Part 2 of 2

It is accurate to point out that some very prominent JBS members were officials within the White Citizens Councils movement or other racist groups. However, they were not allowed to use the JBS as an avenue to proselytize for those beliefs.

In 2/66, Donald Gray, (the Birch Society’s Wholesale Book Division Business Mgr) sent a memo to all of the JBS’s American Opinion bookstores. The purpose of the memo was to identify the type of material that should NOT be sold in, or recommended by, JBS bookstores. Gray described such verboten material as:
“…most of the books and pamphlets with an anti-Semitic flavor which we omit from our booklist (that) are not of sufficient value in substance or scholarship to rise above the level of anti-Semitic invective or propaganda. Frankly, in our opinion, this applies to most of the books or pamphlets by Marilyn Allen, Richard Cotten, Myron Fagan, Kenneth Goff, Wickliffe Vennard, Eustace Mullins, Gerald L.K. Smith, Robert H. Williams, and Benjamin Freedman.”

Significantly, several of the listed authors (such as Marilyn Allen, Richard Cotten, Gerald LK Smith and Eustace Mullins) were explicit racists — not just anti-semites.

With respect to your comment about a “nuanced understanding of racism” — I think you are conflating two different matters. There is nothing in my argument that requires anybody to euphemize or trivialize the credible factual evidence regarding racists who were JBS members. And, as I have previously written both here in LGF, in other discussion forums, and in my on-line reports about the JBS —- there are many valid reasons for criticizing and rejecting the JBS interpretation of our civil rights movement.

My position, however, is that it is not fair or necessary to attribute to the JBS as an organization, or to its leadership, such vile motives as racism or bigotry (whether “passive” or ‘active”). That premise wrongly smears many decent people and the use of such unkind and mean-spirited labels makes intelligent and amicable discussion impossible.

I might also add that I apply the exact same principle to the Birch Society itself. For 40+ years I have condemned their malicious characterizations of everyone who disagrees with them — whether liberals or conservatives.

re: #75 Obdicut

Well, Bennett says they did, for one. Check out pages 505 and 506, for some quick, easy examples.

That essay of his is rather good reading. Thanks for linking to it.

I fully accept that. I simply think that opposition, even though not stemming from bigotry, can also be racist.

If you support only people with college educations voting for the president, and no black people have college educations, it really doesn’t matter if your belief is based staunchly on an honorable belief that only the college-educated can make that decision well; it is also a racist position.

Okay. I asked an ethicist. He said it was fine to question the honesty of anyone, as long as I wasn’t presuming dishonesty.

It’s very odd; you seem to be insisting on a nuanced appraisal of the JBS, but ignoring a nuanced idea of racism. Racism doesn’t only include being bigoted, but— as I previously said— valuing other things above racial equality. In this case, you are asserting, and I agree, that the JBS felt that states rights and the resistance to federal government was more important than racial equality.