The Piper

The Barnes Review
A Journal of Nationalist Thought & History

Volume XI Number 4........July/August 2005.......www.barnesreview.org

P. 50. JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY EXPOSED? Michael Collins Piper
In this highly controversial article, the author tells of his "membership" in the John Birch Society, perhaps the shortest "membership" on record, since it only took him a matter of minutes to realize that something seemed to be seriously amiss with the patriotic group...

My 'One-Minute' Membership In the
John Birch Society

In what is sure to be one of TBR's most controversial articles ever, an American nationalist reflects on his experiences with the John Birch Society and his increasing doubts about its effectiveness as a voice for independent-minded American patriots.

By Michael Collins Piper

Many questions about the John Birch Society (JBS) have passed through my own mind since I first became aware of the existence of the JBS when I was a 16-year-old high school student. Honestly, I'm fully aware that there will be many good people who will be utterly inflamed by my remarks, but let's let the chips fall where they may.

My first awareness of the JBS came at a time when I was becoming embroiled, for better or worse, in political affairs. Having pretty much determined (on my own, with no input from friends or family) that I was some sort of "conservative," I quickly began the process of trying to learn as much as I could about various "right wing" political organizations.

That led me to my local libraries, where I savored all the standard conservative writings that were available. However, I did not restrict my reading to literature that reflected my own point of view. Always open-minded, I was curious to see what "the other side" had to say.

As a consequence of that, I zipped through a wide variety of volumes coming from what might be described as the "liberal-left," and I continually came across references to a mysterious and controversial 'John Birch Society" and its founder, Robert Welch. In my own mind, I said, "If the liberals consider the JBS and its founder to be to be so bad, then they must be pretty good."

No sooner had I made up my mind to try to find the address and contact the JBS than there — lo and behold — in my own local public library — I spotted a copy of the JBS publication, American opinion, sitting right on the shelf, side-by-side with so-called mainstream publications.

At that moment — having only had a JBS publication in my hand for the first time ever, for less than several minutes, in fact — I realized that something here was very much amiss.

With great excitement, I began leafing through the professionally produced JBS journal, thrilled to have access to the "forbidden" facts and "hidden" information that I just knew I couldn't get from Time or Newsweek or even in the pages of the conservative weekly U.S. News & World Report.

That particular issue of American Opinion had a chart that captured my attention. It was an overview — country by country — of "communist influence" (by percentage) in the various countries of the world.

I knew, of course, that communists were in control of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and that they also had widespread influence throughout the rest of the West. I was acutely aware that communist influence, in one form or another, had gained a toehold in my own United States of America.

However, I was surprised to see that, according to the JBS, communist strength in America was far more powerful than I would have estimated. I don't recall the exact percentage, but I recall that it was extraordinarily high.

'Thank God," I thought, as I studied the chart, "that there are a few countries, such as Argentina and Chile, that are in the hands of anti-communist military leaders." But when I turned to those two republics, I found that the JBS listed communist influence there to be in the range of 70 to 90 percent. I was startled, needless to say. "Maybe they know something I don't know," I thought. I continued to read on.

Next I turned to the state of Israel. Based on my own earlier research. I knew that Israel's economy was based on a strictly socialist model, funded by billions in U.S. tax dollars. In addition, I was also aware of the predominant influence of Russian and Eastern European Jews in the worldwide communist movement and knew that many Jews of a Marxist bent had been involved in establishing the Jewish state. What's more, I also knew that not only had Israel been strategically assisted, in its founding years, with arms and support from the communist bloc, but also that tiny Israel was the only nation in the Middle East with a flourishing communist party.

With all of this in mind, imagine how surprised I was to learn — at least according to the JBS in its American Opinion chart-that communist influence in Israel was hardly more than 10 to 20 percent!

Photograph of Robert Welch at podium Caption: "Robert Welch (above) blamed "agents provocateurs hired by the insiders" for infiltrating his John Birch Society and sowing anti-Semitism to convince the public that the Birchers hated Jews. In the mid-1960s, Robert dePugh and journalist Westbrook Pegler were dropped from the society because they were considered anti-Semitic. Revilo P. Oliver was eased out in 1966 after he said: "The conspiracy that is destroying us, we are told, is a conspiracy of communists or of Illuminati or of Jews. Most writers on this subject are so anxious to convince readers that they imply that the conspiracy they identify is the root of all evil and that if only (by some miracle) all the Bolsheviks or Illuminati or Jews were vaporized, we'd have nothing more to worry about. The trouble with that vision, of course, is that every educated man knows it can't be so."

 

At that moment — having only had a JBS publication in my hand for the first time ever, for less than several minutes, in fact-I realized that something was very much amiss.

Skimming the rest of the chart, I soon saw that, in the Birch worldview, Israel was probably the only serious bastion of anti-communism on the entire face of the planet. Not even the anti-communist regimes in Argentina and Chile seemed to qualify.

It was then I knew, pure and simple, that those at the highest levels of the JBS had fallen under the influence — perhaps the outright control — of the insidious force of political Zionism.

That was enough for me. I knew then that the JBS was not for me. My "membership" in the JBS, truth be told, lasted little more than a minute.

Little did I know at that time, however, that I had learned. quite fast and quite easily, what thousands of good, honest members of the JBS had to learn with much more pain over a long period of years.

I had no idea that there were disillusioned former members of the JBS all over the United States who had, in one fashion or another, figured out just what I had discovered on my own, without ever even having been a member of the JBS.

Some four years later, when I went to work for Liberty Lobby, the populist institution in Washington, D.C. that published the weekly national newspaper The Spotlight, I learned the full history of the Zionist infiltration and manipulation of the JBS. At The Spotlight I gained access to fascinating archives researchers had accumulated over the years, pointing to the strange origins — and directions — of the JBS.

I also discovered the facts about the little-known "Rockefeller connection" to the JBS. In the August 1965 edition of Capsule News, Morris Bealle (now deceased) laid it bare. He wrote:

Robert Welch (and his brother Jimmy) received a tremendous payoff from the House of Rockefeller two years ago, for organizing the John Birch Society and sitting on the communist lid for the past seven years. The total pay-off was $10,800,000, less the value of the family candy company, which is reputed to be maybe $100,000 or $200,000.

On October 1, 1963, Rockefeller's National Biscuit Company announced the "purchase" of the James O. Welch Candy Company of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Moody's Manual of Industrials, and in Standard-and-Poor's Business Index, NBC gave the alleged purchase price as "200,000 shares of National Biscuit common stock." According to The Wall Street Journal for Oct. 1, 1963, NBC common stock was selling for $54 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. Today it is selling for $58. Thus the Welch brothers were given $10,800,000 'Just like that."

Candy people say the whole family business, with plants and five sales offices, [was] hardly worth $200,000. Welch will tell those dopes who will believe him that National Biscuit is not a Rockefeller concern.

Again, Moody's Manual will trip him up. It lists as two of the directors the names of Roy E. Tomlinson and Don. G. Mitchell. [Both are] members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Further, they are a pair of Rockefeller's "professional directors." Tomlinson is also a director of their Prudential Life and American Sugar Refining.

It was American Sugar that was directly concerned with the financing and embargoing into the hands of Communist Russia of Cuba in 1959. They made the deal with Castro, which ended freedom on the island of Cuba and made possible those Havana missile bases designed to wipe out American eastern seaboard cities.

It also appears that the Rock Mob financed and promoted the organization of the John Birch Society. How else could it have gotten millions of dollars worth of newspaper publicity by the phony "attacks" on Welch that came with dramatic suddenness.

And, for the record, in more recent years, famed populist historian Eustace Mullins, author of The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, The World Order and other classics, has said publicly — more than once — that his research led him to the conclusion that the Birch Society was indeed a creation of the Rockefeller empire, based on precisely the same data that led Bealle to reach his assessment. So Bealle was not standing alone, by any means, in making these allegations.

In the matter of the privately owned Federal Reserve banking monopoly, the JBS took some mighty peculiar positions. In the September 1964 issue of American Opinion, one of Birch's favorite economists, Hans Sennholz, wrote an article about the Federal Reserve System. The article stated as follows:

The control rests absolutely and undividedly in the hands of the U.S. president ... They [the people who run the Federal Reserve System] are agents of the government, not corporate officials with the proprietorship rights and powers customarily of stockholders of corporations. The Federal Reserve System is not, nor has it ever been, a "private banking institution" that is busily filling the pockets of the bankers, nor is it the evil product of an international conspiracy of foreign bankers ....

The late Norbert Murray, an outspoken Montana patriot who was a career journalist in the mainstream media and a former New York publicist for major business interests, and Dun's Review, succinctly described the article as a "pack of lies" that "protected the fraud of the system."

Publication of such an article could only mislead good members of the JBS who were trying to puzzle out the myths — from the facts — about the nature of the Federal Reserve and of the powerful international banking houses that played such a major role in the manipulation of U.S. foreign policy.

In any event, while working for The Spotlight, I did indeed learn much more about the JBS than I would have ever imagined possible.

It was at that point — in the late 1970s and early 1980s — that the JBS shed perhaps any pretense of indifference and began actively promoting the interests of the state of Israel and its powerful lobby in Washington, abandoning any ambiguity about where the Birch Society's controllers stood on the issue of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Much to the dismay of longtime JBS loyalists, The Spotlight's hard-hitting senior journalist, the legendary Andrew St. George, reported at length and in devastating detail on the mysterious maneuverings of one John Rees, a Britisher by birth and one with quite a murky past, who had squirreled his way into the inner circles of the JBS, establishing himself as the real "power behind the throne" during Robert Welch's declining days.

The Spotlight pinpointed Rees's amazing role in operating his own intelligence and spying operation which was, in many respects, quite akin to that of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, an important adjunct of Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

For my own part, as a student of the JFK assassination, I discovered the amazing fact that like Robert Welch in his heyday, the John Birch Society — to this day — endorses the much-discredited Warren Commission fraud that "one lone nut" assassinated President Kennedy.

The late Morris Bealle, pointed out early on (on June 19, 1965) in his rambunctious newsletter, Capsule News, that Robert Welch had declared Bealle's book, The Guns of the Regressive Right — which pointed a finger in the direction of the CIA — to be "all wrong" and told his followers that it was not the CIA but Lyndon Johnson behind the JFK assassination.

According to Bealle, "We examined thoroughly all of his 1964 bulletins ... [which] were filled with attacks on Earl Warren and curious expressions of hearty agreement with him on the myth that 'a communist [meaning the Decoy Man Oswald] killed Kennedy.'"

In fact, as I pointed out in Final Judgrnent, my own book on the JFK assassination, Birch founder Welch played a major part in directing conservative attention away from a possible role by the CIA in the JFK assassination and in the direction of the Soviet KGB. This was the very propaganda line of top CIA figure James J. Angleton, the CIA's devoted liaison to the Mossad.

So while the Birchers think that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone-nut communist under the direction of the Soviet KGB — the theory put forth by Mossad loyalist Angleton — they are very careful to avoid pointing toward the culpability of the CIA and certainly never ever dare mention the likelihood — as I carefully documented in Final Judgrnent — that the Mossad also played a critical role in the assassination conspiracy.

On Nov. 21,1988, the Birch Society's New American magazine touted the Warren Commission Report, saying that "evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt" that Lee Harvey Oswald — one lone communist nut — killed JFR.

In any case, however, the JBS's dedication to the obviously dubious claim that one lone communist "nut" killed JFK remains in force. In 1995, I sent a copy of the second edition of my book to a vast array of individuals inviting them to debate and refute the thesis of the book with me — on radio or in writing or in any public forum.

One of those to whom I sent a copy of the book was William F.Jasper, senior editor of the Birch Society's New American. To this day — 10 years later, and following the sale of some 50,000 copies of Final Judgment to enthusiastic readers across the country — I have yet to hear from Mr. Jasper.

My experiences with the JBS — as far as the issue of the JFK assassination is concerned — were certainly instructive. But my discoveries regarding the Birch position on this issue came many long years after I had already figured out that the Birch Society was not for me, based on my other research and that of others and based on the study of Birch publications.

Certainly there are many fine American patriots who are supporters of the JBS. Indeed, some of my best friends are Birchers. But my own "one minute membership" in the John Birch Society was enough for me •

 

MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER is a frequent contributor to THE BARNES REVIEW and the author of Final judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, called the definitive work on the JFK political execution. He is also the author of The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America and The High Priests of War. Order any of these books from TBR BOOK CLUB by calling toll free 1-877-773-9077 and charging to Visa or MasterCard.