I’m always seeing ‘the Birchers’ catching flak, why? What is it with the Birch Society that has everyone up in arms? I’ve seen this so many times but never asked.
I'm with you. What little I know is that they were opposed to 1960's civil rights legislation that got them branded as racists.
Each night I would choose a different stack and select the toughest, most intimidating and most opaque tomes I could find and read until my mind reeled. Even if they were beyond my ken, at least I understood that the ideas were there and that men, now the dust of the ages, had thought and pondered and written on ideas now nascent in my mind.
One evening I came across a container full of a little periodical called American Opinion , from the John Birch Society, mostly unread and gathering dust. I recognized the name and, mostly for s#its and giggles, I thumbed through a few copies. There were, as I expected, the most preposterous of conspiracy theories. But there was something else. Usually toward the back and written in the turgid prose reserved for those seeking to express ideas both profound and precise was a description of the education that I was not getting and a bemoanal of its demise. Here was brilliance, here was intelligence, here was the flickering flame of a civilization in decline.
The problem became how to reconcile the two, the brilliance running on a parallel track but separate from the world and the base fear of forces, ominous and conspiratorial, lurking in the darkness beyond. They were right in lamenting the loss of Classical Thought and the decoupling of our social strictures from the forces driving them for millennia. I think that they were wrong and giving too much credence to the power of conspirators and the sympathetic mutuality of their goals. The lesson I took was that good intentioned men can be brilliant, educated and wrong. Were they wrong or was I? Even in my dotage I recall the cautionary words of novelist Taylor Caldwell when she was asked how on earth she could possibly believe in such conspiratorial rot. Her retort: “How can you not.”
It is like reading a Donald Wildmon publication, or a really stemwinding article by Joseph Farah.
Short on substance, but sure to stir up the heavy breathers.
I’m no expert on the JBS. I can read Marx anytime and be considered an “intellectual”. If I read the JBS, it might come back to haunt me. Still, I think I’ve seen some of their literature. My take is that they rightly saw that some things were wrong. An example would be our liberal MSM misleading people before the advent of alternative voices like Rush and FreeRepublic. Give them credit, some things are wrong. Other people had no clue.
But then they would try to make sense out of it and take some wrong turns. It’s not all about communism, or about the Federal Reserve system, or about Jews in control.
Here’s an an alternative approach. There are intellectual ideas (forces) that swirl around the world even as individual nations, and individual people address particular issues at particular times and places. One intellectual idea is embodied in the American revolution. This was actually an Evolution. Much of the best was retained and improved as we moved civilization forward. A competing idea is embodied in the French revolution. This was truly a revolution as all of the old order was rejected. They rejected monarchism, rejected religion, rejected tradition. All was swept away in favor of superficial, ad hoc “reason” acceptable to the mob.
Today’s American conservatives are intellectual heirs to the American revolution. Today’s American liberals have been Europeanized and are intellectual heirs to Marx and Engels who greatly admired the French revolution.
Because they are insane conspiracy theorists. Out of curiosity, I attended a Birch conference a few years ago. It was filled with official Birch literature claiming insane things -- like arguing that the Soviet Union just "pretended" to collapse so that the US would let its guard down and be easy to conquer in a communist uprising.
Members of The John Birch Society are not necessarily beholden to the Republican Party, and often criticize unconstitutional activities perpetrated by the POTUS and Members of Congress, regardless of party.
Obviously that will generate much bile coming from the party faithful.