President’s Corner — April 2010
by John F. McManus, President
Be a Conspiracy Realist!
A fundamental tenet of The John Birch Society is belief that things happen because some persons want them to happen. Even Franklin Roosevelt once stated, “In politics, if something happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” And if what happens is harmful, even evil, we don’t hesitate to label it the fruit of conspiratorial design.
But we must always keep in mind that, while there are indeed determined conspirators behind much of the harm being done to our country and our freedom, there are few out-and-out conspirators. Most of the effort destroying our country and converting it into a totalitarian nightmare is done by ambitious and self-serving individuals who care not a whit about morality or about their fellow human beings. They seek only personal gain and they will be rewarded if they play the conspiracy’s game.
I recently accepted an invitation to speak at the very successful Tenth Amendment Seminar in Atlanta. Other speakers would capably focus on the Tenth, so I decided to introduce the notion of conspiracy to the hundreds in attendance, many of whom have been persuaded to shun “conspiracy theories” and those who hold them. It turned out to be a good decision.
The incident I chose in order to explain how a conspiracy operates had to do with an event that became sensational headline news in October 1957. The Soviet Union had just successfully launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to circumvent the Earth. All of a sudden because of Sputnik, the Soviets were deemed to be ahead of our nation in everything. The Russians, we were told, were our superiors in satellite technology; they were likely ahead scientifically and militarily; and they now had great prestige throughout the world. Everywhere, the attitude conveyed was that we were second-rate and had better get busy to at least try to catch up.
The John Birch Society was formed slightly more than a year after Sputnik. Robert Welch knew, because of the Soviet success, that there would be plenty of moves to create more government here at home. He understood what Mr. Obama’s top aide Rahm Emanuel said only recently, that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” So, during the Society’s founding meeting in December 1958, Robert Welch dusted off some thoughts he had gathered soon after Sputnik and predicted the following:
• greatly expanded government spending
• higher taxes
• increasingly unbalanced budgets
• wild inflation of our currency
• socialistic controls
• centralization of power in Washington, and
• federal aid to and control over education
Everything he said would happen did happen. But there’s more to the story that even Robert Welch didn’t know at the time. Nine years after Sputnik, General James M. Gavin, our nation’s top military official in the space program, stated in a speech that a full year prior to Sputnik’s sensational success, he was given a “written order” forbidding him and his program to develop an orbiting satellite.
Gavin said that he and his team knew that the Soviets were about to launch their Sputnik, and he repeated that his team had the capability to accomplish the feat well before the Soviets. He stated:
On the basis of this, I made several entreaties to the Department of Defense seeking authority to launch a satellite, and shortly thereafter I was given a written order forbidding me to do so. This admonition was passed on to Wernher Von Braun.
Wernher Von Braun was the brilliant refugee from Germany who participated so heavily in the development of our nation’s space program.
The point I’m leading to, of course, is that the crisis involving Sputnik was a planned crisis. And the plan included using it to expand government, raise taxes, start deficit spending, create inflation, inject the federal government into the nation’s education system, centralize power in Washington, and convert our country into a socialistic nightmare. The word that fits what I have just described is conspiracy. And the conspiracy that arranged for the U.S. to appear to be second-rate to the USSR still dominates most of what happens in our nation, even though the USSR is no more and Russia has an entirely new role to play.
The Soviet launch of Sputnik produced a crisis, but it was a created crisis. The conspiracy that seeks to rule us has the capability through its control of the mass media and its vast wealth to use a manufactured crisis to build more government and eat away at personal freedom. It can take advantage of an unplanned crisis as well. And there are plenty of amoral creatures ready and willing to go along with the conspiracy’s desire in order to get along personally.
The top U.S. government officials in 1957 who forbade our space experts to put a satellite in orbit before the Soviets were President Dwight Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and CIA Director Allen Dulles — all members of the world government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In fact, the Dulles brothers, as young disciples of CFR Founder Edward Mandell House, were part of the group that formed the CFR. The Secretary of Defense at the time was Charles Wilson, not a CFR member.
How does one oppose a conspiracy? Pleading with top conspirators such as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and others to reverse course won’t do it. Hoping that a good book, a potent DVD, or your carefully written letter explaining that their policies will harm our nation won’t do it either. The way to defeat a conspiracy is to shine the light of truth on it — and on the despicable individuals who eagerly make themselves available to do its work.
It would have served America very well if the men in our space program in 1957 had immediately informed fellow Americans about the order forbidding them to beat the Soviets in the space race. That kind of light shone on a conspiratorial plan would have destroyed the plan to use the crisis for the very purposes Robert Welch so accurately catalogued in 1958. It is such light-shining that separates The John Birch Society from so many other groups and individuals, many of whom are given dignity by more self-servers in the mass media.
More than ever, the JBS message about our country not facing stupidity or poorly informed leaders is resonating with fellow Americans. Here’s what you as a member of The John Birch Society should do: Simply ask a concerned but uninvolved friend, neighbor, co-worker, or casual acquaintance if he or she believes that our leaders are stupid or if they are merely ill-informed. You will have set them up for the only possible remaining explanation — that our nation’s leaders know what they are doing and must be stopped through exposure.
Don’t allow yourself to be talked out of using the word conspiracy. Don’t lead with it however. Should someone accuse you of being a “conspiracy theorist,” smile and say, “No, I’m a conspiracy realist.”
