False Opposition: The John Birch Society

With the onset of the McCarthy era 50 years ago, any perceived threat to U.S. sovereignty from the British Round Table and its American branch shifted to an obsession with the Soviet Union. Roy Cohn, who was legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist Senate investigations of the 1950s, would later become a member of the John Birch Society and a principle figure in the JBS intelligence gathering operation, the Western Goals Foundation. Out of the latter emerged the core group which, in 1981, formed the present Council for National Policy -- a consortium of high level political, corporate and evangelical leaders which is the primary coordinating body and funding conduit for Christian Right projects.

Sara Diamond's book, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, notes: "Before and after the formation of the John Birch Society, corporations played a major role in rallying the public to the anticommunist cause." In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act granted corporations the right to distribute literature to counter labor union organizing -- a movement they blamed on the communists. To reduce the cost of producing and distributing anti-Communist materials, corporations turned to non-profit organizations such as the JBS.

"By 1963, corporations were spending an estimated $25 million per year on anticommunist literature... Some corporations circulated print and audio-visual materials produced by the John Birch Society; other corporations produced their own in-house literature...By the early 1960s, the Nation magazine reported that there was a minimum of 6,600 corporate-financed anticommunist broadcasts, carried by more than 1,300 radio and television stations at a total annual budget of about $20 million...Leading sponsors included Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and Howard J. Pew of Sun Oil. The corporate sector's massive anticommunist propaganda campaigns created a favorable climate for the mobilization of activist groups like the John Birch Society."

On the other hand, or rather the other side of the dialectic, super-capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller would come to understand the potential of using labor unions to corporate advantage -- as a means of controlling the opposition.

"The Rockefeller interests have not overlooked and have made good use of the monopoly of labor that is afforded to unions, to effect monopolies of industry that would be recognized as illegal if they had been effected by a monopoly of machinery. Labor unions have proved to be a powerful weapon for the Rockefeller Empire in extending its world conquest; and subsidized unioneers are always in the forefront of the emissaries that they send out into newly conquered territories. With Marxism as a shibboleth, they are rapidly accomplishing a world-wide subjugation of the 'peasantry'. This has earned for wily John D. Jr. a reputation for 'liberalism'. It is more appropriately called "Rockefellerism".

In the long march toward a new social order, ultra-right and left-wing agitation propaganda serve not only to polarize and destabilize society, they create a diversionary conflict to prevent recognition of the true conspiracy. Lest an informed and united citizenry form an alliance against them, principles of conflict management are employed by the power elites.  (more...)

The John Birch Society