60th Anniversary: Celebrating The John Birch Society’s Epic Journey

60th Anniversary: Celebrating The John Birch Society’s Epic Journey

For six decades, under continuous enemy fire, The John Birch Society has carried the torch of freedom in the fight for God, family, country, and the Constitution. ...
William F. Jasper

Sixty years of unflinching service to God, family, country. Six decades of uncompromising dedication to truth and principle. In December 1958, when Robert Welch summoned together 11 prominent American patriots to found The John Birch Society, our nation was in deadly peril — from without and within. Communism was sweeping the world, while here at home Democrats and Republicans alike were embracing welfare-state socialism. Politicians from both parties were not only lauding and funding the recently formed United Nations organization, but were practically tripping over each other to transfer more and more powers to that global body.

World War II, in which totalitarian collectivism — in the form of communism, Nazism, and fascism — had ravaged the planet, had ended only 13 years earlier. The Korean War, fought under United Nations command and with incredible restrictions on U.S. forces, had ended only five years earlier, in 1953. But it had not really ended; our leaders had settled for a cease-fire and the abandonment of American POW/MIAs to communist North Korea. President Harry Truman had sent America’s fighting men into that cauldron of death without a declaration of war by the U.S. Congress, as demanded by our Constitution. He and his enablers in Congress and the media got around that by claiming that the Korean “conflict” was a “police action” authorized by the United Nations. There was no need, they said, for a formal declaration of war.

More than 36,000 Americans gave their lives in the UN’s Korean “police action” — and a dangerous precedent was set for sending America’s armed forces to far-flung battlefields on open-ended missions, based merely on presidential whim and the supposed demands of the “international community.” Another consequence of that conflict was the successful solidification of communist conquest of yet another land. The “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” backed by the Soviet Union and communist China, was, in effect, rewarded by the United States with a guarantee of future nonintervention. Communist dictator Kim Il-sung, Korea’s Soviet-installed “Supreme Leader,” presided over one of the most repressive regimes on the planet until his death in 1994. His son, Kim Jong-il (ruling from 1994 to 2011), and grandson, Kim Jong-un (ruling from 2011 to present), have continued his sordid, lethal reign. The current global tension and tumult caused by Kim Jong-un is an enduring legacy to betrayal by American leaders decades ago.

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