Summary
âž¡ The text discusses the perceived threat of communism, suggesting it could take over the United States through gradual, insidious means rather than direct force. It argues that this process is already underway, with the U.S. gradually surrendering sovereignty to international organizations and moving towards a socialist economy. The text also warns of the dangers of appeasement and the potential loss of freedom, using historical examples of communist cruelty to emphasize the threat. Finally, it suggests that the susceptibility of the U.S. to communism is due to the age and decay of Western European civilization, likening this to a societal cancer.
âž¡ The text suggests that American troops should only be stationed overseas to protect American interests, and that the government should reduce its involvement in areas it doesn’t belong. This change should be gradual and supported by the American people, requiring a large educational effort. The speaker believes that with effort and dedication, we can reduce the influence of communism, decrease government involvement, and create a better world in the next 15 years.
âž¡ The text discusses the rise of collectivism, likened to a disease, in Western Europe and America, which is seen as a threat to individual freedom and prosperity. It criticizes leaders like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt for their roles in this shift. The author also expresses concern about a loss of faith, both religious and in human potential, and sees this as contributing to moral decline. The text ends by emphasizing the need to resist communism, which is viewed as a top-down system maintained by deceit and fear, and calls for dedication to the cause of freedom.
âž¡ The text discusses a plan to combat communism and socialism through various methods such as establishing reading rooms, expanding conservative periodicals, supporting radio programs, organizing fronts, exposing communist influence, silencing detractors, lining up speakers, extending influence internationally, and putting weight into political scales. The text emphasizes the need for dynamic personal leadership rather than organizational leadership, using the example of Bob Taft. It also discusses the potential of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon as leaders, but questions their ability to provide the necessary dynamic leadership.
âž¡ The speaker criticizes Richard Nixon for not being a true leader, but rather a manipulator of public opinion. He emphasizes the need for dynamic personal leadership to combat the spread of collectivism, which he views as a threat to individual freedom. He proposes a principle of “less government, more responsibility” and warns against the dangers of an overly powerful government. He ends by encouraging his audience to look forward and work towards a better future, rather than dwelling on the past.
âž¡ The text emphasizes the importance of faith and morality in shaping our society and individual lives. It suggests that these values are the bedrock of our dreams and aspirations, and without them, we risk losing our way. The author encourages us to be grateful for our freedoms and to take responsibility for preserving them. He proposes the formation of the John Birch Society to uphold these ideals and to inspire others to do the same.
âž¡ The John Birch Society aims to promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world. It operates through small local chapters, led by appointed leaders, and is funded by member dues. The Society is dedicated to fighting against communism and other forms of centralized government, and expects its members to be highly committed and active. It encourages people of all faiths to join and work towards a better world, without resorting to conspiratorial methods or violent revolutions.
âž¡ The John Birch Society, a non-religious organization focused on adult education, has remained on its original path despite various pressures. It has pioneered new methods for carrying out its educational mission, facing significant opposition and attacks. Despite these challenges, the Society’s educational program is functioning effectively across all 50 states and even in some foreign countries. The Society has played a crucial role in various battles, exposing and slowing down different projects of the conspiracy, and has seen a significant increase in public support over the years.
âž¡ The text discusses a conspiracy to wipe out the middle class and reduce everyone else to a basic level of living. It mentions various political events and figures, such as the exile of King Constantine of Greece and the replacement of Salvador Allende in Chile. The text also highlights the rising crime rates in Soviet Russia and the potential instability in the region. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of the United States in this global situation and the growing awareness among the American people about these issues.
âž¡ The speech argues that the U.S. was manipulated into World War I and II by a conspiracy aiming to spread communism and create a world government. It suggests that the U.S. should focus on its own interests, reduce government size, and withdraw from the United Nations. The speaker encourages Americans to reject the negative label of ‘isolationist’ and to strive for independence, moral values, and prosperity.
Transcript
So I’m uploading this speech. It’s from Robert welch, it in 1974. It’s in two parts. The first part is a recreation of a speech that he gave in 1958. And then the second part is 15 years later which is 1974. And I’m not going to give anything away. I just want you guys to listen to it. It’s a little over two hours long. Well worth the time. Robert Welch, for those of you who don’t know, he was the founder of the John Birch Society and this is a fantastic speech. It’s good to know, you know, when, knowing what we know now.
It’s, it’s nice to see that there were people who were trying to sound the alarm many years ago often labeled as crackpots. But you know, as we know now, they, they were very crack potish. So that said, I, I will try to do a show tomorrow as well, but I can’t promise that I will because of the, I can’t predict what’s going to happen with the electricity or the weather or whatnot. If I can, I will. If I can’t, I’ll, I still will probably try to do something but Friday I will be in Mexico finishing off my, my dental work and I will not be around for the Friday night watch party but I will be uploading something.
Haven’t decided on what that’s going to be yet but, but there will be something being played. So that said, I hope everybody had a great day and I hope you enjoy these speeches from Robert Welch. Definitely comment in the comment section. I want to hear what you guys have to say because I don’t get to see it in the live chat tonight. So anyway guys, I hope you enjoy this and I will see you when I see you. Take care. Gentlemen, let me welcome you to Indianapolis all of you, I believe, are already aware of my appreciation for your being here.
At this point. There’s an omission of five lines. But each of you also felt that you would not have been asked to. To give up everything else and come to this meeting, and then to listen to my voice off and on for so much of the two days unless I had some very serious matters to put before you and proposals to discuss. Frankly, the matters are serious and the proposals are far reaching. So much so that just their presentation makes me feel solemnly humbled at the size of the task envisioned for. Increasingly, before tomorrow is over, I hope to have all of you feeling that you are taking part here and now, in the beginning of a movement of historical importance.
But long journeys start with easy steps, and our first step should be to identify our fellow travelers. No pun intended. Many of you are known to each other, but some are not. So let me, as informally as possible, introduce each one to the group. This was then done, and here we also omit one page. Our immediate and most urgent anxiety, of course, is the threat of the communist conspiracy, and well it should be for both internationally and within the United States. The Communists are much further advanced and more deeply entrenched than is realized by even most of the serious students of the danger among the anti communists.
I personally have been studying the problem increasingly for about nine years, and practically full time for the past three years, and entirely without pride, but in simple thankfulness. Let me point out that a lifetime of business experience should have made it easier for me to see the falsity of the economic theories on which Communism is supposedly based, to see them more readily than might some scholar coming into that study from the academic cloisters. While a lifetime of interest in things academic, especially world history, should have given me an advantage over many businessmen in more readily seeing the sophistries in dialectic materialism.
So I have felt, rightly or wrongly, that my grasp of communist purposes and even of their methods should have been more rapid than that of some of my patriotic friends who have gradually become staunch anti communists. Yet almost every day I run into some whole new area where the Communists have been penetrating and working quietly for years until now they are in virtual control of everything that is done in that slice or corner of our national life. Again, an omission of one page. But as background for our further discussion, I am going to ask for your patience while I make a much more general review with you of how far the international conspiracy as a whole has now gone and where we stand today.
Now omit 12 lines. And from here on I must simply quote extracts, sometimes many pages apart, without giving you the background to which they belong or calling your attention to the size of our jumps ahead. But we do ask you again, in order to avoid confusion, please to remember that all of those lines were written and then spoken in the fall of 1958. Section 1. Look at the score. Throughout all history, the bearer of bad news has been a most unpopular person. So I certainly am not seeking any garlands of popularity at present. For the truth I bring you is simple, incontrovertible and deadly.
It is that we are living in America today, in such a fool’s paradise as the people of China lived in 20 years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday. And as George Santayana so brilliantly pointed out, those who will learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it. Lenin died in 1924, but before he died, he had laid down for his followers the strategy for this conquest. It has been paraphrased and summarized as first we will take Eastern Europe, next the masses of Asia, then we shall encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America.
We shall not have to attack. It will fall like overripe fruit into our hands. To make doubly clear what he meant and how firmly he meant it with regard to taking Asia ahead of Western Europe and then using Asia as a stepping stone and base from which to conquer Western Europe and the rest of the world, the strategy was also stepped stated that for the communists the road to Paris led through Peking and Calcutta. Today you can easily see how that road to Paris is leading back from Peking through Calcutta, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Algiers. Now gentlemen, there are many remarkable things about that three step strategy.
But the most remarkable is that the communists have never wavered from it one iota. They have used the philosophy of socialism as an ideological weapon in this struggle whenever they could, and for whatever it was worth. But they’ve also used bribery, lies, bluff, brutality, the countless tentacles of treason, murder on a scale never before dreamed of in the world, and every possible means to advance them on this road without the slightest, slightest concern for any moral difference in those various means. And above all, they have used patience. A patient gradualism has been the most important key to the communists overwhelming success.
And in October 1950, Stalin’s lackeys formalized their puppet state of East Germany. By this time, of course, there were other takeovers going on in other parts of the world as well. We shall see. But we are dealing here only with Europe. And East Germany finished the job there as it had been planned by Lenin 26 years before. The Communists now had Eastern Europe entire and the first step of their three step program was complete. Next was Asia. Actually, the anti communist position is crumbling rapidly everywhere in Asia. If you will look at a map of Asia with all of these countries properly shaded, I think you will agree with me in my estimate of the Communist progress, it is that they have already gone 3/4 of the way towards the completion of the second step in their three part program.
Now let’s consider the rest of the world. It is with the benefit of this realistic background, therefore, that I venture to offer the first following opinion. It is that the Communists, through long and careful and insidious preparation, have already gone at least one fourth of the way towards the accomplishment of their third and final step, which is taking over this country and with it, of course, the rest of the world. Now 1/3/4 plus 1/4 adds up to 2 out of that total of 3. And not to believe that the Communists are already 2/3 of the way towards carrying out their total program or that they are not now moving at an accelerated pace and with increased momentum to finish the job is to close your eyes to the plain facts as surely as did the good people of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and with the same ultimately fatal results.
Now please note, gentlemen, that this. The Communists have never made any of this immense progress by the direct use of force. They have beguiled Chinese into fighting Chinese, Koreans into fighting Koreans, Vietnamese into fighting the French and each other, the Israelis, British and French into fighting Egyptians, the Algerians into fighting the French. They have even maneuvered Americans into fighting Chinese Communists in Korea with the Americans hands tied behind behind their backs. But not one Russian regiment has ever taken part in any of this imperialistic advance, except for the suppression of rebellion in already conquered territory as in Hungary.
There are three possible methods by which the Communists might take us over. One would be by a peaceful coup d’etat, as in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The second method would be by fomenting civil war in this country and aiding the Communist side with military might. But there is a third method which they are clearly relying on most heavily. And this is taking us over by a process so gradual and insidious that Communist rule is slipped over so far on the American people before they ever realize it is happening. The process in that direction is going on right now, gradually but surely and with ever increasing spread and speed.
A part of that plan, of course, is to induce the gradual surrender of American sovereignty, piece by piece and step by step, to various international organizations, of which the United nations is the outstanding but far from the only example. For another part is the conversion of the United States into a socialist nation quite similar to Russia itself in its economy and political outlook before police state enforcement is ever introduced. The best way to explain the aim here is simply to quote the directive under which some of the very largest American foundations have been secretly but visibly working for years.
This directive is so to change the economic and political structure of the United States that it can be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia. Now, here are the commonest aims for the United States. 1. Greatly expanded government spending for every conceivable means of getting rid of ever larger sums of American money as wastefully as possible. 2. Higher and then much higher taxes. 3. An increasingly unbalanced budget despite the higher taxes. 4. Wild inflation of our currency. 5. Government controls of prices, wages and materials, supposedly to combat inflation. 6. Greatly increased socialistic controls over every operation of our economy and every activity of our daily lives.
This is to be accompanied naturally and automatically, by a correspondingly huge increase in the size of our bureaucracy and in both the cost and reach of our domestic government. 7. Far more centralization of power in Washington and the practical elimination of our state lines. There is a many faceted drive at work to have our state lines eventually mean no more within the nation than our county lines do now within the states. 8. The steady advance of federal aid to and control over our educational system leading to complete federal of our public education. 9. A constant hammering into the American consciousness of the horror of modern warfare, the beauties and the absolute necessity of peace.
Peace always on communist terms, of course. And 10. The consequent willingness of the American people to allow the steps of appeasement by our government which amount to a piecemeal surrender of the rest of the free world and of the United States itself. In summary, gentlemen, we are losing rapidly losing a cold war in which our freedom, our country and our very existence are at stake. And while we don’t seem to know we are losing this war, you can be sure that the communists do. There is just one thing, only one thing in the whole world which the communists fear today.
It is that despite their tremendous influence in our government and over all of our means of mass communication, the American people will wake up too soon to what has really been happening and what is now happening right under their very noses. The only thing which can possibly stop the communists is for the American people to learn the truth in time. One matter on which most Americans need to become better informed is what being subjugated by the communists or arriving at an accommodation with Communism as they want it called, would really mean for their cruelty and terrorism is almost beyond, beyond imagination.
And the domination of our press, television and radio by communist influences is now so great that you simply are not allowed to learn or to be reminded of the real nature of the beasts to whom we are losing. General Mark Clark, for instance, officially reported from Korea. We obtained solid evidence that The Communists slaughtered 11,622 members of my command while they were defenseless prisoners of war. These men were tied to their fellow prisoners and transported to previously selected sites. They were dumped alive into trenches dug for the purpose and summarily shot. About 5,000 of those boys were from your hometowns and mine.
But how many of you ever saw that report in your headlines or anywhere else during the so called Spanish Civil War? The London Times, which then as now certainly was not slanted in favor of the anti communists, reported that in one 12 months period the Communists had murdered over 4,000 priests in cold blood and had driven more than that many nuns out into the streets of various Spanish cities, inflicted horrible obscenities on them and then murdered the nuns. In some places the communists herded priests and their congregations into churches, set the churches on fire and burned the Christians and their buildings together.
These and similar epic cruelties of the period are found facts documented beyond all question. But how many of you have ever heard them? All of this vicious and purposeful savagery I have been trying so inadequately even to indicate is not something happening on some other and far off planet or perpetrated by the Assyrians 2500 years ago or dreamed up as the imaginative nightmare of an Edgar Allan Poe. These gentlemen, are the very real acts and deliberate policies of the recent past and the very present of people whom we treat as human beings and with whom we sit around conference tables and arrive at truce terms and concessions to appease them.
There are some 700 million non Russian, non communists now living daily lives of virtual slavery behind the iron curtain. Some 40 million of them in the actual slave labor camps of Russia and Red China, who only a dozen years ago or much less enjoyed practically the same personal freedoms as do you and I today. These people now say to each other, but above all to themselves, if I’d only known, if I’d only believed. There is no amount of work and sacrifice and suffering I would not have given if I had only realized the necessity, the danger in time.
Now it is too late, and any amount of struggle and of sacrifice, even of life itself, is all in vain. The number of people subject to these cruelties is now increasing by tens of millions every year, and we are directly in the path of the conqueror. Are we really so hopelessly blind, so stupefied by prosperity on one side and the insidious propaganda on the other, that we cannot even see the wolves devouring the carcasses of our brothers? Or drawing ever nearer to ourselves? Are we going to let our country and our whole civilization go under and new dark ages of serfdom be ushered in while we happily play at our little games? May God forbid, but may we speedily become more worthy that he should.
Section 2. But let’s look deeper now. If the danger from the communist conspiracy were all we had to worry about, it would be enough. But in my opinion, the first great basic weakness of the United States, and hence its susceptibility to the disease of collectivism, is simply the age of the Western European civilization. Some of you will already have recognized, in fact, that I am drawing a corollary to the conclusions usually connected with the name of Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s theory is absolutely fatal to the acceptance of socialism or any form of collective collectivism as a forward step or as a form of progress in man’s sociological arrangements.
For in Spangler’s view, collectivism is a disease of society concomitant with decay and remarkably similar to cancer in the individual. The Roman Empire of the west, for instance, started dying from the cancer of collectivism from the time Diocletian in imposed on it his New Deal. And it is perfectly evident right in the cases of the various civilizations that we know most about, that both the Greek and the Roman civilizations did perish of the cancer of collectivism, and that the civilization of Western Europe is doing so today. It was Western Europe which made the last half of the 19th century the period of the highest level to which which man has yet climbed in his struggle to reach an enlightened and humane life.
But as so often happens for the individual, by the time Western Europe had the knowledge, the wealth, and the ability to get the most out of life, it was ready to die. The truth is that by a cycle which seems inevitable, whether it is a biological reality or only an analogy, Western Europe was worn out. And under those circumstances the degenerative disease of collectivism, the cancer of social organizations, began its peripheral infiltration. The American civilization was every bit as much of an Entirely new and different civilization from the old and ancestral one of Western Europe, as was Rome, a new civilization distinct from Greece.
And this American civilization at the turn of the present century was only 300 years old. It had the strength and vigor and promise of a healthy young man in his late teens. There was no reason on earth for any such organism to be attacked by and then start succumbing to the cancerous disease of collectivism at that stage of its young manhood, with its whole lifespan of accomplishment before it. But we have the cancerous disease of collectivism firmly implanted now. Nevertheless, we have people feeling that nothing should be done by them, but everything for them by the government.
Its disastrous ravages are quite far advanced. And we have it basically because of too long and too close an association with a parent that was dying of the disease, that was old enough and weakened enough for the virus to to be rampantly active throughout this parent’s whole environment. When Woodrow Wilson, cajoled and guided even then 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 the same building bed with this parrot 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, push the communists back, get out of the bed of a Europe that is dying within this cancer of collectivism, and breathe our own healthy air of opportunity, enterprise and freedom. Then the cancer we already have, even though it is. Then the cancer we already have, even though it is of considerable growth, can be cut out.
And despite the bad scars and the loss of some muscles, this young, strong, great new nation, restored to vigor, courage, ambition and self confidence, can still go ahead to fulfill its great destiny and to become an even more glorious example for all the earth than it ever was before. It should be centuries from now, before the natural time comes for the decline of America and for the highest torch of civilization to be taken over by the rising newer nations to the West. But we do have to achieve the sufficiently drastic surgery. And that, of course, is a Herculean task.
We shall return to a study of it when we come to the more positive part of this program. Section three and deeper still. Now, gentlemen, in looking thoroughly and realistically at the danger to everything we have inherited, spiritual as well as material. And at the cause of that danger we come to the second of the fundamental reasons for deep and basic anxiety. And putting that matter bluntly at once, the reason is simply loss of faith. Not just loss of faith in God and all his works, but loss of faith in man and his works too, in his reasons for existence, in his purposes, and in his hopes.
Let all of us thank whatever God we severally worship that there is so large a remnant of the really true believers still left. We honor them. We need their steadying adherence to the rock of reverence and their aspiration of unwavering obedience to ancient and divine commandments. We desperately need their unshakable confidence in absolutes, in eternal principles and truths, in a world of increasing relativity and transitoriness, in all things. We admire them in fact, as will become more clear tomorrow. The young man I admire most of all of those America has produced was a fundamentalist Baptist missionary named John Birch.
But we must not let our admiration, far dependence on and feeling of spiritual kinship with the fundamentalists blind us to the visible fact that their number grows smaller every year. Among the people literate enough and ambitious enough to be activists in Europe and America, those who are honestly true believers in a faith which most of them still profess is an ever smaller minority. What is far worse, fully one third of the services in at least the Protestant churches of America are helping that trend. Some ministers have converted Christianity into a so called social gospel, which becomes in fact indistinguishable from advocacy of the welfare state by socialist politicians.
And some actually use their pulpits to preach outright communism, often in very thin disguise, if any, while having the hypocrisy as atheists to thank God in public for their progressive apostasy. We must not only know the truth, but face the truth if it is to set us free or to keep us so. Except for the diminishing number of fundamentalists of all religions, all faith has been replaced, or is rapidly being replaced by a pragmatic opportunism with hedonistic aims. And what a fall that is for a race which can boast of once having listened to a St.
Augustine, a St. Francis of Assisi, a John Milton, or an Alfred Tennyson. In Western Europe and America today, we are living in a spiritual vacuum, exactly as were the Romans at after they had lost any real faith in their pagan gods and before the rise of Christianity. The most terrible result of this collapse of the rock of faith on which our morality was built is the rise of the amoral man, of which the usual communist himself is the most illustrative example. For the chief point of this whole present section of our discussion runs parallel to the main point in connection with the extent to which the cancer of collectivism has weakened and endangered us.
Besides the short term job of eliminating the communist danger, we have the equally important longer range job of ending this mass psychological flight towards amorality and of restoring convincing reasons for men once again to strive to live up to moral and humanitarian ideals. Otherwise there is no chance of saving our Christian style civilization. Otherwise there is no chance of saving our Christian style civilization from self destruction. And it will merely go down to chaos and the other ultimate serfdom of the weak under the strong more lingeringly than if it is destroyed and its once free members are enslaved by the communists.
We shall return to the constructive side of this need and this undertaking in the morning. Section 4 and so let’s act. We come now to the question of what is to be done about these problems. The very first thing we must realize is that there is no easy formula possible nor brilliant scheme devisable for beating the communists. The conspiracy is now incredibly well organized. It is so well financed that it has billions of dollars annually just to spend on propaganda. It has the benefit of decades of successful experience. It has one set goal of world rule by any means to which every act in all of the lives of some 40 million party members are now wholly subservient.
And it is guided by men who had to have supreme cunning and ruthlessness to have achieved their present positions within the conspiracy itself. The human race has never before faced any such monster of power which was determined to enslave him. But there is one basic consideration of tremendous importance which we must always keep in mind. This is that communism has been imposed, and must always be imposed from the top down by trickery and terror. And that it must then be maintained by terror. Truth, reality, human instinct and the overwhelming weight of human desire are on our side.
We have these points in our favor against a conspiracy which must depend on falsehood, cunning and terror utilized by less than 5% of the total population. To feel that we cannot win that struggle is a form of pessimism to which I for one shall never yield. What I have, what I have chiefly intended this brief introduction to lead to, therefore, is the realization that every effort we undertake, every battle we fight, even if we lose it, and every sacrifice we make is cumulative. Every bit of dedication to the cause is worthwhile. Obviously, the place for us to begin is in the United States, because the American support of the international Communist conspiracy is now the backbone of its strength and has been for many years.
If and when we can reach the point of turning just the American government from actively helping the communist government conspiracy everywhere in the world, we shall have won a most important battle in the war ahead. The amount of work, the amount of work required to do that in the face of a way the cards have been so painstakingly stacked against us, is something to contemplate. And yet there is nothing but work and more work, thinking and more thinking, dedication and more dedication which will do the job. So now let’s look at the job itself. 1. First, we would establish reading rooms, small and inexpensive, in just as many of the cities, towns and villages of this country as we could, just as rapidly as we could.
2. Second, since getting the truth about both recent history and current events in into as many hands and heads as possible is so important, we would see that the circulation of the conservative periodicals was expanded as rapidly as it could be done without too much waste. 3. We would do everything we could to support, maintain, increase the number of stations used and widen the audiences of such radio programs as those of Fulton, Lewis, Clarence Mannion and dozens of more local broadcasters throughout the country. 4. We would institute the organized planning and control to make full and effectively coordinated use of the powerful letter writing weapon that lies so ready at hand.
5. We would organize fronts, little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts. 6. Another thing we should do, and one badly needed, would be to start shocking the American people or an increasing percentage of the more literate and more intelligent who have not yet been completely brainwashed into a realization of what is happening, into a dawning realization of how far and how completely communists and communist influence have crept right into their communities, into institutions and activities where the general public does not have the slightest suspicion of such infiltration. The best way to do this is by exposure, which is why the communists just had to get rid of McCarthy and went to such extreme lengths to do so.
7. There are now dozens of slimy characters at loose in our midst whom I’ll call to your attention by describing one who is more or less typical. His usual name is Gordon hall, though he also uses and has used many aliases, and we could silence him and those like him with comparative ease. 8. We would line up a large list of speakers ourselves all over the country. 9. Ninth and current in this listing would be our undertakings on the International. For many reasons, we would Start extending our body into other countries as soon as there were energy and resources which could properly be spared for that purpose.
10. Finally, and probably most important of all these courses of action, we would put our weight into the political scales in this country just as fast and far as we could. We are at a stage, gentlemen, where the only sure political victories are achieved by non political organizations. By organization which has a surer, more positive and more permanent purpose than the immediate political goals that are only means to an end. By organization which has a backbone and cohesiveness and strength and definiteness of direction which are impossible for the old style political party organization. Fantastic. Of course it’s fantastic.
But everything I am talking is fantastic. We are living in fantastic times and a fantastic situation. The alternative to sufficiently fantastic measures and efforts is a fate of fantastic suffering for our children and the equally fantastic loss of a whole humane civilization that has cost countless sacrifices, immeasurable labor and an infinite number of noble dreams across centuries. In the building we are in circumstances where it is realistic to be fantastic. I was careful to bring into this group only men of sufficient intelligence and imagination to understand that paradox. And tomorrow morning I hope to make the realism of this afternoon’s hypothesis and these proposals at least as believable as is the unbelievable present power of the forces of evil arrayed against us.
May you have a good dinner. A little surcease from such serious thoughts and a good night’s sleep in the meantime. Section 5 under positive leadership this morning in retracing our footsteps, we come first to the cancer of collectivism, to the question of how to stop its further ravages and how to restore the American body politic to good health, renewed strength and as much promise for the future as is possible in view of the damage already done. And that, gentlemen, brings me to one of the basic points purposes for which this meeting was called. It is one which I approach with great humility, but with no misgivings as to its necessity.
For we simply are not going to be able to save our country from either the immediate threat of communism or the long range threat of socialism. By organizational leadership. Our only possible chance is dynamic personal leadership. Let me begin with an illustration of the difference which also supports the argument. In 1952 I disagreed with Bob Taft on at least three of his ten most important political principles. Yet I had made 25 radio speeches for Taft in the primary campaign on my own time and my own money. I was wholeheartedly an enthusiastic for the nomination and the presidency because I trusted him and he was going generally in my direction.
The fact that he didn’t see two or three issues out of ten the way I saw them didn’t dampen the energy of my personal support for him in the slightest. But if and when I am a member of any organization, political or otherwise, and there is disagreement on the part of the any sizable percentage of the membership as to 3 out of 10 of the organization’s policies are planks, a splintering of the organization into two groups is almost inevitable. Personal leadership holds together a following in the way that organizational leadership never can. At present, we are in the position of trying to defeat a disciplined, well armed, expertly commanded army with a collection of debating societies, and it can’t be done.
So let’s look briefly at the possibility, the advantages and the disadvantages of finding this desperately needed leader in the political field. And the easiest way to do this is to conduct a discussion around some individual from the very start. Now, the one man who comes nearest to measuring up to all the needs and qualifications whom we see on the political horizon at the present time is Barry Goldwater. I know Barry fairly well. I’d love to see him President of the United States. I’d love to see him President of the United States. And maybe someday we shall.
But does anybody in this room think there is any slightest chance of Barry Goldwater supplying the dynamic overall leadership needed to save this country for anybody to be president of? If so, I think he is still not fully aware of the nature and totality of the forces at work. The Gold Warrior, by the very circumstances of his political success, present prestige and the expectations of his supporters will inevitably think and move in terms of political warfare, even if he personally should reach the point and the understanding of wanting to consider political action as just a part, no matter how important, of much broader overall action.
How much chance do you think there is that his friends and supporters would let him step out of the strictly political role in which he has been so successful? How much chance is there that they would let him build and utilize forceful leadership on all of the other fronts where we must fight the communists? How many of the steps which we discussed yesterday afternoon and which I am sure must be taken, taken if we are to have any chance at all? Do you think you could count on Barry Goldwater’s leadership to bring about, no matter how much he was beseeched and no matter how much he himself came to feel inclined to do so, or more for the other illustrative points that will arise than for any hopes offered by the prospect? Let’s look at Richard Nixon in this connection.
He’s an extreme smart man. He is one of the ablest, shrewdest, most disingenuous and slipperiest politicians that ever showed up on the American scene. He can sit in Washington one night and convince some of the most modern Republicans that that he’s the best ball carrier they have and spend four hours in the Waldorf Towers the next day convincing MacArthur and Herbert Hoover that he is their man. He can use the tremendously overrated and over publicized but actually highly cautious part he played in the Alger Hiss exposure to hang on to the hopeful loyalty of the vigorous anti communists.
At the very time when he is insinuating himself into the good graces of the left by quietly knifing McCarthy, Nixon could pose as a conservative Republican congressman and yet be one of the original founders in 1950 of Republican advance. This was intended to be not the Republican opposition to, but the Republican teammate of Americans for Democratic Action. And it even had some interlocking left wingers who were members of both groups. Nixon can claim state still to be vigorously anti communist. Yet when he has a chance as Vice President to break the tie and cast a decisive vote for HR3 to reestablish some chance of prosecution of subversives actually advocating violent overthrow of our government, what happens? He moves heaven and earth to have Wallace Bennett found and pressured into voting against HR3, defeating the measure so that the Vice President will not have to vote.
What good would such a man be to us even as President unless outside forces and accomplishments made it opportunistic and expedient for him to ride an anti communist wave which those outside forces had created. As for being a leader, the sad truth, hard for many hopeful and wishful conservative Republicans to realize is that Richard Nixon, a most engaging personality and clever politician, has never been a leader in connection with any event or development or at any stage in his career. He has been a rider of waves so far as public support was concerned and a manipulator of uncanny skill behind the scenes.
I have, I have made these remarks here in this really inner circle group in order to emphasize the wisdom of the old advice. Put not your faith in politicians. I am thoroughly, I am thoroughly convinced that we cannot count on politicians, political leadership or even political action, except as a part of something much deeper and broader to save us. Now I didn’t always feel that way and I think that up to the time that the nomination was stolen from Bob Taft in 1952, it was still possible to have saved our country from the Immediate communist danger anyway, primarily by political action.
But my study of the whole picture convinced me more and more that one, no one outspoken senator nor a dozen outspoken senators and no amount of the ephemeral political support they might muster could possibly save our country unless. Unless there was encompassing them and their efforts and support this far larger and broader movement to which I keep referring. Two, that there was not going to be any such movement without the dynamic overall personal leadership to which I have also been referring. And three, that with all of my own shortcomings, there wasn’t anybody else on the horizon willing to give their whole lives to the job with the determination and dedication I would put into it if I didn’t.
What really. What really moved me to cross this Rubicon, however, the consideration which more than any other gradually brought me the necessary measure of courage and determination for so staggering an undertaking was another result of many years of study of not only the present but the past. This is the conviction that even warding off communist slavery and reversing the socialist trend is only half the the battle. We can never win even that half unless both leadership and following have a positive dream which is more important as a hope than the negative nightmare is as a fear.
Unless the promise of what we can build supplies more motivation than the terror of what we must destroy. And unless this faith in the future is based on a deeper faith in eternal truths, the nature of these truths and the tenets of this book. Faith, which I hope and believe every man in this room can accept and approve, I shall come to later this morning. What I’m trying to do here as an introduction to and part of our thinking about how to rid America of the collectivist cancer, is simply this. I want to convince you, as I am convinced that only dynamic personal leadership offers any chance for us to save either our material or our spiritual spiritual inheritance.
I want to convince you, as I am convinced that even under such leadership we have no chance unless the specific battles are fought as part of a larger and more lasting movement to restore once again an upward reach to the heart of man. And I have wished to make clear what you are bound to be assuming already, that with whatever I have in me of faith, dedication and energy, I intend to offer that leadership to all who are willing to help me. Section six. To restore responsibility. With that much explanation as background, let’s see what basic principle we can establish and what specific objective we can define with regard to the particular battle against collectivism.
And it seems to me, gentlemen, that the whole essence of our purpose can be summarized in just five Less government and more responsibility. The principle is simple enough for all to understand, and yet it is broad enough, I believe, to be comprehensive with regard to all that we really desire to attain through political action, we must try to make it a convincing political standard and an accepted goal. What we must start asking our fellow citizens everywhere to consider is on the basis of all known past human experience, are there any general conclusions with regard to the organization of society which can be set forth with confidence? It seems to me clear that there certainly are.
1. First, government is necessary some degree of government in any civilized society. Two Second, while government is necessary, it is basically a non productive expression, an overhead cost supported by the productive economy. 3 Third, government is frequently evil. 4 Fourth, government is always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom. 5 Whatever must be done by government will always cost more than if it could be done by individuals or smaller groups. 6. Government. 6 Government by its size, its momentum and its authority will not only perpetuate errors of doctrine or of policy longer than they would otherwise retain acceptance, but it will multiply their effectiveness on a geometric scale as against the arithmetical cumulative effect of those errors, if confined to individuals or smaller groups.
7 as any society becomes reasonably settled and shakes down into a semi permanent pattern of economic and political life, the drive always begins to have government become the management of the social enterprise rather than merely its agent for certain clear purposes. Yet a government trying to step in and improve the working of a free market is exactly like a man who takes a lighted lantern outdoors at noon of a bright June day to show you the sun. 88 as a government increases in power, and as a means of increasing its power, it always has a tendency to squeeze out the middle class, to destroy or weaken the middle for the benefit of the top and the bottom.
9 the form of government is not nearly so important as its quality. 10 which brings us to the last and, and in my opinion the most important of these basic generalizations concerning government and our 10th point is that neither the form of government nor its quality is as important as its quantity. The increasing quantity of government in all nations has constituted the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. The greatest enemy of man is the greatest enemy of man is and always has been government. And the larger, the more extensive that government, the greater the enemy. The communists believe that a collectivist society should swallow up all individuals, make their lives and their energies completely subservient to the needs and the purposes of the collectivist state, and that any means are permissible to achieve this end.
The true Americanist believes that the individual should retain the freedom to make his own bargain with life and the responsibility for the results of that bargain. And that means are as important as ends in the civilized social order which he desires. There are many stages. There are many stages of welfarism, socialism and collectivism in general. But communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction. In this final state, communism, you have a society in which class distinctions are greater than in any other, but where position in these classes is determined solely by demagogic political skill and ruthless cunning.
And you have a society in which every fault of government that we have discussed above is held to be a benefit and a desirable part of the framework of life. But there is an exactly opposite direction. This direction leads toward a governmental environment for human life founded on the basis of long experience with government. An experience which shows government to be a necessary evil, but a continuous break on all progress and the ultimate enemy of all freedom. It is the forward direction, the upward direction. And Americanism, I hope, shall become its name. Section 7 and help to build a better world.
We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. We in the ages, lying in the buried past of the earth, built Nineveh with our sighing and Babel itself with our mirth, and overthrew them with prophesying to the old of the new World’s word. For each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth. For the last 50 years our age has been a dream that was dying to this very group at this very moment. I am proposing that we turn our face races forward instead of backward, begin to make even our defensive actions fit into a constructive design, and do our part to usher in a new age that is coming to birth.
Now, I don’t expect the New York Times to begin announcing excitedly in January that obviously the world started on a new era in Indianapolis in December 1958. Of course, it is only the work we do afterwards. Afterwards, the work we persuade and inspire others to do, and the long results and widening reach of both, that can make of this meeting anything but a two day seminar in philosophy and current affairs. But if every man here should leave tonight feeling in his own mind that he had been at the beginning of a new chapter in history, it would be true.
It would be true no matter how long the historians might take take to find it out. The basic reason why our old age is dying, as I tried yesterday to make clear, is that the faith which was the core of its Strength no longer commands the unquestioning loyalty of enough of its devotees. For the dream of any nation or any people must depend on faith. The foundation of our new dream must be faith, or it will never come to pass. Where is this faith and what is this faith so true that neither our hearts nor our reasons can deny it, so broad that it takes in without violation the faith of our fathers, and so deep that it can inspire martyrdom at need as to where it’s right in front of us and as to what it is, exactly what we in this room already and actually believe.
Now, first let me repeat here for the devout Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants who are among my best friends and strongest supporters, that it is no part of my purpose to disturb their beliefs in the slightest, or the beliefs of any man or woman who really does have a religious faith instead of just the shell of one. What I am concerned about, what we must all be vitally concerned about today as the very essence of our problem, is morality, integrity and purpose. That morality. That morality must be based on a bedrock of faith. For those who already have such a bedrock of faith and stand on it and abide by it, I can offer nothing, and I would certainly take nothing away.
But for those who are no longer sure exactly where they do stand, on what rocks or how firmly I want to try to show them that all of these bedrocks together constitute a foundation with room and strength for us all. For unless we willingly anchor our moral judgments to eternal truths, we become just chaff blown always before the winds of confusion. For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs. That there is a purpose in man beyond anything called for by his individual needs and far greater than his personal desires, can be denied only by the most depraved maniac or the most ignorant fool.
One of the best summarizations of the force and beauty and eternal quality of that purpose is contained in William Herbert Carruth’s each in His Own Tongue, which I should like to recall to your minds A picket frozen on duty, a mother starved for her brood, Socrates drinking the hemlock, and Jesus on the rune, and millions who, humble and nameless, the straight hard pathway plodding. Some call it consecration, and others call it God who can read that realize the incontrovertible and wonderful truth of the story of man’s purpose at work, which the poet tells and fail to feel reverently bound to serve that same purpose faithfully and well.
What is that purpose? And this too has been summarized by yet another poet in just one brilliant Line, thou hast put an upward reach in the heart of man. Not only are we a part of some mighty purpose beyond our understanding, and not only do we have a clear duty to be true to that purpose to the fullest extent that we are allowed to grasp its workings and its direction, but all human experience shows that the total happiness of any generation and of its posterity is directly tied to the respective of that generation. For the upward reach in man’s nature.
We have all the reason here that man can ask, divine or human or pragmatic, for keeping our consciences attuned to the emotions and impulses which increase man’s upward reach, and for then obeying those consciences, obeying by commission as well as omission to the utmost of our respective will, powers and abilities. The substance of my conscience, as I believe it is really the substance of the conscience of every man in this room, was gratitude and a corresponding sense of responsibility, gratitude, if you will let me paraphrase Henley’s line without the slightest implication of blasphemy, gratitude to whatever God there was and gratitude to all of the noblemen of the past for the life and the environment, for that life which was given me, and responsibility to God and man to be worthy so far as I was able, of the human race at its best.
And gentlemen, what firm a foundation can we possibly need for the faith on which to build our new age and with which to inaugurate the dream that is coming to birth wherever we turn? In looking at whatever blessings we have for the present and hopes for the future, we find a need for gratitude that makes the acceptance of responsibility a duty and a source of inward happiness. Consider, for instance and for an instant, the blessing of freedom. Kipling once wrote, truly, all we know of freedom, all we need to know this our fathers won for us long and long ago.
Are we, as Lalo put it, going to be traitors to our sires and lose that freedom for our children and their children? Macaulay had Horatius say, and how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods? And so we ask ourselves in simple sincerity, if it becomes necessary, just how can man die better, especially if in doing so he appreciably reduces the odds faced by his compatriots in their fight against the overwhelming forces of evil threatening us today. But it is not even to the martyrs, perhaps, that we owe the most.
There have been missionaries and scholars, the Catholic monks of the Middle Ages, poets and philosophers, builders and explorers, statesmen and scientists throughout centuries receding into the unknown past, who have toiled and dreamed and sacrificed and died that you and I might have the comforts and freedoms and hopes that we enjoy now in so fair and happy a land. One of the worst and most sad and disturbing traits of many of our young people today is that they take their inheritance for granted and have no thought of its cost. This is a vital part of the moral breakdown that is endangering our civilization.
It shows how basic and necessary a component of faith is man’s feeling of continuity and gratitude. Let us, with a faith for the future based on this very principle of gratitude to God and man, live up to ourselves, lived up to by ourselves, and made a living and articulate faith for others by both example and teaching. Let us try to bring many of these young people who are now at loose ends because of their lack of any faith, back into the conscious current of man’s increasing purpose for a code of honor and an ennobling sense of responsibility are themselves gifts to the human soul which have been won by its upward reach.
And so, gentlemen, without any claim to goodness, wisdom or originality, I have tried in far too short a time for so huge a subject to indicate to you the elements of a faith which I still hope and believe is shared by all of you, no matter how differently you might have explained or expressed it. It is a faith for which I have earnestly hoped that it might encompass the individual beliefs of most men of goodwill, that it might refill our ancient funks of inspiration, and that it would become a basis and a beginning of renewed dedication to a dream of man’s future.
Section 8. Through the John Birch Society. Now, how do we go about asking men, in the words of Santayana, to trust the soul’s invincible surmise? We come at long last to the question of ways and means and methods in connection with all of these plans and aims and hopes. I am proposing as the most immediately tangible outcome of this meeting the formation of the John Birch Society. And I ask you not to give undue thought at present to the name. In the small packets for each of you, there are copies of my little book, the Life of John Birch.
I hope you will read it when you have the opportunity. If you have not already done so, or even if you have, you will find, and, I believe, agree, that John Birch possessed, in his own character all of those noble traits and ideals which we should like to see become symbolized by the John Birch Society and the kind of life of peaceful opportunity and responsibility which John Birch wanted for his fellow Americans and for his Chinese friends and for all men of good will, is exactly the kind of life we should like to see possible everywhere.
It is my fervent hope that the John Birch Society will last for hundreds of years and exert an increasing influence for the temporal good and the spiritual ennoblement of mankind throughout those centuries. For I am staking my whole aspiration to play my part in forwarding man’s work. One increasing purpose on whatever can be accomplished through it. The John Birch Society is to be a monolithic body. A republican form of government or of organization has many attractions and advantages under certain favorable conditions. But under less happy circumstances, it lends itself too readily to infiltration, distortion and disruption.
And democracy, of course, in government or organization, as the Greeks and Romans both found out, and as I believe every man in this room clearly recognizes, democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud. The fear of tyrannical oppression of individuals and other arguments against the authoritative structure in the form of governments have little bearing on the case of a voluntary association where the authoritative power can be exercised and enforced only by persuasion. And what little validity they do have is outweighed by the advantages of firm and positive direction of the Society’s energies.
Especially for the near future and for the fight against communism, which is the first great task of the Society, it is imperative that all the strength we can muster be subject to smoothly functioning direction from the top. As I have said before, no collection of debating societies is ever going to stop the communist conspiracy from taking us over. And I have and I have no intention of adding another frustrated group to their number. We mean business every step of the way. We can allow for differences of opinion, we shall need and welcome advice, and we expect to use the normal measure of diplomacy always called for in dealing with human beings.
But whenever differences of opinion become translated into a lack of loyal support, we shall have shortcuts for eliminating both without going through any congress of so called democratic processes. Otherwise, Communist infiltrators could bog us down in interminable disagreements, schisms and feuds before we ever became seriously effective. The purpose of the John Birch Society, as officially stated, will be to promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world. That says it all. Members of the John Birch Society, not only in the United States, but anywhere in the world, not only can be good patriots in their respective countries, but necessarily will be.
For internationalism as it is conceived and promoted today, is an attempt to impose more government and A more centralized one world government on all of us everywhere. For that reason, it is automatically contrary to everything we stand for. And one of the movements we shall oppose with all the strength we can. The John Birch Society will function almost entirely through small local chapters. Each will have a chapter leader appointed through offices of the Society in the field who have themselves been duly appointed by headquarters. The dues are whatever the member wants to make them, with a minimum of $24 per year for men and $12 per year for women.
We should expect the chapter leader to get all of his or her chapters together at least once a month and in many cases, oftener. And we expect the chapter leader to be in practically continuous contact with his or her members, to whatever extent may be necessary for handling the organizational mechanics of the Society and for helping to form new chapters. We shall have a paid staff man with the title of coordinator for each area of the proper size above these coordinators. In time, we shall have supervisors with the rank or title of major coordinators. And we shall further build the organizational front framework from the bottom up as made necessary by sufficient membership.
We are expecting far more work and dedication and far more sacrifice of other interests on the part of those who do become members of the John Birch Society than you have ever thought of giving to any other organization which you joined or even considered joining. For unless we have the cumulative weight and effect of such solid effort and sacrifice on the part of our members as a weapon to be wielded against the Communists, we are certainly not going to be able to hold on to even the increasingly confused, dark and immoral world. We now have much less help to build a better one.
So we are asking for a lot, and we want you to know it. If and when you sign an application blank for membership in the John Birch Society. That brings us next to a consideration as to the very nature of our undertaking, which needs to be made clear. For all revolutions, as Metternich once pointed out, begin in the best minds and work downward. While most religions begin at the bottom with the masses and gradually acquire both respectability and acceptance at the top. We are neither and both far from founding a religion. We are merely urging Protestants, Catholics, Jews or Moslems to be better Christians, better Jews or better Moslems in accordance with the deepest and most humanitarian promptings of their own religious beliefs.
And we are simply trying to draw a circle of faith in God’s power and purpose and of man’s relationship to both, which is broad and inclusive enough to take each man man’s specific faith into that circle without violation. Yet the evangelical fervor with which we expect our members to fight the forces of evil and work for a better world makes certain principles with regard to religious groups apply to ourselves. We are not beginning any revolution, or even a counter revolution in any technical sense, because while we are opposing a conspiracy, we are not ourselves making use of conspiratorial methods.
Yet our determination to overthrow an entrenched tyranny is the very stuff out of which revolutions are made. The net result of these reflections is that we are not a copy of any movement of the past. We are unique. We are ourselves. We are something new, as befits a moving force for a new age. We believe in profiting by all human experience, but we shall make our own amalgam of the organizational metals forged by that experience with the mercury of our own purpose, without donning sackcloth and ashes. We shall try to inspire saintly men to join our efforts to make this a better world.
And without building barricades in the streets, we shall still try to rally rational men to our efforts to preserve the best of the world we already have. And now, gentlemen, I am nearing the end of the semi formal part of this long undertaking as to what is expected of you in either effort or money. If you are thinking of halfway measures, we might as well quit now. But I might as well also reveal my fanaticism by telling you that there is no further force and no discouragement which could make me quit or even put less of my life and energy into the struggle.
The last, the last resort of my own mind has been expressed by Louise Imogen guinea. To fear not sensible failure, nor covet the game at all, but fighting, fighting, fighting, die driven against the wall. I repeat, however, that we do not have to die driven against any wall, nor do we have to lose the struggle at all. As I’ve said elsewhere, there’s enough strength, enough money, enough intelligence and enough patriotism in the vast business community of America to form the nucleus that will stop and destroy the communist conspiracy if we can stir it to action in time.
What I am proposing here is the mechanics and the leadership through men like yourselves, by which it can be stirred to action and that action made effective. Let me repeat just one thing that I said to you yesterday morning. There are in the satellite countries today thousands of men just like you and me, who only 10 years ago could regularly meet in such groups as I propose. Not only that, but they could go out openly with and before larger groups to try to spread the alarm and to stop the communists from taking over their countries. These men now say to each other, but largely to themselves, if I had only known, if I had only recognized and believed the danger and.
And the horror of communist rule. In time, there is nothing I would not have given to save my freedom, my family, my country. If I had only recognized the urgency and the desperate need. Now it is all too late, and any sacrifice, even of life itself, would be entirely in vain. We do not have to be too late, and we do not have to lose the fight. Communism has its weaknesses, and the conspiracy has its vulnerable points. We have many layers of strength not yet rotted by all of the infiltration and political sabotage to which we have been subjected.
Our danger is both immense and imminent, but it is not beyond the possibility of being overcome by the resistance that is still available. All we must find and build and use to win is sufficient understanding. Let’s create that understanding and build that resistance with everything mortal men can put into the effort while there still is time. Then while we are destroying and after we have destroyed the communist tyranny, let’s drive on towards our higher goals of more permanent accomplishment, towards an era of less government and more responsibility in which we can create a better world. And now, ladies and gentlemen, you can simply be yourselves again.
Fifteen years after that last setting, we are over 2000 virtues and friends at dinner together in Los Angeles on March 9, 1974. Those of us at this, this table that were a part of that party of 11, and I’m sure all of you now have a realization of how accurately prophetic Mr. Welch was 15 years ago. Now, let’s save time for him by omitting any further introduction or comment by me or applause by you as we hear what he has to say about the next 15 years. Bob. Ladies and gentlemen, we shall now condense what needs at least two full days into 30 minutes.
So please forgive the extent to which these remarks become both cryptic and staccato. We pick up at the point where I had just finished the last line of the two day presentation at Indianapolis. Then Macmillan leaned forward in his chair, holding out towards me what looked like an old envelope on which he had been scribbling. I stepped forward, took it, went back behind the podium, and then, to my delighted surprise, was able to hold up for the other 10 men to see a check from Ben to the John Birch Society for $1,000 with a note that read here, Bob, we’re in business.
Indeed, we were in business at once. And as Bob Stoddard has pointed out in relatively better financial position than we’ve ever been since. What’s more, we proceeded to survive in a bitterly hostile environment and are now still celebrating our 15th anniversary, which occurred exactly three months ago. So we begin this look toward the future with an extremely brief glance at the past. Section A Some points to Remember one. Throughout all of the diverse pulling and pressures from within and from without, the Society has been kept strictly on its originally charted course. 2. It is still unique as the only cohesive, voluntary, non religious organization for adult education on a permanent nationwide basis in all human history.
3 Consequently, the society has had to become a pioneer in almost every respect, not only as to its organizational structure, but by creating its own means and methods for carrying out this educational task. 4 It offers the only kind of opposition which the collectivists in general and the contemporary international conspiracy in particular have never faced before. We have maintained education as our total strategy and truth as our only weapon. So the conspiracy has known only one way to fight back, which was never try to refute the accusations, but always seek to destroy the accuser. Consequently, the Society, from the time it was two years old, began to face more vicious smears, lying propaganda, massive attacks and undermining tactics than have ever been turned on any other non religious group in America.
5 Despite those impediments, our thoroughly organized educational program is now functioning solidly, continuously and with rapidly increasing effectiveness in all 50 states. Also at an embryonic stage in three foreign countries and with a and with an amorphous influence that extends thinly throughout the world. 6 the educational tools and methods of the John Birch Society now include books, pamphlets and reprints distributed by the millions of copies per year, a monthly and a weekly magazine which are becoming increasingly recognized as authoritative in their field. Films, filmstrips, records, reel to reel tapes and cassettes which altogether are played to an enormous quantity of people and a speaker’s bureau which when measured by the number of engagements filled or the total audience reached, we believe to be the largest in the world.
Seven through literally thousands of ad hoc committees, including our speakers forums, we have multiplied the reach and effectiveness of our actual members at least fourfold. Eight through the tireless patriotic thought, labor and dedication of its staff and tens of thousands of its members, the Society has played an extremely important role in certain basic battles staged by the Conspiracy. These have included our part in in preventing the establishment of a Negro Soviet republic in the southeastern states, our stopping cold almost entirely through the impact of Alan Stang’s pamphlets and speeches. A similar movement by Reyes T arena to set up A Chicano independent government in some of our southwestern states and largely by using patriotic Indians as our speakers and project leaders.
Our current blocking of a similar American Indian movement so decisively that the communist controlled scoundrels at the head of it are blaming us for all of their troubles. 9:9 with regard to more explicit activities, let us offer an example. The notorious Dr. Martin Luther King was a spouse, a pro communist philandering, big spending, troublemaking, violence, creating liar and crook as the conspiracy has ever sponsored in any of its programs against any people. And almost single handed through our very courageous and patriotic patriotic Negro speakers. We exposed these facts so thoroughly that King became only an embarrassment to the insiders like Nelson Rockefeller who were financing his carnival show.
In fact, during the last weeks of his life, King canceled entirely the whole series of speeches already set up for him on a tour from Memphis to Richmond and bank. Rather than be up against the exposures in a parallel series of speeches over the same area by our speaker Julia Brown, he could no longer be of any practical value to the insiders at all as a live agitator, but only as a form falsely glorified dead martyr. So much to our regret, that gruesome transformation was arranged by the conspiracy in very short order. Also, let us mention the magnificent role played by our support your local police committees all over the United States in putting an almost complete end to the Communist inspired and communist control civilian police review boards.
These boards. These boards had been designed for the ruthless harassment of all police officers who tried to do their duty in handling communist criminals and agitators. And there have been about 40 other specific, similar, specific accomplishments of major or appreciable importance for which the Society has been responsible in the course of its efforts to expose and slow down or stop various projects of the conspiracy. 10 and most important of all is a general consideration. For a dozen years there have been unceasing efforts, mostly behind the scenes on the part of both Richard Nixon and William F.
Buckley Jr. To damage or destroy the John Birch Society. There have been more open but recurrent attacks, frequently laced with vicious lies for the same purpose on the part of some 30 senators, governors and pundits of the press and the airwaves. Yet despite all of these smears, the standing and character of our members, the dependability of our educational tools and the quality of our methods have gradually brought about an immense change in the attitude of the public towards the John Birch Society. Until today, the fraction of the public that feels favorably towards the Society has climbed from about 4% to at least 50%.
And a final and a final measure of our value to the anti communist cause can be expressed most comprehensively in a single thought. Suppose there had been no John Birch Society at all and no sign of its educational program over these past 15 years. Then just try to imagine how much more completely in the dark the American people would be today about all that is happening and how tremendously easier it would be for the insiders of the conspiracy to carry out the final steps in their plot to enslave us. Section B How fares the other side? 1 For almost 200 years the goal of this self perpetuating conspiracy has been to destroy all religion, all regularly established governments and all traditional human institutions and then to impose its new world order on the chaotic ruins that will be left.
The conspirators have never been able to destroy anything of importance, however, by attacks from the outside, but only by subversion from the inside. Almost every member of the conspiracy therefore leads a continuous life of falsehood to his friends, of pretense to the public, and of underlying doubt with regard to his own future. From Algerhist to Richard Nixon, every communist or insider has a knowing fear that although he is a peacock today, he may be a feather duster tomorrow. The abnormality of such existence adds up to a basic liability which is forever tugging away at the solidity of the whole conspiratorial organization.
And the effects of this defiance of all normal human instincts are beginning to show up today on the whole international scene more clearly than ever before. 2. The insiders and the Illuminati before them have always intended that about 3% of any population should have absolute rule over the other 97%. This is because their obscene lust for power is more happily satisfied by success in proportion to the scarcity of others who also enjoy the prequest. In other words, by an inverse ratio. This seems a very strange and cruel psychological quirk to traditional Americans in a country where even those with the ambition and ability to become very rich have always wanted to see others become rich also, and to have everybody around them enjoy all the comforts and even luxuries of an increasing national prosperity.
And this attitude alone on the part of the insiders, as demonstrated at present by their calculated effort to wipe out the whole middle class and to reduce everybody but themselves to a level of bare subsistence, is going to militate very strongly against them as their Design becomes more obvious. 3. The whole conspiracy always has been and still is an overextended, very thin shell of power being constantly enlarged by bluff audacity and the ruthless use of terror terror to smother all resistance piecemeal. The insiders themselves never know just when or where this shell may be broken, nor how serious the break may be.
The forced exile of the pro communist King Constantine of Greece by an anti communist military junta was one example. A more recent one has been the replacement of Salvador Allende, the communist boss and would be tyrant of Chile by an anti communist military group which certainly seemed, as does the one in Greece, to be determined to restore a constitutional republican government to their respective countries as rapidly as possible. The conspiracy certainly cannot be sure of what is going to happen on mainland China when Mao Chee Tung dies, or how long Willy Brandt can last in West Germany when, despite all of the moral support that Richard Nixon could give him, he still barely won the last election in 1972 by two boats which were purchased through outright bribery.
Also, of course, Pere Elliott Trudeau, still ruling Canada without even a majority, could have the sordid facts of his utterly treasonous and criminal past begin to catch up with him in the minds of the Canadians. And there are a dozen other seriously weak spots in the shell where there could be a blowout at any time. 4 in Soviet Russia itself, as you may learn from all the trustworthy news that you can excavate, there is doubt that even another stallion could hold the lid down tight enough on the boiling pot. There is a crime wave among the youth at least equal to our own.
Over half of all crimes of assault, robbery, rape and hooliganism by children of the ages of 16 and 17 are due to intoxication. A recent report showed that over 80% of these youngsters had started drinking vodka before they were 16. There are now increased fines for parents and jail sentences for others who encourage youth under 18 to escapism from sordid reality by the nepenthe of alcohol. But even these tender attentions from the loving Big Brother government do not seem to provide the promised degree of bliss in this communist paradise. Nor does anything else. Charges of ideological aberration and even treasonous heresy by some officials against other officials have become commonplace.
Solzhenitsyn has had plenty of company among scientists as well as other writers in risking imprisonment, torture, or death for complaining about the in human conditions and the spread of terror in many parts of the vast Soviet Union besides the prison camps, even after half a century of unceasing attempts to stamp out all religion, the powers that be today and have some hopes of still being tomorrow, are now having some trouble with a religious revival. More trouble than for many years. Indeed, the resistance of all kinds at any cost has now gone so far that for the first time Soviet planes on domestic flights are being hijacked by Soviet citizens in attempts to escape.
The plain truth is that the commissars who are trying to rule the Soviet Union today are sitting on a powder keg which would blow up at any minute. That they ceased to have the ostentatious financial support, moral support and material support of the United States government. And the same thing is true of a great many other regions within the vast commonest corral of nations. 5 the truth is that everything now depends more than ever before on what happens in the United States. And this is a shaky read on which the insiders are leaning. They are using the protracted assault on Nixon to distract American minds from what Nixon is still doing to advance advance communist plans.
Also to cause distrust and despair in American minds about our whole economic political system so as to get an easier acceptance of drastic changes which spell Communism. But they are also generating some very serious bitterness and rivalries within top revolutionary circles. Few men, if any, have ever done more to increase communist power, power and prestige at home and abroad than Richard Nixon. And few have been more skillful at cementing grateful communist commissars and ambitious insiders into the circle of his own support. Yet some of the most powerful insiders seem determined to throw Nixon overboard in order to put more power directly into the hands of the Rockefeller faction and such Rockefeller agents as Henry Kissinger.
And we believe that they are thereby creating a lot of future headaches for the whole conspiracy. Six More important than any of these considerations, however, is a now rapid awakening among the American people. What happened to the Equal Rights Amendment last year and to the Genocide Treaty and the land use Bill this year are just straws in the wind. The insiders have not dared to install actual rationing of gasoline which they have so badly wanted. Nor has the Nixon administration yet dared to establish full diplomatic relations with Red China. Also, we think the present obvious intention to surrender the Panama Canal completely into international communist hands through the communist government of Panama may run into quite a jolt if a million buffer stickers appear on that many American cars reading as follows, don’t give Panama our canal, give them Kissinger instead.
And ladies and gentlemen, we are accepting orders for those stickers right now at 4 for $1. 7. These are also straws in the wind. But the insiders can see which way the straws are blowing. The Nixon Administration already has executive orders on the books sufficient to establish a complete Dictatorship. But Nixon does not dare to make a full test of either their reception or their constitutionality. Regional government Regional government is being pushed hard, but still on the phony pretense of increasing federal cooperation with state and local governments, rather than usurping all of their functions and powers.
The drive for more and bigger crime waves, although fully supported and encouraged by the pro communist governors of at least five states, has not yet dared go far enough to make the American people welcome a national gestapo. All of the conspiratorial forces, with municipal, state and federal backing, have not yet succeeded in taking our guns away from us. And the insiders have never been able, and the insiders have never been able to establish permanent communist rule over any country whose citizens were armed. Eight and the biggest problem of the whole conspiracy, as we said in the March Billington, is even more basic.
It is the incredible strength, productivity, resourcefulness and momentum of the American free enterprise system which makes it so extremely difficult to destroy. Also, there is a changing mood, a rising spirit of anger and determination coming up in the American people which is crowding the insiders into a race against time. For time, like truth, is on our side. So with all of these factors, so with all of these factors and circumstances in mind, we solemnly ask ourselves, how stands the battle today? And in deadly seriousness. Thus we repeat the answer that we started giving you in 1973, early in the year.
We think that for the past year the objective odds have been, and as of today still are about even in this struggle for victory by either side. This is because we now have the size and strength and resources. Sorry, that’s a misprint. This is not because we now have the size. Nothing got left out. This is not because we now have the size and strength and resources to meet the enemy on realistic terms. Not at all. We don’t. Not at all, my friends. We never delude ourselves nor anybody else. But it is primarily, we think, the odds objective or even, because we really mean business.
In this most crucial fight of all human history, as we always have, we believe it is possible for us to continue expanding our total program until it does measure up to the practical need before the hour is too late. And that even if the conspirators, sensing and fearing this possibility, should have some of us meet with fatal accidents or start unleashing against the society more vicious falsehoods than ever before, we are still prepared. Our total undertaking now has the organization, the experience, the courage and the willpower to use our growing strength to best advantage, to act as a catalyst and a rallying point for the patriotic uprising that is now underway, and thus to play a decisive, decisive part in helping to save our country and hence our whole civilization from the living death that is called communism.
Section C, which is the last of the three sections in this section C. So what must we do to be saved? Having thus used two thirds of our time on the background of this speech, let us now use the other third on the substance that will justify its title. So we first answer our question in the words of St. Augustine, we must pray as if it were all up to God, but work as if it were all up to us. And fundamentally our own work, of course, must be exactly what we have already been doing, only a great deal more of it, with more people to help us.
But the major purpose of this whole effort tonight is to add a powerful new concept to our understanding and our aims. To make that concept clear, we must creep up on it through a few brief items of history, out of a thousand details we should like to offer for strengthening our point. So we skip many volumes and begin with one most significant fact. There was absolutely no reason on earth for the American people, or any other people for that matter, to become involved in World War I. The whole horrible conflict was deliberately plotted and brought about by insiders of the Master conspiracy through their working in and on the governments of both sides with loyalty to none.
Their objective was to create the ways and means through which the war could be used to advance the communist movement. The insider’s three major goals in this respect with regard to World War I were a to overthrow the government of Russia and enable the communists to establish there a first physical base of communist power b to drag the United States into this kind of totalitarian foreign war with all the changes in the structure of our government and the outlook of our people that the war would make possible and c to give birth to the embryo of their future world government in the form of the League of Nations.
The first two items on that profoundly evil agenda came off according to design, and it is hard to tell which was most important to the conspirators. For from our entry into World War I, there was a prompt beginning and thereafter a gradual development over the next 25 years of the role of the United States as a food supplier, equipment manufacturer, prestige builder, financial aid, ideological disciple, general benefactor, wartime ally, military arsenal and vicious hatchet man for the Soviet Communists until by the end Of World War II, the United States government had clearly become the most powerful single force in promoting the rise of communist power all over the world.
Most of this was exactly in line with what the insurance insiders in the United States and elsewhere had plotted and expected. So naturally, they had used many waves of deceptive propaganda with much diplomatic trickery by their tools in all the governments involved and every act of cold blooded murder or vicious treason to their respective countries which Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill together could devise in order to involve us in in World War I and its aftermath at Versailles. But in typical communist fashion, as a means of continuing and increasing our involvement in world affairs, the insiders also invented a semantic weapon with which to smear and ridicule and discredit all Americans who were sensible enough to oppose their sinister plans.
The basic term of this ideological tool was isolationist or isolationism. And over the next few decades the insiders made it into a verbal bludgeon of tremendous force. For World War II was plotted, contrived and utilized by the same conspiracy for the very same purposes as World War I, plus many other purposes as well as the same ones. Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall also aided every step of the way by Winston Churchill even produced some improvements on the lies and treason and ruthlessness of Wilson and House in order to drag us into this new international maelstrom and by this time even prominent Americans.
This is by getting into World War, we’re getting into World War. Even prominent Americans of unquestionable patriotism quailed before the prospect of being called isolationists. Until by the decades after that war, the now communist dominated American government had tens of thousands of bureaucrats, millions of American soldiers and billions of American dollars scattered all over the world. This was for no other purpose, possible real reason, than to help the communists to impose their brutal tyranny on an average of 7,000 more newly enslaved human beings somewhere in the world every hour of every day throughout every year, every lying pretense or diplomatic skullduggery imaginable, as well as every foul misuse conceivable of American money and military might with was being utilized on an enormous scale for that purpose by our communist controlled State Department.
And the surest way to discredit all critics of this rampant treason was to vilify them as isolationists. But the time has come at last when it is both wise and possible to identify this brazen fraud as one of the most bright, blatant big lies in the whole realm of communist propaganda. So brush the insider’s dust out of your eyes, my friends, and the commonest soap suds out of your brain and ask yourselves in all honesty, what on earth is wrong with the United States simply minding its own business are with having its foreign policy function primarily for the safety and benefit of the American people.
Which is exactly what we had done for the first 140 years of our existence as a nation, to the incredible advantage of ourselves and everybody else. Everybody, that is, except a numerically small clique of power lusting conspirators who had somehow inflicted themselves on a gullible world. We do not have to pull into our shell by any means. Certainly we had never done so when Yankee clippers sailed the seven seas. Or when American automobiles first began to put the whole world on wheels. The United States should be glad to maintain the comfortable minimum of diplomatic relations with every civilized nation, as we always were.
Our people should certainly be glad to exchange commercial goods, cultural productions and happy visits with the people of all nations, as we always have been. But we should remember Richard Cobden’s famous warning that real peace and happiness will come to this earth when the peoples of different countries have as much to do with each other as possible and their governments as little as possible. And we should also remember that the continuous colossal meddling of our government with the affairs of other governments all over the world does unmeasurable damage to the people under those other governments and to our own people as well.
Let’s get back on the road to greatness which we followed with such confidence and success during our first four generations as an independent nation. Then standing on our own feet, let’s once again become an envied example for all the world by our productiveness, our inventiveness, our individual rights and freedoms and opportunities, by our sense of responsibility, our compassion for the unfortunate, our basic moral codes and our noble aspirations. And by our determination to preserve the wonderful inheritance which our founding Fathers bequeathed to us for our own descendants, and as an asylum for all worthy people who suffer under tyranny through no fault of their own.
If this were the ambition of this and of this humane course be dubbed isolationism, then let’s take pride in being called isolationists. Above all, let’s not be prevented from using our common sense, from leading patriotic lives, than standing on our God given rights through fear of a tricky phrase invented for that very purpose by the most vile and merciless criminals in all human history. Section D. I thought I’d combine this in section C when I said it was the last, but I noticed I split it and I do remember now, I did find a split it, but anyway it’s the last half of the last section.
Let me encourage you. Section D In conclusion. In fact, if your speaker were a young man of 50 and a politician, of which goodness knows he is neither, he would start running for president in 1976 on an isolationist platform, and the internationalist insiders might be amazed at how many millions of Americans would come surging to his support. So we offer the idea free to any qualified person who wants it, while we turn to a very brief summarization of what we hope the John Birch Society will help and even sometimes lead the American people to accomplish during the next 15 years.
1. Our first and most important specific undertaking should be to restore the complete independence of the United States. This includes our resolution to give get us out of the United nations and get the United nations out of the United States. 2. We must once again make our money freely redeemable in gold at some realistic price. And we must take all practicable legislative steps to prevent a recurrence of the enormous thievery and other subversive crimes that have been perpetrated on the American people through a contrived inflation by every president from Franklin roosevelt through Richard Nixon. 3. 3.
We should reduce the number of government views, bureaus of government, civilian employees, and the whole quantity of government by at least 50%. And we should achieve at least this much reduction in proper fashion through gradually convincing a majority of the American people of the wisdom of such a course. 4. We should withdraw all American troops from every spot on earth that is not American soil, except when and where such troops may be required, as decided by Congress, to protect American lives and property from criminal vandalism. 5. 5. We should get government out of the areas and functions and activities where government does not belong.
Again. Again, all steps to this end should be taken gradually, but nevertheless just as rapidly as enough of the American people can be persuaded to support such progress. Any such achievement will require a truly massive educational force. But that’s exactly what we hoped to build during the next 15 years. We could go ahead for at least 100 numbered items, but the John Birch Society will undoubtedly be working on more than that many specific projects which will be laid out in its bulletins before another 180 months will have rolled around. And all of them will fit into all of these projects will fit into the general pattern indicated by the five major objectives listed above.
So let’s really wind up this marathon monologue with one final thought. None of us can guarantee anything about what the future will bring. Your speaker knows what a job we have before us to rid our country of the scourge of communism within the next few years and then to go ahead on our constructive program so well that 15 years from now we shall already be entering an era of far less government, of a much sounder sense of responsibility and with God’s help of a better world. But I sincerely believe that it can be done. And this much I know.
If every man and woman in this audience should leave here tonight feeling in his or her own mind and heart that it can and must be done, then it surely will be. And so all of you patriots of good character, good conscience and noble ideals whom we can reach with the filmed version of this speech in a thousand other audiences, it is with a great deal of confidence and energizing will to win that we invite you to join us in our epic undertaking. While to all of you great wonderful friends in this present audience I certainly extend my very deep thanks indeed for so much patience and attention.
Thank you and good night.
[tr:tra].
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