Josh Marshall has been keeping close track of the current Bush administration drive to turn back the clock to those good old pre-Social Security days when if you were old you were poor. Unless you were already from one of the richest families around. And if your kids couldn't or wouldn't care for you, you were really in deep doo-doo.
Being poor in old age was your punishment for not being rich in your younger days. Because wealth is a sign of God's favor. And, besides, the folks who were old and poor didn't hang around as long as they do today, with all this socialistic Medicare and stuff. The Reps have to get the Social Security phase-out rolling before they turn to cutting medical care so old folks can go back to suffering and dying in the same way they did in the 1920s.
In the course of one of his recent posts on that subject, Marshall linked to this description of the Koch brothers of Koch Industries from Sourcewatch of the Center for Media and Democracy: Koch Family Foundations 04/19/04. The Koches are eager to bring back those good old days, and it seems they fund all sort of right-wing organizations.
I was familiar with the names of the Koches, because David and Charles Koch have been associated for a long time with the Libertarian Party and related causes. The linked article says that David still provides most of the annual budget for the Libertarian-oriented Cato Institute. The Koches were also active supporters of Bob Dole in his 1996 run for President.
It turns out that Old Man Koch (Fred) was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society. (There's also a Sourcewatch link (05/02/05) on the Birch Society but the first couple of paragraphs aren't displaying properly at this writing.) The Birchers have been around since 1958. The Sourcewatch reminds us of some the Birchers early "hit" publications: A Choice, Not an Echo by the later anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly; The Gravediggers by Schlafly and Chester Ward, which "claimed that U.S. military strategy and tactics were actually designed to pave the way for global communist conquest" (I came across this one time in a used book store. I had never realized what a paranoid crackpot Schlafly was until I saw that.) ; and None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer.
By the way, if you're looking for sensational reading and you're not already a drooling-at-the-mouth paranoid rightwinger, you're likely to be bored stiff by reading these or most other rightwing loony pamphlets of the Bircher type. Even though this stuff is sometimes frighteningly influential on powerful people - and on billionaires like the Koches who want to bankroll the jihad against Jews, communism, liberalism, and Lord knows what else - one reason more mainstream researchers don't dig into more of this must be in part because so much of their reading material is mind-nummingly dull.
I'm going somewhere with this, believe it or not. The Sourcewatch article observes:
In April 1966, the New York Times reported on "the increasing tempo of radical right attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, parent-teachers associations, mental health programs, the Republican party and, most recently, the ecumenical movement. … The Birch Society is by far the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country. It operates alone or in support of other extremist organizations whose major preoccupation, like that of the Birchers, is the internal Communist conspiracy in the United States."
The Birch Society was organized into cells, imitating Welch's understanding of Communist organizing techniques. "This cell segregation is aimed at preventing infiltration by the 'Communists' or other groups seeking inside information about the society," the Times reported. "Ernest Brosang, the New Jersey regional coordinator, contends that it is virtually impossible for opponents of the society to penetrate its policy-making levels." Its activities included distribution of segregationist literature, attacks on race "mongrelization," agitation against the United Nations, and petitions to impeach liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. To spread their message, Birchers held Sunday showings of right-wing documentary films and operated such as "Let Freedom Ring," a nationwide network of recorded telephone messages. They alsohelped organized the "Minutemen," a paramilitary group training to lead guerrilla warfare once the Communists took over." ...
By the time of [founder Robert] Welch's death in 1985, the Birch Society's membership and influence had declined, but the ... UN role in the Gulf War and President Bush's [Old Man Bush's] call for a "New World Order" unwittingly echoed Birch claims about the goals of the internationalist One World Government conspiracy. Growing right-wing populism in the United States helped the JBS position itself for a comeback, and by 1995 its membership had grown again to more than 55,000.
This piece by Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons (John Birch Society PublicEye.org, adapted from the 2000 book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort) gives a glimpse at Welch's political philosophy:
In a 1966 speech, Welch coined the name "The Insiders" to describe the leaders of the conspiracy. The Birch Society seems unable to make up its mind if the Insiders are direct descendants of the Illuminati Freemason conspiracy, although the basic concept is clearly related. During the late 1980's and early 1990's the Birch leadership downplayed the connection, while in the late 1990's, the Birch book list began sprouting titles seeking to prove the link to the Illuminati Freemason conspiracy. Many Birch members, and founder Welch himself, expressed support for this thesis, sometimes in writing, sometimes at Birch public meetings. According to the theory, there is an unbroken ideologically-driven conspiracy linking the Illuminati, the French Revolution, the rise of Marxism and Communism, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations. Of course, not all Birch members agreed with everything that Welch or the Society proposed. Welch's famous book, The Politician, caused a stir even among many loyal Birch members who were shocked by Welch's assertion that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was "a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy."
They don't say it in that excerpt. But most people in the Bircher orbit understand those "Insiders" to be The Jews. Incidentally, this loony-tunes theory about the Illuminati and so forth, in which The Jews always turn out to be key conspirators, is also expoundedin Pat Robertson's books The New World Order (1992) and The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (1993). (Sadly enough, I once heard Carlos Santana at a concert in Mountain View CA ramble on about the Illuminati.) Also, it's worth remembering that in the far-right gutter, "Freemason" is also a synonym for The Jews. In Germany and Austria, where overt anti-Semitism can get you into sticky legal problems, that tack is a favorite, i.e., using the Freimauer (Freemasons) as a substitute for The Jews.
Andy Jackson was a Mason, I might add.
Which brings me to this. I've been reading another book by Jerry Lembcke, author of The Spitting Image, which I quote here all the time, it seems. He also wrote CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth. As part of his research into a controversial and badly flawed CNN story, he winds up having to dredge through a lot of the less savory rivulets of the rightwing. In part, he's talking about how Chris Matthews - who some people manage to conceive of as some kind of liberal - pandered to the paranoid right on a 1998 Hardball segment. The topic had to do with the POW/MIA issue, which many on the far right have take to levels hard for most of us to imagine at first glance. In this case, one of the twisted fantasy tales is that the US government was deliberately murdering POWs and US defectors in Vietnam, but in the mind of the wingnuts of this particular persuasion, defecting to the Communists was actually a good thing:
Something still more interesting was probably going on in the minds of the far-right-wing members of Matthews s audience, however. For them, the implicit rehabilitation of the defectors to the status of Americans, even heroic Americans, if their equivalence to POWs could be established, was a bold stroke, and one seemingly incongruent with their own views. A defector, after all, would be the patriots' Antichrist, the embodiment of national betrayal. But the meaning of defection is relative; whether it's good or bad depends on what the defectors are defecting from. If the government has acted in an un-American fashion, might not defection be virtuous? The legacy of the far right's ambiguous relationship to the war in Vietnam left the door open for it to accept defectors as victims of the country's misbegotten wartime policies.
During the 1960s, far-right organizations like the John Birch Society supported the war in principle, but opposed the way the government conducted it. According to the Birch Society, communists in government, referred to as "insiders" by the society, were prosecuting the war but intentionally preventing the military from pursuing a winning strategy. The result was that chaos reigned in the streets of America, world opinion was turned against the country, and Ho Chi Minh was able to exploit anti-American sentiment that the war produced in Vietnam. So, for the Birchers, a war that was supposedly an anti-communist endeavor was actually furthering the interests of international communism. It is not entirely surprising then that those who could twist a war against communism into a war for communists could thirty years later find a way to remember defectors as victims of political conspiracy if not, indeed, loyalists in their own cause.
Follow that? It was the Patriotically Correct thing to do for soldiers to defect to the Communists because the US government was fighting the Vietnam War to advance Communism. So defecting to the Communists was the best way of opposing this pro-Communist plot.
Pretty nuts, huh? And yet, into today's Republican Party, which increasingly holds the "reality-based community" in sneering contempt, this kind of thinking is becoming more credible all the time. Think about it. Is that really so much goofier than listening to Republican war fans argue straight-faced that the Iraq War was never, ever about "weapons of mass destruction"?
One thing we can count on is that the Iraq War will generate all sorts of OxyContin-fantasy theories. Some of them as nutso as the POW pro-communist anti-communist defectors idea.
As Bill Moyers says, the delusional has now become mainstream.
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