TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @SternDrewCrypto
reSee.it AI Summary
I claim a former FBI head says 9/11 was an inside job planned by the highest levels of the U.S. government to fuel endless wars, the Patriot Act, and trillions for the military–industrial complex. I see a long pattern: OKC, JFK, RFK, 1993 WTC, 9/11, and elite-led child-sex trafficking. The deep-state playbook stages crises, pins them on patsies, erodes freedoms, and shields the cabal. Media and tech help, but cracks appear. Who still swallows the official lies?
@SternDrewCrypto - Stern Drew
🚨 FORMER FBI HEAD CONFIRMS 9/11 WAS ORCHESTRATED AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT! Former FBI Head says 9/11 was a deliberate inside job planned and executed by the highest levels of the U.S. government. The goal? Endless wars, the Patriot Act surveillance nightmare, and trillions funneled to the military-industrial complex. This is not a one-off event. It's part of a long pattern they've desperately tried to bury. Connect the dots: - Oklahoma City Bombing (1995): Government-supplied materials and inside assistance used in a controlled demolition to vilify militias and ram through anti-terror legislation. - JFK Assassination (1963): CIA, Mafia, and deep-state coup after he threatened their power structure. - RFK Assassination (1968): Another Kennedy silenced because he knew too much about CIA operations and mind-control programs. - 1993 World Trade Center bombing: The test run on the same towers by the same networks. - 9/11 (2001): Planes used as cover story while nano-thermite brought the buildings down in free-fall speed. Pentagon hit by a missile? Flight 93 shot down? All manufactured to launch the never-ending "War on Terror." - Child sex trafficking networks run by the Military, CIA, and top politicians: Epstein Island was just the tip. D.C. parties, underground tunnels, blackmail videos. Victims are silenced. Whistleblowers end up "suicided." This is the deep-state playbook in action: stage massive crises, pin them on patsy enemies, strip away freedoms, and protect the pedophile elite cabal that runs everything. They own the mainstream media, Big Tech censorship machines, and the official narrative. But the cracks are showing. The truth is bleeding out. Who else is done swallowing the official lies?
Video Transcript AI Summary
Ted Gunderson describes a 27.5-year FBI career with 13 assignments across the United States, noting he never lived in the extreme Northeast. He says he handled counterespionage and counterterrorism in New York and Connecticut, negotiated with skyjackers at Philadelphia International Airport for two and a half hours on 07/12/1972, and led large divisions in Southern California with over 700 personnel. He personally investigated the Oklahoma City bombing, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and the World Trade Center, labeling all as “huge cover up.”
Gunderson asserts that terrorism is being used as an excuse to strip constitutional rights and civil liberties, mentions the Bilderbergs, and identifies himself as the FBI veteran who retired in March 1979, having been the senior special agent in charge of the FBI Los Angeles division with more than 700 personnel and a $22.5 million budget. He says he was on the street for nine and a half years, then progressed administratively to supervisory roles, including being the numbers two man in Connecticut and Philadelphia, an assistant special agent in charge, chief inspector, and agent in charge in Memphis, Dallas, and then senior special agent in charge in Los Angeles with three other SACs under him and 24 supervisors.
Gunderson claims to have “information chiseled in stone” that the FBI had advanced knowledge of 9/11 and did nothing to prevent it. He states he watched the planes hit the towers on television and questions the feasibility of hijacking four planes without advance knowledge, asserting the US government has the most advanced intelligence and that there is no way they wouldn’t have known. He questions whether planes were remotely controlled and insists the towers were imploded, citing seismograph readings near the base and molten steel in the basement that burned for about 100 days, arguing that airplane fuel could not account for these effects.
He contends anti-terror legislation emerged in the mid-1980s under the George H. W. Bush administration, citing a female DOJ attorney who allegedly said, before passage, that “people have to be killed.” He references the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, noting an informant who helped plan the attack and claims the FBI knew in advance and supplied bomb ingredients, a claim he says appeared in the New York Times on 10/28/1993. He argues that insufficient deaths prevented anti-terror legislation, and, regarding Oklahoma City (1995), claims a pineapple electrohydrodynamic gaseous fuel device bomb was used, followed by a conventional bomb inside, suggesting multiple devices.
Gunderson mentions four unexploded devices retrieved from the Murrah Building, as reported in a Fireman’s Magazine article (Sept. 1995). He references news coverage of recovered unexploded devices marked with “US Army” on the side and asserts that McVeigh was a mind-control victim, alleging he was recruited by the CIA to be a professional assassin and involved with the CIA drug operation. He ties this to MKUltra and Monarch programs, stating he learned of these after leaving the FBI while investigating the Jeffrey R. MacDonald case.
He recounts his involvement with satanic cult allegations linked to the MacDonald case, claiming a Satanic cult distributed drugs along the East Coast and that a satanic ring operated internationally, including child kidnapping rings, with a focus on the Finders in Washington, DC. He discusses the 1960s–1980s era, mentioning the kidnapping of children like Johnny Gosch in Iowa, and asserts ongoing international trafficking and sex trafficking of children, including claims of flights of children to Paris and New York. He says he has provided documentation to the FBI multiple times but has been ignored, alleging covert CIA involvement in child trafficking. He mentions tips from airline employees and another informant, Paul Bonassi, stating that children were auctioned off for up to $50,000, with ages from two to 21, and that buyers bid on children like automobiles, all of which he says is occurring under nose of authorities, with copies of US customs reports supporting his claims.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Actually, I had a quite an illustrious career, twenty seven and a half years in the FBI. And in those twenty seven and a half years, I had 13 assignments, so I moved around the country. The only part of the country I never did live in was really the Extreme Northeast, US. So, also, during my career, I handled just about everything. I was counter espionage, counter terrorism in New York and Connecticut, and I negotiated with some skyjackers at Philadelphia International Airport for two and a half hours, 07/12/1972.
And I ended up being in charge of most of Southern California, had over 700 personnel under my command. I personally investigated the Oklahoma City bombing case, huge cover up. Jack Kennedy's assassination, huge cover up. Bobby Kennedy's assassination, huge cover up. World Trade Center, huge cover up.
Okay. Terrorism. They're using it as an excuse to take away our constitutional rights and our civil liberties. The Bilderbergs. I'm Ted l Gunderson, a twenty seven year veteran of the FBI who retired in March 1979.
At the time of my retirement, I was the senior special agent in charge of the FBI Los Angeles division with more than 700 personnel under my command and a budget of $22,500,000. I was an agent on the street for nine and a half years, and then I advanced administratively. I was a supervisor, and then I was numbers two man in Connecticut and Philadelphia, and assistant special agent in charge was the title. And then I became a chief inspector, and then I was agent in charge in Memphis, Dallas, and the senior special agent in charge in Los Angeles because I had three other special agents in charge under me and 24 supervisors under them. I have information chiseled in stone, documented that the FBI had advanced knowledge about nine eleven and did nothing to prevent this from occurring.
And this is atrocious. It's unbelievable, have having been a former FBI agent myself. And it's very obvious that this whole thing has been orchestrated by the powers that be at the highest level of our government, and I want the world to know about it. The minute I saw the planes fly in to the tower on television live, as a matter of fact, the question I had in my mind was, there is no way, absolutely no way, that somebody could skyjack four planes, 20 people skyjack four planes, in this case 19 individuals, and our government would not know about it in in advance. We have, the US government, the most advanced intelligence techniques of anybody in the world, and there you will never convince me we didn't have advanced knowledge about what was going on.
We saw the airplanes go in, and it's also a question about whether they're remotely controlled. I don't know about that. I hate to comment on something that I where I have no documentation, but there's much more to this story than has come out so far. You'll never in a million years convince me that those those buildings, those towers collapsed because those planes hit them. I'm I'm confident that they were imploded.
As a matter of fact, the there were seismograph readings from the they think from the base of two of them about the time that the buildings collapsed. There were also molten steel that was in the basement, which is a very high temperature for melt melting steel, and those planes hit above the 80th Floor, so there's no way that that airplane fuel could have dropped down that low. Also, there were fires that burned in the basement for some one hundred days afterwards. So there's some implication. There there's some finagling, there's some maneuvering as far as I'm concerned, and there are many, many more people involved in this than these these so called skyjackers and terrorists.
The anti terrorism legislation was written back in the middle nineteen eighties under the George Bush senior administration. A female Department of Justice attorney who was one of the authors made the statement publicly, before this passes congress, people have to be killed. Now if we fast forward to a World Trade Center car bombing in February 1993, at that time, the FBI had a 43 year old former Egyptian army officer as an informant who was in with the terrorists. He was commissioned by the terrorists to put the bomb together. He went to his FBI superiors.
We're gonna use a dummy bomb. Right? And they said, no. We're gonna use a real bomb. So the FBI know they knew in advance that they were gonna bomb the World Trade Center.
They furnished the ingredients for the bomb, which is absolutely unbelievable that they get away with this. What's unbelievable about it is this was actually printed in the New York Times on 10/28/1993, but they got away with it. And if I was a congressman or senator, I would demand an investigation. Why would the FBI finally see ingredients for the bomb that brought down or that that had damaged the World Trade Center in February 1993? We had six people killed there.
We had a thousand people injured. We had a total of six citizens who died in the February. We had a thousand dollars worth of a thousand individuals were injured. We had half $1,000,000 in damage, but there weren't enough people who died to pass the anti terrorism legislation. So now we fast forward to May 19 04/19/1995, world trade excuse me, Oklahoma City bombing.
We had a hundred and sixty eight, a hundred and sixty nine people who died, probably a hundred and sixty nine because there was a one leg they never did identify. And a year later, the anti terrorist legislation passed. Now it wasn't tough enough. I can't prove that there were explosives that were placed in the World Trade Center in the nine one one situation. However, I from what I've seen, a a an expert on implosions from Albuquerque, New Mexico, he worked for the government as under government contract, stated immediately afterwards that the buildings were imploded.
And then he retracted his statement and said, well, maybe they were, maybe they weren't. And, basically, now he's saying that they weren't imploded. But other experts who have looked at the at the pictures say that the buildings were imploded. I think that in order to implode those buildings, there had to be implications, government implications or involvement in placing these charges. I mean, that was a tremendous project.
I mean, I don't know how many people would be involved in that. Going back to Oklahoma City, an inside investigator told me there were at least 11 other people involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now if you have 11 other people involved in Oklahoma City, you're gonna have three or four times that involved in the World Trade Center situation. Going back to Oklahoma City, the government claimed that there was a fertilizer, ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb in the truck. Initially, it came out, I think, with 1,500 pounds and then it's 2,500 pounds.
In the end, they said 4,800 pounds. Fertilizer bomb explodes in 360 degree, but there's no question about it, the bomb that was in that truck was a directional bomb. Now, there was a bomb called electrohydrodynamic gaseous fuel device that was developed in the early nineteen eighties, highly classified. It was developed by Hercules Manufacturing in Silicon Valley, California. At the time of the first explosion in the experiment on in Area 51, two technicians were died because they underestimated its the power and and the strength of this bomb.
My informant, my main informant, Michael Ricconosudo, whose firm Hercules Manufacturing actually developed this bomb, Michael was with the agency for years, it was his father Marshall, told me that the bomb in the the truck bomb in Oklahoma City was this electrohydrodynamic gaseous fuel device. We call it a pineapple bomb because it's the size of a pineapple, but very, powerful. And then what I think happened in Oklahoma City is that we had the pineapple bomb go off, and then nine seconds later, we had a conventional bomb go off on the inside. With regard to this proceeding, basically, there are four elements that I have to receive information regarding. I have a newspaper article, actually a publication from the Fireman's Magazine where the author, who is the editor of the magazine and obtained the information from the Oklahoma City Fire Department, states that four unexploded devices were brought out of Oklahoma City, the Murrah Building, that four unexploded devices were brought out of the Murrah Building.
This is in this article, the fireman's publication. I think it was September of of nineteen ninety five when it was published. Now if if that's the case, then you had five conventional bombs planted on the inside, and you had the barometric bomb or the pineapple bomb in the truck. And now we have the news media. I have copies of the news media that were recorded that afternoon, the afternoon of Oklahoma City.
And reporter after reporter after reporter has made the statement, oh, they recovered a not a bomb. A bomb that was unexploded. One of them specifically said, they recovered a bomb, and now we're gonna know where the bombs came from because it has US army written on the side, stenciled on the side. So we have and McVeigh as far as McVeigh was concerned, I I think McVeigh was a mind control victim. He they the government said he's flunked out of special forces.
I doubt that. I think he was in special force. He wrote a letter to his sister saying he'd been recruited by the CIA to be trained as a professional assassin and also to work on the CIA drug operation. And he was visited in Oklahoma City and in Colorado when he was in custody by doctor Jolly West, DLA. Doctor West is the foremost expert on MK Ultra.
MK Ultra is a government CIA mine control program. I was not this I had absolutely no knowledge of the project MKUltra, the Monarch project during the period I was in the FBI. It was only after I got out of the FBI and I started doing my own research, and that came about because I was the investigator of the Jeffrey R. MacDonald case. He's a former Green Bay doctor who was convicted of murdering his wife and two children in Fort Bragg, 02/17/1970.
And he was tried and convicted, sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. I was called into the case after he'd been tried and convicted. His friend said he's innocent, and I began my investigation. Within ten months, 10/25/1980, I obtained a signed confession from a girl, Helena Stokely, who said doctor McDonald did not commit those crimes. Were committed by her satanic cult group.
The satanic cult group was distributing drugs up and down the East Coast. Were being flown in plastic bags. These are the body cavities of the dead GIs coming out of Southeast Asia. This is the late sixties, early seventies. This is all documented.
Time magazine, 01/01/1973. Doctor McDonald's absolutely innocent, and he's in jail today, twenty some years in prison. Now the reason I tell you about that case is because after I developed this information and went public with my confession from Alina, I was on national TV. I was on radio talk shows, and people came from all parts of The United States and said, hey. I know all about that satanic cults.
It's for real. I'm a a victim, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And that's how I became involved and embroiled in these very controversial issues. And then I started doing my own research, and one thing led to another. And then I investigated international child kidnapping ring out of the the Midwest, out of Nebraska.
There were they were flying children out of Sioux City, Iowa to Washington DC for sex orgies with congressmen, senators, and just it went on and on. Then I had the the McMartin case out of the southern man Southern California. The children were dropped off in the school in the morning by their parents. They picked them up late in the afternoon in the interim. They put the kids through tunnels and up into the trapdoor, the triplex next door, put them in automobiles, and prostituted them.
Two, three, four year old children. Unbelievable. And this is this is how I became involved in all these issues. And I just kept going. As to any good investigator, would you I just keep going.
The the international child kidney opinion is not being exposed. I have personally given my documentation to the FBI on at least six or eight occasions, and I have been ignored because it's a covert CIA child kidnapping operation that's been active since the early nineteen sixties. What's happening here is these children are being flown or were in the past in the nineteen eighties out of Sioux City, Iowa to Washington DC for these sex orgies for the purpose of black men in the congressman, compromising them. And, of course, hey. There's a bill that's gonna be passed on Monday, and then I can come around and say, congressman, you remember when you were with that little boy, that little girl last Friday?
Okay. You better vote this way. This is that's exactly what's happening. It's called blackmail. This is a CIA covert operation.
It's called the Finders out of Washington, DC. And they're involved in kidnapping and international trafficking of children around the world. And I had, in my day, in the eighties, I had one of the kids who was actually part of the kidnapping team when he was 10, 11, 12 years old. They were putting him out as a decoy in a park, certain shopping malls, and so forth. And to attract the kids his age over near the car, and then the adults would grab the children and be offered.
And one little kid was a 12 year old newspaper boy named Johnny Gosch out of West Des Moines, Iowa. Johnny Gosch was kidnapped. And back in 1982, he was taken in, used as a sex slave. Later, he and another kid escaped. They stole a car and escaped, and Johnny Gosch is in hiding right today, by the way.
The children are used for body parts. They're used for satanic ceremonies, human sacrifices. They're used as sex slaves. In 1997, I think it was, I was in Denver giving a lecture. I had a tip from an airline employee that 210 children flew out of Denver to New York and then on to Paris, France.
The airline employee who saw this was refueling the plane, asked a female adult and two male adults who were with the children. Sorry. Go ahead. Asked a female adult and two male adults who are with the children, who are these kids? And they said the woman says, Child Protective Services, mind your own business.
And that man, by the way, has disappeared. I also had a tip from an airline employee, a flight attendant out of Los Angeles that a plane load of kids, children was flown to Paris, France. Paul Bonassi, my informant inside the Nebraska case, who was part of the net the child network, told me that he's at least some of these kids are auctioned off. He's attended six such auctions. As few as six and as many as 36 children were auctioned off at these various at these various auction.
The children sell for up to $50,000 each, sometimes more. The ages are two to 21. The kids stand on a stage in their underwear with a number across their with the string around their neck and a number on a cord on a piece of cardboard, and the people in the audience bid on them, just like bidding on an automobile. This is going on right under our nose. I've given this to the FBI and demanded investigation.
I gave the latest complaint I filed is in writing as of November. I just keep pumping it over to them, keep giving it to them. And I have a US customs report that documents this.
reSee.it AI Summary
I recall Robert Welch’s 1958 ten-step blueprint to destroy the Republic, now unfolding in 2026: explode government spending, skyrocket taxes, run deficits forever, engineered inflation, price/wage controls, ramp up socialist controls, centralize power in DC, seize and indoctrinate education, hammer endless anti-war propaganda, breed total apathy. They laughed then—this is execution, the Republic dismantled by traitors inside the gates. Wake up and share before it's too late.
@SternDrewCrypto - Stern Drew
🚨 THE 1958 BLUEPRINT TO DESTROY AMERICA IS UNFOLDING EXACTLY AS PLANNED – ROBERT WELCH WARNED US 68 YEARS AGO! 🇺🇸 In 1958, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch exposed the INSIDERS' (globalist cabal / deep state communists) chilling 10-step master plan to collapse the Republic from within. He called it out in his legendary speech and EVERY SINGLE STEP is happening RIGHT NOW in 2026. The 10 Steps to Total Enslavement: 1. Explode government spending → waste trillions on endless "crises" & pork to bankrupt the nation 2. Skyrocket taxes → squeeze the middle class dry while elites hoard 3. Run massive deficits forever → debt slavery is the goal 4. Engineered wild inflation → devalue your savings & wages into dust 5. Price/wage controls "to fight inflation" → introduce total economic tyranny 6. Ramp up socialist controls → micromanage every aspect of your life & economy 7. Centralize ALL power in DC → erase state sovereignty, dissolve borders & state lines for one-world federal rule 8. Seize & indoctrinate the education system → brainwash generations into hating America & loving collectivism 9. Hammer endless anti-war propaganda → push "peace" ONLY on communist/globalist terms while weakening defenses 10. Breed total apathy → numb the masses with distractions, drugs, division & despair so they never resist They laughed at Welch then. They call it "conspiracy theory" now. But open your eyes: Look around. This isn't coincidence. This is EXECUTION. The plan isn't coming – it's HERE. The Republic is being deliberately dismantled by traitors inside the gates. WAKE UP BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. Share this before they censor it. The fight is NOW. 🇺🇸
Video Transcript AI Summary
Robert Welch delivers a two-part address, introduced as a condensation of the Blue Book originally presented at the John Birch Society’s 15th birthday dinner in New York on 12/07/1973, followed by a shorter second part titled And Fifteen Years Ahead. William J. Grady, a longtime Birch leader and former corporate executive, introduces the setting and helps set the stage for the first part.
Setting and framing
- The stage scene recalls a 1958 Indianapolis gathering at Margaret Dice’s home, where 11 of 17 invited attendees attended despite severe weather and airline strikes. Welch delivered a two-day monologue that became the Blue Book; the condensed version now presented is drawn directly from that 1958 text.
- The essence of the first part is a verbatim condensation (with occasional listener-notes indicating omissions) designed to preserve the original thread of thought. The audience is asked to imagine themselves as the 11 men listening in 1958.
Part I: The 1958 monologue condensed
- The central premise: the communist conspiracy poses a grave, pervasive threat to the United States and must be understood in its full, long-range scope. The talk emphasizes that the danger is both international and domestic, and that the conspiracy uses many methods, including bribery, lies, coercion, and patient gradualism.
- The three-step communist strategy (as attributed to Lenin) frames the discussion:
1) Take Eastern Europe.
2) Expand into Asia and around the globe.
3) Encircle and take over the United States (and thus complete global conquest).
- The movement’s three-part progress is assessed as already advancing: Eastern Europe and East Germany completed the first step; Asia is two-thirds to completion of the second; the third step—overrunning the U.S.—has begun, with the implication that 2/3 of the total program is either completed or well underway.
- How they operate: direct military force is not the primary method; instead, they rely on subversion, espionage, manipulation of civil society, and the infiltration of influential organs (press, education, government). They can also prod indirect conflicts to benefit the cause, while masking their influence behind conventional public institutions.
- The role of gradualism and surrender of sovereignty: the plan includes the slow surrender of American sovereignty to international bodies (like the United Nations) and the transformation of the U.S. into a socialist economy and political system. The talk calls out ten aims of this strategy, including increased government spending and taxes, inflationary pressure, price and wage controls, expanded socialistic controls, growth of bureaucracies, centralization of power, federal control of education, emphasis on peace at communist terms, and appeasement policies that yield partial concessions.
- The speaker asserts that Americans are losing track in a “cold war” that could lead to subjugation, while blaming a Western media and political establishment for obscuring the truth. He cites grim examples of communist violence (e.g., reports from Korea and the Spanish Civil War) to illustrate the cruelty of the regime they claim to be aligning with.
- Section two shifts to a broader diagnosis: the Western European civilization is afflicted by a cancer-like disease—the cancer of collectivism. The West’s vulnerability is linked to a long history of reliance on state power and social welfare that weakens individual initiative. Welch argues that the United States must avoid adopting Europe’s fate and instead pursue a vigorous, independent, American liberalism that refuses to surrender to collectivism.
- Spiritual and moral critique: the root cause of vulnerability is stated as a loss of faith, not only in God but in human purpose and moral absolutes. Welch laments a moral vacuum and the rise of amorality, warning that without a bedrock of faith and a sense of absolute values, civilization risks collapse.
- Section three argues that restoring moral order requires a renewed sense of mission grounded in faith and responsibility. Welch commends fundamentalists and champions John Birch as an exemplary figure, while warning that the numbers of true believers are shrinking. He emphasizes the need to resist both secular and doctrinal deviations that dilute moral seriousness.
- Section four outlines a practical, albeit aggressive, plan to counter the conspiracy: organize reading rooms; expand circulation of conservative periodicals; widen radio and local broadcasting support; deploy letter-writing campaigns; organize fronts; expose infiltrators; mobilize speakers; extend activity internationally; and push political influence to energize the broader movement. He acknowledges the proposal’s “fantastic” nature but insists the times demand “fantastic” measures to avert catastrophe.
- Welch critiques political leadership as insufficient to save the country; he argues for dynamic personal leadership capable of unifying a broader movement beyond party politics. He analyzes Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, concluding that they are insufficient as sole leaders because their power is constrained by political pathways and factional dynamics. He stresses that true salvation requires a larger, sustained movement guided by a deep set of beliefs and a willingness to sacrifice personal interests.
- The concluding argument emphasizes the necessity of dynamic leadership coupled with a larger, enduring, nonpolitical movement that can mobilize public support and act decisively against the conspiracy. He insists the only chance to stop the conspiracy rests on awakening a broad, committed base, expanding education and outreach, and building a durable structure to press for decisive reforms.
Part II: Fifteen years ahead (and the John Birch Society’s program)
- The 1974 segment begins with Bob Welch reporting a successful fundraising moment (a thousand-dollar pledge from Ben) that signaled the society’s financial viability and ability to endure hostile conditions.
- Some points to remember: the Birch Society has remained on its original course, remains unique as a nationwide nonreligious adult-education organization, and has pioneered methods to combat the conspiracy through education and truth rather than conventional political confrontation.
- The organization’s achievements include countering several major conspiracy-driven projects, exposing figures linked to subversive activities, and building an extensive educational apparatus (books, pamphlets, magazines, films, and a large speakers bureau) that reaches broad audiences.
- Section B contrasts the conspiracy’s methods with Birch’s activities, arguing insiders rely on subversion and fear rather than open debate. It also notes the internal vulnerability of the conspiracy—its dependence on fear and falsehood—and highlights weaknesses in major powers and political figures who are aligned with or opposed to the conspiracy.
- Section C asserts that World War I and II were engineered by insiders to advance communist power, and that isolationism is miscast as treason by the conspiracy. Welch argues for a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy toward genuine national interest, minimal entanglements, and an emphasis on domestic strength and independence from international bodies. The message celebrates American self-reliance and warns against excessive meddling in global affairs.
- Section D offers a concluding call for a fifteen-year program emphasizing: complete independence from the United Nations, reestablishing monetary gold convertibility, reducing government by at least 50%, withdrawing U.S. troops from overseas unless Congress authorizes protection of American life and property, and gradually rolling back government functions that do not belong to the state. A comprehensive educational campaign would accompany these steps to persuade the public.
Closing
- Welch returns to the belief that with dynamic personal leadership and a broad, committed movement, it is possible to rid the country of communism within years and then pursue a constructive program for less government and more responsibility, ultimately creating a better world. He expresses gratitude to the audience for patience and attention and invites continued support for the John Birch Society’s mission.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: And now ladies and gentlemen, we come to the real substance of this evening's program. Mr. Welsh is going to deliver a speech in two parts. The first part of that speech is a condensation of the Blue Book entitled fifteen years ago, exactly as it was delivered at the fifteenth birthday dinner of the John Birch Society in New York on 12/07/1973. Then the second and shorter part of Mr.
Welsh's total speech is entitled And Fifteen Years Ahead. It will round out the total presentation, which he has epitomized under the heading, In One Generation. To give you the proper setting for this dramatic offering, we are going to call on Mr. William J. Grady, who, for a great many years, was president and then chairman of the board of Grady Foundries, a highly successful business with eight plants today, which he established over fifty years ago.
At one time, he was also both president and then chairman of the JI Case Company, which is one of our country's very sizable corporate industries. Mr. Grady is a former president and then chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers and a former president of the National Council of YMCAs of the United States. But today, being as near to total retirement from business responsibilities as a man of his dynamic character can become, Mr. Grady is, and for many years has been, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the John Birch Society.
What's more, Mr. Grady was himself present at the founding meeting of the Society in Indianapolis on December 1958. We are also pleased to have some others from that founding meeting at our head tables here tonight. We have asked Mr. Grady to set the stage for the first part of Mr.
Welsh's speech. So it is my great pleasure to present to you a truly wonderful American, Mr. William J. Grady.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, having known and admired my friend Bob for more than ten years before the founding of the John Birch Society, this is an opportunity, and I might say a temptation, to use more time than is allotted to me to introduce this really good friend and great patriot. But my function here tonight is to ask you to join us as stage properties, if you wish, to a performance of fifteen years ago. We want you to go back in your minds to the outlook at that time, and in that mood to constitute yourselves as the 11 men of whom I was one who sat and listened for two full days to an exposition of what was happening to our country and what what and what was going to happen unless we woke up and did enough about it. This meeting was at the home of miss Margaret Dice in Indianapolis. A picture of her home is on your program.
As you look at this picture, the front right hand corner is the living room where our two day session occurred. Of the 17 men that were originally invited, 11 had accepted and every one of those 11 showed up despite the fact that the weather was about the nastiest and sweetest that December can produce. And both major airlines which served Indianapolis were on strike. Not one of us had ever met or even seen Ms. Dice before nor had Mr.
Welch, although he and she had become very good friends by mail because of her outstanding patriotic efforts. And on learning about the proposed meeting, she had volunteered her home and hospitality for the group. Incidentally, Ms. Dice, with her very friendly servants taking care of the coffee breaks and luncheons and other needs of hospitality, and with her own chair drawn up out of sight of the group in the corridor just around the corner from the door of her living room had listened to most of the whole two day discussion without any of us being aware of it. And she was not favorably impressed.
As she told mister Welch on taking him to his plane Wednesday morning, she did not think that anybody would ever stand still for the thoroughness with which we intended to examine every problem. Within two or three years, however, she had completely changed her mind and had become an ardent life member of the society for the rest of her day. Mr. Welsh had arrived on Sunday. So by Monday morning, he and Ms.
Dice had borrowed from the local church a full sized podium and had set it up in one corner of her living room. They'd also arranged all of the chairs and sofas for exactly where each of us was to sit. At 09:45 that Monday morning, therefore, when everybody had arrived despite the weather and had been duly seated, the meeting got underway. Or as your editor puts it, a trembling boy, 58 years old, having screwed up his courage to the requirements of this ordeal, went to the podium and installed himself immovably from behind it for two days. This is the nearest, Bob says, that he ever came to being a preacher of the Gospel, although he had taught Bible classes in college for over forty years before.
In any event, he was still wondering what would be the reaction of these extremely busy men to what they were going to hear after having committed themselves to two full days plus travel time to come and hear it. But with all practical escape now cut off, Bob Welch finally plunged into that marathon monologue on which he'd been working during most of October and November, and which eventually was to become the Blue Book of the John Birch Society. You are going to hear that monologue tonight compressed into about one tenth of its former volume. But this condensation has been accomplished by a very careful selection and pulling together of phrases and sentences from the original text so as to carry the main thread of thought from the beginning to the end. Now naturally, a great deal of the documentation, background, and explanation with regard to many of the points will have to be omitted.
The fact that there have been such omissions will be indicated by Bob by an occasional aside during the first two or three minutes of his speech. But after that, he will assume that you are taking them for granted. But no transitional or connecting phrases or sentences will will have been added at any point. This is from the original take. So we ask you to keep constantly in mind that all of the statements you hear were made fifteen years ago and that every one of them is verbatim from the original presentation.
So now we again ask you to remember or imagine that you are an audience of 11 men sitting in a living room in Indianapolis on December 1958 and listening to mister Robert Wells.
Speaker 2: 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 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 humble 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 anticommunists. 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 anticommunists. 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, on a mission of one page.
But as background for our further discussion, I'm 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 1958. Section one, 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 twenty 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 follows. 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 overwrite 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 stated that for the communists, the road to Paris led through Peking and Calcutta. Today, you could 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 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 communist's 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 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 twenty six years before. The communists now had Eastern Europe and Tyre, and the first step of their three step program was complete. Next was Asia. Actually, the anticommunist 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 three fourths 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 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 one plus three fourths plus one fourth adds up to two out of that total of three. And not to believe that the communists are already two thirds 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 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 their backs. But not one Russian regiment has ever taken part in any of this imperialistic advance except for the suppression of 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. But 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 communist aims for The United States. One, greatly expanded government spending for every conceivable means of getting rid of ever larger sums of American money as wastefully as possible Two, higher and then much higher taxes. Three, an increasingly unbalanced budget despite the higher taxes. Four, wild inflation of our currency.
Five, government controls of prices, wages, and materials supposedly to combat inflation six, 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. Seven, 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. Eight, the steady advance of federal aid to and control over our educational system, leading to complete federalization of our public education.
Nine, 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 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 communist 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 communist or arriving at an accommodation with communism, as they want it called, would really mean. For their cruelty and terrorism is almost 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, quote, 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 is now certainly was not slanted in favor of the anticommunists, reported that in one twelve 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 communist 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 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 twenty five hundred years ago or dreamed up as the imaginative nightmare of an Edgar Allen 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 700,000,000 non Russian, non communists now living daily lives of virtual slavery behind the iron curtain, some 40,000,000 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'd 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, unquote. 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 two. 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 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 imposed on it his New Deal. And it is perfectly evident right in the cases of the various civilizations that we know most 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 nineteenth century the period of the highest level to 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 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 disease, that was old enough and weakened enough for the virus to be rapidly 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 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 communist back.
Get out of the bed of a Europe that is dying with 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 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 should 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 for 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 honest and 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 that 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 used 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 Saint Augustine, a Saint 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 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 immoral 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 cancel 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 ultimate serpent of the weak under the strong more lingeringly than if it is destroyed and its once free members are enslaved by the communists. We should return to the constructive side of this need and this undertaking in the morning. Section four. 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 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 40,000,000 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 it. 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 conspiracy everywhere in the world, we shall have won a most important battle in the war ahead. 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. One, 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.
Two, second, since getting the truth about both recent history and current events 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. Three, 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 Manion, and dozens of more localized broadcasters throughout the country. Four, 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. Five, we would organize fronts, little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts. Six, 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 how completely communist 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. Seven, There are now dozens of slimy characters loose in our midst whom I will 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. Eight, we would line up a large list of speakers ourselves all over the country. Nine, ninth and current in this listing would be our undertakings on the international front.
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 nonpolitical 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 cease from such serious thoughts, and a good night's sleep in the meantime. Under Positive Leadership. This morning, in retracing our footsteps, we come first to the cancel 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 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 10 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 and enthusiastically for Taft 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 10 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 three 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, 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. For Goldwater, 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 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 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 is an extremely smart man. He is one of the ablest, shrewdest, most disingenuous, and slippiest 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 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 team made of Americans for democratic action, and it even had some interlocking left wingers who were members of both groups. Nixon can claim still to be vigorously anticommunist, yet when he has a chance as vice president to break the tie and cast the decisive vote for h r three 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 h r three, 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 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 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 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 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 faith, which I hope and believe every man in this room can accept and approve, I shall come to later this morning. What I am 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 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 wish 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 words, 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 this: 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. One, first, government is necessary some degree of government in any civilized society. Two, second, while government is necessary, it is basically a nonproductive expense, an overhead cost supported by the productive economy.
Third, government is frequently evil. Fourth, government is always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom. Whatever must be done by government will always cost more than if it could be done by individuals or smaller groups. Sixth, 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 effect on a geometric scale as against the arithmetical cumulative effect of those errors if confined to individuals or smaller groups. 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. 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. Nine, the form of government is not nearly so important as its quality. 10, which brings us to the last, and in my opinion the most important, of these basic generalizations concerning government. And our tenth 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 twentieth century. 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 collective estate 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 of welterism, 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, on experience which shows government to be a necessary evil but a continuous brake 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 seven, 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 sign and Babel itself with our mirth, and overthrew them with prophesying to the old of the new world's work. For each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth.
For the last fifty 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 faces 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 war started on a new era in Indianapolis in December 1958. Of course, it is only the work we do 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 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 devote 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 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 road, and millions who humble and nameless the straight hard pathway plod. 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 respect 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 firmer 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 Lowell put it, going to be traitors to our sires and lose that freedom for our children and their children?
McCauley had horacious say, and how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his followers 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 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 bunks of inspiration, and that it would become a basis and a beginning of renewed dedication to a dream of man's future. Section eight, 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 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 goodwill, 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 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 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 officers 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 a title of coordinator for each area of the prophesized.
Above these coordinators, in time, we shall have supervisors with the rank or title of major coordinators, and we shall further build the organizational 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 Muslims to be better Christians, better Jews, better Muslims 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'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 counterrevolution 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 medals 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 semiformal 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 force and no discouragement which could make me quit or even put less of my life and energy into the struggle. The last resort of my own mind has been expressed by Louise Image in Guinea to fear not sensible failure nor covet the game at all, but fighting, fighting, fighting, guy 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 ten 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 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. Commonism 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.
Speaker 1: And now ladies and gentlemen, you can simply be yourselves again. Fifteen years after that last setting, we are over 2,000 Berkshires and friends at dinner together in Los Angeles on 03/09/1974. Those of us at 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 fifteen years ago. Now let's save time for him by omitting any further introduction or comment by me or applause by you as we as we hear what he has to say about the next fifteen years.
Bob?
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, we shall now condense what needs at least two full days into thirty 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 McMillan 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 a thousand dollars with a note that read, Here, Bob, we are in business.
Indeed, we were in business at once, and as Bob Stoddart has pointed out, in relatively better financial position than we have ever been since. What's more, we proceeded to survive in a bitterly hostile environment and are now still celebrating our fifteenth anniversary which occurred exactly three months ago. So we begin this look toward the future with an extremely brief glance at the past. Section 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.
Two, it is still unique as the only cohesive voluntary non religious organization for adult education on a permanent nationwide basis in all human history. Three, 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. Four, 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. Pride. 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 and with an amorphous influence that extends thinly throughout the world. Sixth, 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, film strips, records, reel to reel tapes, and cassettes which altogether are played to an enormous quantity of people and a speakers bureau which, when measured by the number of engagements filled or the total audience reached, we believe to be the largest in the world.
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 preventing the establishment of a Negro Soviet Republic in the Southeastern States. Our stopping cold almost entirely through the impact of Allen 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.
With regard to more explicit activities, let us offer an example. The notorious doctor Martin Luther King was as foul, a pro communist, philandering, big spending, trouble making, 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 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 back, rather than be up against the exposures in a parallel series of speeches over the same area by our speaker, Julia Brown. He could could no longer be of any practical value to the insiders at all as a live agitator, but only as a 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 controlled civilian police review boards. These boards 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 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 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 fifteen 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? One, for almost two hundred 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 Alger Hiss to Richard Nixon, every communist or insider has a gnawing 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. 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 prerequisites of power 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. 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 Allendi, the communist boss and would be tyrant of Chile, by an anti communist military group. Which certainly seems, 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 Chitung 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 votes which were purchased through outright bribery? Also, of course, Pierre 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.
Four, 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 eighty percent 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 18 to escapism from sordid reality by the nepenthe of alcohol.
But even these tender attentions from a 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. Saul Shennison has had plenty of company among scientists as well as other writers in risking imprisonment, torture, or death for complaining about the inhuman 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 cease 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 communist corral of nations. Five, 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 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 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. Sixth, 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 bumper 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 four for $1. Seven, 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 protest of either their reception or their constitutionality. 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.
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 bulletin, 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 and circumstances in mind, we solemnly ask ourselves how stands the battle today.
And in deadly seriousness, 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 that I am sorry, that is 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 objectively are 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 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. 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 insiders' 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 twenty five years, of the role of The United States as a food supplier, equipment manufacturer, prestige builder, financial angel, 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 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 and 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 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 isolationism. 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 mill strong. And by this time, even prominent Americans this is by getting into World War II 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 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, 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 must 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 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 hundred and forty 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 powerlusting 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 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 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 and 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, so 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 fifteen years. One, our first and most important specific undertaking should be to restore the complete independence of The United States. This includes our resolution to get us out of the United Nations and get the United Nations out of The United States.
Two, 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. Three. Three. We should reduce the number of government 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. Four, 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. Five, 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 hope to build during the next fifteen years.
We could go ahead for at least a 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 hundred and eighty 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 fifteen 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. 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.