Smoking Joe:
You can totally ignore the FBI if you want. I cite them because the Birch Society has always recommended Hoover’s FBI as INDISPUTABLY knowledgeable and authoritative.
You can, instead, review the evaluations of Robert Welch and the JBS which have been made by giants within the postwar conservative movement. Perhaps in YOUR scheme of things it makes utterly no difference that virtually the entire conservative movement has REJECTED the JBS as “extremist” and irresponsible (just like the FBI)>
OR—you can review the comments made by former JBS members including some very prominent chapter leaders, section leaders, Coordinators, and National Council members who resigned from the JBS. Even Mrs. Robert Welch resigned from the JBS because of how the new leadership (after her husband’s death) savaged President Ronald Reagan in the pages of the JBS magazine, The New American.
MORRIS DEES: I have no clue why you bring up his name. I have no connection of any kind whatsoever to him nor do I care what he thinks or writes. Apparently, in your scheme of things, presenting straw-men arguments is how you use “reason” to make your best case?
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: I was there too. I lived it. I saw it. If you do not want to believe FBI investigative files which contain verbatim transcripts of closed secret CPUSA meetings (which is certainly odd since you claim to be interested in historical accuracy), you can, instead, consider the following comments made by JBS members:
1. George Schuyler — the famous African American conservative columnist and author wrote:
“The White Citizens Council which has branches or cells everywhere, controls by terror such states as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and to a lesser extent, Virginia…It has defied and disrupted the operation of the laws of the land. It has used threats and vicious economic reprisals…It has become a legal arm of Mississippi’s Government.” [4/22/61 Schuyler column in Pittsburgh PA Courier]
And what, exactly, did groups like the JBS propose as their remedy to such a grave situation?
NOTHING WHATSOEVER!!
Instead the JBS suggested that we just let the politicians, local communities, and government instrumentalities responsible for creating, defending, and implementing the “terror”, “threats”, “intimidation”, “economic reprisals”, continue “business as usual” IN PERPETUITY.
2. Rev. Delmar Dennis — a JBS member who infiltrated the most violent Klan in our nation’s history for the FBI (White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi). Rev. Dennis helped convict many Klan members for their criminal acts.
Delmar Dennis’s comment:
“The Klan in Mississippi has completely infiltrated every phase of the legal, political, social and economic system in Mississippi. The membership in the Klan ranges from common laborers and criminals, to judges, lawyers, doctors and political leaders. While they may not be active members, they are secret members who use their influence to further Klan efforts and aid Klan activities, for example, it is generally known in Klan circles that supervisors who pick juries use their influence to get Klan members on the jury panel.”
So while people like YOU are exercised over the largely MYTHICAL “Communist” influence within our civil rights movement, Rev. Dennis saw (and participated in) the actual everyday workings of southern society. He was a product of his small town values and environment and he accepted the premise that blacks were morally and intellectually inferior beings who should be segregated from whites.
Unfortunately, the Birch Society interpreted the problem in our southern states as entirely abstract ideas about the nature of our political system instead of understanding the real-world consequences to living human beings of the Jim Crow system.
As a result, the JBS totally ignored, de-valued, trivialized, or facilitated the daily injustices and crimes often committed (or condoned) by the very people in southern communities whom had the responsibility for translating abstract principles into reality. These were the folks who made “state’s rights” and the words “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” into a cruel joke for African Americans.
So don’t waste anybody’s time with your personal anecdotes and selective amnesia.
Really? Morris of the SPLC? You have no clue?
Since the Clinton administration Morris' bunch have had the ear of the FedGov telling them who is and who isn't a terrorist--like the 'bitter clingers' who believe in the bible and the 2nd Amendment. You should get out more. They may be full of it, but they are relevant, simply because they help define who gets snooped and who doesn't. While they include a few leftist groups, their bias is blatantly anti-conservative (well, anti-Constitutional).
As far as my personal anecdotes go, I trust them far more than any sanitized retrospective. I lived it.
If you won't hear the words of a witness, there is no point in continuing this conversation.