servitude for 'renunciation politicians,' meaning those forces striving for normal relations with the neighboring peoples in the east and south-east of Europe. This paper advocates with peculiar zeal a general amnesty for nazi and war criminals." Frey's sheet applauded the acquittal of Erich Deppner, an SS storm trooper who ordered the murder of 65 Russian prisoners, a "turning point in the trials of war criminals" (Brown Book, p. 338-39). Another prominent Bircher with a secret life was Edward Hunter, the CIA mind control operative who coined the word "brainwashing" back in 1950. The word quickly, John Marks observed in The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, "became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines." Hunter, an OSS veteran and CIA propagandist employed as a "journalist," wrote scores of books and articles on this emerging science of mind manipulation. His many readers responded with outrage at the communist menace he detailed in his articles, and its insidious mind control tactics. The enemy had developed methods "to put a man's mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue," Hunter reported, "what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator" (pp. 125-26). The country's elected representatives had no choice but to allow the Agency to conduct its own inhumane experiments on unconsenting human subjects. There was, however, no brainwash like Birch Society brainwash. In 1962, Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government exposed as fronts for international Bolshevism a number of policy groups. Democracy was teetering. Smoot had unearthed the enemies in out midst: the Committee for Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council (formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory Council and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot, incidentally, reported to FBI headquarters in Washington before he was bitten by the bug to publish his neo-fascist newsletter, The Dan Smoot Report. "Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government," he wrote, "are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship under the control of the Kremlin" (Political Research Associates, "John Birch Society.") End of Part 5
