Index

John Birch and the Politics of Stupid

Extreme ideologies create extreme problems, but they are not impossible to deal with.

Just as the “christian” right has nothing to do with the Christ they named themselves after, so the John Birch Society (JBS) has nothing whatsoever to do with the man whose name it has stolen.

John Birch was a World War II hero in China, saving downed American pilots and risking his life to help defeat the Japanese. The Chinese Communists killed him as the war ended for reasons not fully understood. Birch correctly believed that the Communists were planning on taking over China after the war. While he was initially in China as a religious missionary, he was working for the U. S. Government when the Communists killed him. At the time, the Chinese Communists were still technically U. S. allies in the war against Japan.

Businessman Robert W. Welch Jr. drove the founding of the JBS in 1958. Like Mao’s Little Red Book, the society had The Blue Book of the John Birch Society - by Welch - as its ideological basis. While the JBS originally claimed it was essentially anti-communist, but it actually was and is about what we now call the “culture wars.” Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” was explicitly about those same culture wars but in China. The parallels are striking but unsurprising since both are or were powered by xenophobic paranoia with no connection to any facts.

With that parallel in mind, the chaos created by the JBS’ ascendance into governmental power should surprise nobody. There is no accepted estimate for how many died in the Cultural Revolution. The U. S. already has at least a million dead from COVID alone. Half of those deaths are directly traceable to the orange former president.

The problem continues and worsens thanks to the anti-vaccine movements connected to the JBS and its successors like QAnon. Now we have to deal with measles and other sicknesses that were once almost eradicated. These plagues have been revived by the unvaccinated.

We also have the injured and dead left by the racist and homophobic right wing unleashed by the orangutan. Just as the JBS was more-or-less left for dead by regular people, so were the Nazis, the Klan, and their fellow travelers. Stupidity and hatred are apparently like vampires, experts at hiding and almost immortal.

I have been trying to figure out how supposedly educated adults can believe the garbage that the JBS, QAnon, Nazis, and Klan all put out. Researching the John Birchers and their Chinese parallels has shown me that this insanity is neither a new nor uniquely American problem. It gives me hope that the U. S. can survive it just as China survived Mao.

P. S. Sad to say, but Khrushchev was right.