WHO ARE THOSE GUYS - The John Birch Society

I would not have gotten along with Mr. John Morrison Birch.  Probably, whatever your politics, neither would you.  One of his college professors described Birch as “a one-way valve; everything coming out and no room to take anything in”. Honestly I think the odds were pretty good that eventually somebody somewhere was going to shoot him for shooting off his mouth.  Politics had almost nothing to do with it.  It just so happened that John Birch was a human bull who finally met his china shop on a road in northern China, and that the hot head who pulled the trigger happened to have been a communist. It was just as likely the shooter would have been a Methodist or a Mormon, or even a pacifist.  He was human tick, an irritant. An annoying loudmouthed fool who eventually drove everyone who knew him, to want him dead.

“Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight. You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right. Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft. But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left. Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society. Here to save our country from a communistic plot. Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks. To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.” (lyrics and music by Michael Brown) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG6taS9R1KM

His commanding officer in the forerunner of the CIA, Major Gustav Krause, described the situation rather simply; “Militarily, John Birch brought about his own death.” Birch was a life long missionary on a military mission on 25 August, 1945, when he and a few other people ran into a patrol of Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army.  The commander asked Birch to hand over his revolver, and, surrounded by nervous soldiers, the other members of the group handed over their weapons. Birch decided to argue about it.  Eventually, embarrassed, frustrated and pissed off, the officer shot him. The other people were held for a few hours and then released unharmed. But the role of the missed opportunity for the application of common sense in John Birch's death did not stop candy-king Robert Welch from building an elaborate conspiracy theory around Birch’s death,

Welch, who never met John Birch, saw Birch as the first hero of the war against the international communist plan for world domination. Welch's vision of Birch as a hero evolved until it became a virtual black hole of paranoia and invective that eventually sucked into it everything Welch came in contact with, including the Republican Party, tooth decay, the Republican President and American hero Dwight David Eisenhower –whom Welch accused of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy” - and, believe it or not, the entire state of Alaska.

I’m not kidding about the Alaska thing. Conservative deity William F. Buckley even mentioned it in a column posthumously published in March of 2008, entitled “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.”  In discussing how to distance conservatism from the John Birch Society, Buckley described Welch's belief that "the state of Alaska was being prepared to house anyone who doubted his doctrine that fluoridated water was a Communist-backed plot to weaken the minds of the American public.” I guess Alaska was supposed to be the new Texas.

The John Birch Society is and was part of a long line of paranoia  that stains the American psyche, from the anti-French and anti-Irish ‘Alien and Sedition Acts’ of 1798, through the “Order of United Americans”, the “Know Nothing Party”, the Immigration Restriction League, the anarchists scare, the “Yellow Peril”, the imaginary Pearl Harbor betrayal, the Black helicopters hiding in our national parks, the militia movement and the mythical bombs planted in the twin towers on 9/11. In fact the John Birch Society cemented all that lunacy together on a firm foundation of anti-Semitism and white supremacy. And this legacy of lunacy and head-up-your-exclusion-duct thinking officially began in Indianapolis on 9 December, 1958.

Robert Welch organized and financed that meeting. He could afford to do that because a fortune by selling “Sugar Babies”, “Junior Mints” and “Pom Poms” to children. And that wealth built on the little holes in children's teeth gave Welch the authority to lecture to 12 true believers for two days straight, about the worldwide communist conspiracy to steal Welch's millions by inventing the myth that fluoride prevents tooth decay, much in the same way that "liberal environmentalists" have invented the myth of global warming to steal the Koch brothers billions.. 

That day in Indianapolis, Welch spewed out such run-on gems of wisdom as, “When Woodrow Wilson, cajoled and guided...by the collectivists of Europe, took us into the First World War, while solemnly swearing that he would never do so, he did much more than end America's great period of happy and wholesome independence of Europe. He put his healthy young country in the same house, and for a while in the same bed, with this parent who was already yielding to the collectivist cancer. We never got out of that house again. We were once more put back even in the same bed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, also while lying in his teeth about his intentions, and we have never been able to get out of that bed since.”  You might notice a disturbing repetition of bed and parent analogies throughout Welch’s theology, whether the parents and commies are in the bed or under the bed, alone in the bed or sharing the bed, there are a lot of beds and parents and Commies. And cancer - he refers to cancer a lot.

Warned, Mr Welch, “…both the U.S. 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 U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'” Did I mention that the John Birch Society was anti-Semitic?  Ayn Rand, no Semitic lover herself, complained, “What is wrong with them (the JBS) is that they don't seem to have any specific, clearly defined political philosophy.”  She might have been talking about the Tea Party, who, in fact, were encouraged and funded by the JBS - or Donald Trump., whose politics are a sort of slow thinking man’s Klu Klux Klan, while the KKK remains a sort of the idiot's version of  the John Birch Society.

In 1966 the New York Times described the John Birch Society as “…the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country”, which, if you think about it, is the equivalent of being named Miss Congeniality in a mental institution -  she even brings smiles to the invisible people.  Robert Welch died in 1985 and his creation is now watched over by the Koch brothers, whose father Fred attended the very first meeting of the Society.  He funded the group for many years. Each year the John Birch Society continues to produce cadres of indoctrinated Johnny Apple Seeds like Steve Bannon,  planting fear and ignorance in every dark nook and cranny where it might take root – sort of like tooth decay.  And they have now taken over the entire Republican Party.

But the thing about Johnny Appleseed was that the all the apples which grew from his seeds were sour. Edible apples are possible only through a science of grafting – but then the John Birch Society never believed much in science - too many Jews.  Sounds like the Republican party today, doesn't it?

- 30 -