In the parlance of the Internet age, the word "meme" refers to a self-replicating idea, phrase, or concept that spreads through a population like a virus. Memes can be playful pieces of trivial slang, advertising slogans as indelible as they are annoying, or innovative expressions that usefully

However, memes can also transmit misinformation or disinformation--that is, falsehoods deliberately planted and carefully cultivated. They can also be used to defame, discredit, or dehumanize individuals or groups of people. Once seeded in the public mind, the defamatory meme can propagate itself almost endlessly, infecting the population at large with an artfully distorted perception of the targeted person or people.

The Communists perfected the use of memes, including those intended to dehumanize their enemies, long before the Internet. An official Communist Party directive issued in 1943 decreed: "When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them, after suitable build-ups, as Fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic ... to discredit them. In the public mind constantly associate those who oppose us with those names which already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind."

"This lumping together opponents of every description--mild or tough-branding them with some predominantly objectionable label, is an old Red tactic," observed Edward Hunter, a scholar of Communist propaganda and psychological warfare, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1961. "It produces some of the more obvious of the patent falsehoods that come out of Red logic ... and reaches such perversions of Socratic thinking as the teaching that war is peace, black is white, and opposition to communism is illegal, whereas pro-Communist activity is perfectly legal."

Hunter informed the Senate Committee that a new "anti-anti-Communist drive has been ordered by the Soviet Communist hierarchy, speaking through and by the voice of the Communist parties of the world, gathered in a rare conclave." The campaign would also produce "a seemingly spontaneous outpouring of articles and persuasions of every character, that will arise all along the fringes of the communications field where the Reds have influence ... penetrating all channels of the press and all attitude-changing segments of our society, such as schools and churches." This smear campaign targeted, as the central enemy, The John Birch Society.

Destroy the JBS!

A 1963 report compiled by the California State Senate's Fact-finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities concluded that the Kremlin-organized campaign to destroy the anti-Communist Right--and the JBS specifically--was a direct response to "Birch actions to throttle Communist activities" in the U.S. In December 1960, 81 Communist-party affiliates from around the world issued a manifesto calling for a "resolute struggle against anti-Communism...." The Communist Party of the United States published that manifesto a month later, thereby setting the stage for the anti-JBS smear.

"So far as the American Communists were concerned, this was an order--plain and incontrovertible," commented the subcommittee report. "It was an implementation of orders from the highest source of the world Communist movement, and it was therefore imperative that the party here do everything in its power to render the Birch Society, the anti-Communist schools, and other rising anti-Communist organizations ineffective."

"Overnight, the activities of the anti-Communist groups became the subject of long articles," Hunter testified. "Anti-Communism only became news when the pillorying of the Birch Society gave [Communists and their allies] the opportunity to refer to all anti-Communism as the work of 'the Birchites,' and to smear it all indiscriminately as 'right extremist.' Without exception, each of the articles purporting to summarize the anti-Communist movement followed this propaganda line. Each time, too, with a similarity that was unmistakable ... there is a backhanded effort to brand the whole thing as Nazi."

Publications put out by the Communist Party--the polluted headwaters of this propaganda campaign--presented the "Nazi" smear in undisguised form. Typical of such screeds was a 1961 booklet entitled The Fascist Revival: The Inside Story of the John Birch Society. Written by Mike Newberry of the Weekly Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, the pamphlet depicted the JBS as a paramilitary fascist organization whose underground cadres (composed of seedy, drunken, dissolute bigots) were plotting to assassinate federal government officials. In his frenzied rendering, Newberry claimed that the JBS was spearheading a fascist plot to overthrow American "democracy."

This assault on the JBS was part of a larger effort to create what we might now call an anti-Birch "meme." "The virulent tone of the booklet ... indicates that the Communist Party would like to create a new, Pavlovian trigger word for this period in its psychological warfare, and believes 'Birchite' might be put into the language this way, replacing 'McCarthyite,'" Hunter explained.

The smear of the JBS tacitly acknowledged the Society as the most significant, and potentially the most effective, means of defeating Communist subversion. This fact was noted by the California Senate Subcommittee:

The feature that distinguishes the Birch Society from other anti-Communist groups is its combination of study and direct action. This provides an outlet for the members, who thus can feel that they are participating in a coordinated campaign. As Professor Alan F. Westin put it: "Unlike those right-fundamentalist groups which have energetic leaders but passive memberships, the Birchers are decidedly activist. 'Get to work or learn to talk Russian,' is a slogan [JBS founder Robert] Welch recommends to his followers, and they are certainly hard at work." This sort of implementing of study by direct action is what disturbs [American Communist leader] Gus Hall and his followers.

The California Senate Subcommittee's investigation of the JBS was actually instigated by Mr. Welch. As the Communist-inspired campaign to smear the Society took root in California, abetted by statements from high-placed state officials (such as Attorney General Stanley Mosk), journalists and politicians began to clamor for an official investigation of the JBS as an un-American or subversive organization. Mr. Welch responded by sending a telegram to Governor Edmund G. Brown "urgently demand[ing] the proposed investigation of The John Birch Society by the California State Senate on Un-American Activities Committee." "A dozen or a hundred or a thousand of our members in California will gladly testify and we can assure you that unlike our Communist enemies none of our members will take the Fifth Amendment," wrote Mr. Welch. "We will gladly cooperate with the Committee in every way that we can."

The resulting report documented the Kremlin-line origins of the anti-JBS smear and was later republished by the Society. Although the subcommittee was often very critical of opinions expressed by Mr. Welch and by the Society, its dispassionate, even-handed examination of the facts established beyond dispute that the JBS was an effective, principled organization composed of public-minded citizens concerned for the future of our republic. This was why the Kremlin and its American adherents undertook to defame and dehumanize the JBS.

But the Communist smear campaign represented only one prong of the attack on the Society.

The Establishment Joins In

The initial Communist sortie against the Society came in a February 25, 1961 article in People's World (the official newspaper of the Communist Party on the West Coast) headlined: "Enter (from stage right) the John Birch Society." That article regurgitated libels against the Society previously carried in Pravda, Izvestia, Trud, Literraturnaya Gazeta, and other Soviet publications. Little would have come of the charges made in the Communist press had they not been recycled by the mainstream American media.

Time magazine's March 10, 1961 issue published a hit piece on the JBS that repeated, almost verbatim, many key points in the People's World article.

Even as the Communists and their ideological siblings in the mainstream press caricatured the JBS as a pack of fascists, a whispering campaign was started among conservative activists to denigrate the JBS as a Communist organization. "In the Chicago area right now," observed Mr. Welch in the March 1961 John Birch Society Bulletin, "good patriots are not only being informed by written report that The John Birch Society is Communist, but two of Chicago's leading citizens are being specifically named as Communists on the basis of their membership in the Society--and one of them is not even a member and never has been. In Texas the rumor has been widely and efficiently spread that The John Birch Society is trying to get [then-FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover out of the government."

Another vector of attack came from the Kennedy administration, which the JBS had severely criticized. Coinciding with the Communist anti-Birch campaign that began in early 1961, the Kennedy administration began to explore ways of using the Internal Revenue Service to shut down the JBS and other conservative organizations described by JFK as "discordant voices of extremism."

In his book Power to Destroy, historian John A. Andrew III notes that in late 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy "turned to Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers union and liberal attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr., asking them to formulate concrete suggestions for a counterattack" against the JBS-led "Radical Right." In December of that year, RFK received a 24-page battle plan entitled the "Reuther Memorandum," which "formed the basis of a broad assault on the right wing by the Kennedy administration," continues Professor Andrew. "It was the first step toward the utilization of the Internal Revenue Service in what became a covert effort to discredit the right and undercut its sources of support."

Despite enduring persistent--and often illegal--harassment by the IRS, The John Birch Society continued to expand its influence. Having survived Communist-instigated smears and a White House-directed assault from the IRS, the Society was targeted by so-called mainstream conservatives, led by William F. Buckley Jr.

As a student at Yale, Buckley was a protege of CIA operative Willmoore Kendall, a onetime disciple of Communist Leon Trotsky. Buckley was also "tapped" to be a member of Skull & Bones, the campus branch of a notorious international secret society. After Buckley graduated, Kendall introduced Buckley to James Burnham, another "ex"-Trotskyite with CIA connections. Eventually Buckley joined the CIA and (by his own admission) received training in "deep cover" work. It was around that time that the future conservative leader penned an essay for America magazine opining that the Cold War would require "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" and its "attendant centralization of power in Washington." In 1955, Buckley--surrounding himself with "ex"-Communists and CIA-connected figures--inaugurated National Review magazine, which the Establishment immediately embraced as the flagship conservative journal.

Shortly after the combined Communist/Kennedy administration attack on the JBS began, National Review joined the assault. A lengthy editorial published in the February 13, 1962 issue insisted that "Robert Welch is damaging the cause of anti-Communism" by "distorting reality." Abetted by Buckley and other "responsible conservatives" (a label Buckley devised), the Republican establishment waged an escalating campaign against the JBS. The attacks reached a crescendo during the 1964 Republican National Convention. At that gathering New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, addressing a national television audience, denounced the forces of "extremism," including "the Nazis, the Klan, the Communists, and the John Birch Society."

In this fashion, Rockefeller employed what has come to be known as the "sandwich smear"--inserting a reference to The John Birch Society in a list that included certifiable hate groups or subversive movements.

In 1965, Buckley reportedly confided to close friends, "I am going to destroy The John Birch Society." That year, his magazine published a lengthy diatribe intended to excommunicate the JBS from the conservative movement. Twenty-five years later, when Buckley stepped down as National Review's editor, he told the Washington Post that the "absolute exclusion" of the JBS and other so-called extremists from the conservative movement was "the magazine's most important accomplishment...."

Battered but Unbowed

"Not since the furious campaign of" calumny directed against the [pre-World War II] America First Committee has a group on the Right had to endure such a barrage of negative publicity--and with little if any justification," summarized historian Justin Raimondo in Reclaiming the American Right.

The reason why Buckley and the conservative wing of the Establishment joined "with the liberals in a smear campaign of massive proportions was that the Birchers refused to fall in line behind the Cold War foreign policy of the New Right," continued Raimondo. Rather than supporting the Establishment Right's agenda--global interventionism, committing our nation in a series of UN-affiliated alliances, shoveling out billions in foreign aid, and building the "totalitarian bureaucracy" at home endorsed by Buckley--the JBS prescribed radically reducing the central government's size, cost, and invasiveness.

Robert Welch understood that Communist regimes abroad would collapse without the material aid that our supposedly anti-Communist government was providing to them. He also warned that our interventionist foreign policy would not only impoverish our nation, but would also bind our nation in a web of interdependence, ultimately leading to the total surrender of our sovereignty.

"The JBS was inveighing against the New World Order years before George Bush popularized that sinister phrase," recalls Raimondo. "For more than thirty years, the smear brigade derided these concerns as the perfervid fantasies of discredited 'conspiracy theorists.' When the plans of the internationalists for a world government backed by U.S. troops and tax dollars unfolded on the front pages of our newspapers, the Society crowed: 'JBS--Ahead of its time!'--and justifiably so."

Since the anti-JBS smear reached its high-water mark in 1965, the Establishment has followed a different approach to the Society--contemptuous silence, occasionally punctuated with slander. When a suitable occasion arises--such as the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, or the 9-11 attacks--various organs of the establishment opinion cartel will emit warnings about the dangers of "extremism" that invariably invoke the Communist Party line circa 1961.

A museum-quality example of this approach appeared in a May 13, 1996 Christian ,Science Monitor op-ed column by Ira Straus, then the chairman of the Committee for the U.S. in NATO. Although Timothy McVeign and "others unknown" carried out the OKC bombing, Straus contended, Birchers were actually to blame for the atrocity.

"For decades," Straus wrote, "the John Birch Society has spread word of the Conspiracy: The international bankers who pull all the strings. The ones who really control both the Communist conspiracy and the United States government. The Trilateral Commission. The Federal Reserve, which is ruining our money. The Council on Foreign Relations--psst, they're out to destroy the Constitution, take away our guns, and enslave us in a United Nations One-World Communist government. Their code words: 'New World Order.'"

Straus didn't demonstrate how the JBS viewpoint was in error, nor did he demonstrate that McVeigh was affiliated or sympathized with the Society. Instead he scrupulously followed the template for creating an anti-Birch "meme" laid out by the Communists decades earlier: tirelessly associate the Society with criminals, terrorists, and subversive elements.

"What is the milieu in which criminal groups of 'freemen' and Oklahoma City bombers grow'?" asked Straus. "It is the underworld of conspiracy theory, a subculture in which people share fantasies of fighting heroically against a huge Conspiracy that is taking over the world .... Conspiracy theory is doing America real harm. Long incubating underground, it has grown into the greatest enslaver of human minds since Communism. It irrationalizes thinking on every issue. It kills. It turns millions of Americans against their own country. It undermines foreign policy by vilifying our government's every effort."

Another opportunity to resurrect the Communist-coined anti-JBS smear came in July 1999, when Benjamin Smith, an adherent of an anti-Semitic group called the World Church of the Creator (WCOC) went on a shooting rampage, killing and wounding several people in the Chicago area before taking his own life. A profile of the WCOC published by the Philadelphia Inquirer claimed that the group's founder, Ben Klassen, was a "lifetime John Birch Society member...."

In fact, Klassen--like a handful of other anti-Semitic miscreants--joined the JBS subsequent to the high-profile smear campaign, because he took at face value the defamatory depiction of the organization as a neo-Nazi cabal. When he became aware that the JBS is welcome to honorable Americans of all faiths and backgrounds, Klassen resigned in disgust--in 1969, decades before taking his own life. "[T]o read the Birch literature, one would never even get a hint of the real culprits," wrote Klassen in his letter of resignation, referring to his demented assumption that "the Jews" are the real "enemy." "In fact, the members are led to believe that no Jewish conspiracy exists, and [to blame Jews for our problems] is the cardinal sin and grounds for expulsion from the Birch Society," whined the hateful Klassen.

Echoes of the anti-JBS "meme" were found in Project Megiddo, a 1999 FBI report warning that "right-wing extremists"--the JBS in particular--posed a terrorist threat at the turn of the millennium. The FBI document was produced by a network of radical "watchdog" organizations and activists, many connected to the hard-core Marxist revolutionary Left. And following the horrific 9-11 attacks, the same "watchdogs" took up the cudgels once again, insisting that the attack on our nation by radical Islamic terrorists justified a federal crackdown on domestic "extremist groups" such as the JBS.

The November 19, 2001 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, for instance, cited reports from "watchdogs" that "there are as many as 25 hate groups in Wisconsin" and that "such groups [are] ... pounding on immigration, civil liberties and anti-Israel themes...." A chart accompanying the Journal-Sentinel article, entitled "A Geography of Hate," displayed a map of Wisconsin on which were marked the locations of various "hate groups." Included in that category were various Ku Klux Klan, rico-Nazi, and skinhead groups, several self styled "militia" units, a handful of "Christian patriot" associations, the Wisconsin branch of the U.S. Constitution Party, and the home office of The John Birch Society.

The assaults on the Society began shortly after its birth; they persist to this day, and will continue for as long as the JBS endures. This is because--as the California Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee pointed out four decades ago--the JBS combines sound education and concerted action to offer a uniquely effective way to combat and reverse our nation's decline into collectivist tyranny. As long as it exists, the JBS will remain the target of defamatory smears generated by the architects of our engineered decline.