John Bevilaqua Posted September 3, 2009 Share Posted September 3, 2009 I just noticed that James Van Brunn, the 88-year old white supremacist who killed the guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. this summer was a close friend and associate of Lt. Gen. Pedro A. del Valle of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta. del Valle once invited a former Nazi to speak at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD and was censured for that by the Navy. Del Valle later lost his job at ITT in South America for his constant anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi tirades. He later helped install a military dictatorship in Chile and was believed to be responsible for the murders of Orlando Letellier the U.S. Ambassador to Chile and one of this associates. As a founding member of The Shickshinny Knights of Malta, del Valle has long been on my list of prime suspects in the murder of JFK as well. Recent revelations by Prof. Tucker from Rutgers in his book about Wickliffe Draper describe the close relationship between Draper and del Valle for decades. Del Valle also believes that the CIA was responsible for letting the USA lose the Korean War and along with Willoughby and MacArthur blamed them for decades for allowing alleged Communist infiltrators in the CIA to control US Foreign Affairs. It is just this nexus of characters who plotted together to eliminate JFK from the face of the earth and lay the entire blame for this conspiracy at the door of the CIA while exonerating their friends in Army Intel and ONI Intel from any blame whatsoever. The deeper you dig into the background of del Valle, the more you realize that he fit right in with the the psychos like Edwin A. Walker, Charles A. Willoughby, Bonner Fellers, George Stratemeyer and Albert Wedemeyer, all of whom were either accused of harboring anti-USA and pro-Nazi sentiments or convicted of some sort of insurrectionist or rebellious anti-Democratic acts and then later exposed, castigated, reviled, belittled and then separated from service to the United States of America. It was just this crew of bitter, reviled, hateful paranoid and schizophrenic psychos who were actually anti-American and pro-Nazi who worked with Wickliffe Draper to have JFK silenced forever. They thought that JFK, Dean Rusk and Dean Acheson were going to hand over the country on a silver platter to Communist control. Willoughby, Walker, MacArthur and del Valle blamed the influence of the CIA for their plight in becoming outcasts, pariahs, has-beens and castoffs and they were generally correct about that. Their plot included not only killing JFK but burying the CIA in blame and retribution in an act of premeditated and pre-designed revenge. Do not fall for their well laid plans and subterfuges. If you do, then you are only playing into their hands, and will be logged as victims of their conniving schemes to perpetuity. http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/...-valle-and.html Pedro del Valle From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Pedro del Valle August 28, 1893(1893-08-28) – April 28, 1978 (aged 84) Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle First Hispanic Marine general Place of birth San Juan, Puerto Rico Place of death Annapolis, Maryland Place of burial United States Naval Academy Cemetery Allegiance Flag of the United States United States of America Service/branch United States Marine Corps Years of service 1915-1948 Rank Lieutenant General Commands held 11th Marine Regiment III Amphibious Corps Artillery 1st Marine Division Battles/wars The Banana Wars World War II * Battle of Guadalcanal * Battle of Guam * Battle of Okinawa Awards Navy Distinguished Service Medal Legion of Merit (2) Lieutenant General Pedro Augusto del Valle (August 28, 1893 – April 28, 1978) was a United States Marine Corps officer who became the first Hispanic to reach the rank of Lieutenant General. His military career included service in World War I, Haiti and Nicaragua during the so-called Banana Wars of the 1920s, and in the seizure of Guadalcanal and later as Commanding General of the U.S. 1st Marine Division during World War ll. Contents [hide] * 1 Biography o 1.1 Early years o 1.2 The Banana Wars & pre-World War II o 1.3 World War II o 1.4 Post-World War II o 1.5 Later years * 2 Written Works by Pedro del Valle o 2.1 Books o 2.2 Articles * 3 Awards and Recognitions o 3.1 Award citation * 4 See also * 5 Notes * 6 References * 7 External links [edit] Biography [edit] Early years Del Valle was born on August 28, 1893 in San Juan, Puerto Rico when the island was still under Spanish colonial rule. He was related to Dr. Francisco del Valle, a surgeon who had served as mayor of San Juan from 1907 to 1910. In 1900, two years after the Spanish-American War, the del Valle family moved to Maryland where they became U.S. citizens (The Jones Act of 1917 later gave United States Citizenship to all Puerto Ricans born on the island).[1] He received his primary and secondary education in Maryland. On June 17, 1911, after he graduated from high school del Valle received an appointment by George Radcliffe Colton, who served from 1909 to 1913 as the U.S. appointed governor of Puerto Rico, to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Del Valle graduated from the academy in June 1915 and was commissioned a second lieutenant of the Marine Corps on June 5, 1915.[1][2] He was, perhaps, the first Puerto Rican graduate.[3] [edit] The Banana Wars & pre-World War II Pedro del Valle helped the Marine Corps in the capture of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1916, for which he was awarded his first Legion of Merit. Del Valle commanded the Marine detachment on board the USS Texas (BB-35) in the North Atlantic during World War I. In 1919, he participated in the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet.[1] Later he served as "Aide-de-camp" to Major General Joseph Henry Pendleton after serving on a tour of sea duty aboard the USS Wyoming(BB-32). His job included an inspection tour of the West Indies in the company of General Pendleton.[1] In 1926, del Valle served with the Gendarmerie of Haiti for three years and, during that time, he also became active in the war against Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. In 1929, he returned to the United States and attended the Field Officers Course at the Marine Corps School in MCB Quantico, Virginia.[1] In 1931, Brigadier General Randolph C. Berkeley appointed del Valle to the "Landing Operations Text Board" in Quantico, the first organizational step taken by the Marines to develop a working doctrine for amphibious assault. In 1932, he wrote an essay titled "Ship-to-Shore in Amphibious Operations" which was published in the Marine Corps Gazette. In his essay, he stressed the importance of a coordinated amphibious assault and of an execution of an opposed landing.[4] He worked as an intelligence officer in Havana, Cuba in 1933 under Admiral Charles Freeman, following the Cuban Sergeant's Revolt. From 1935–1937, del Valle was Assistant Naval Attache, attached to the American Embassy to Italy in Rome.[1] While on duty, del Valle participated as an observer with the Italian Forces during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. The experiences which del Valle gained as an observer led him to author the book "Roman Eagles Over Ethiopia" where he describes the events leading up to the Italian expedition and the complete movements of combat operations by the Italian Army under Generals De Bono, Badoglio and Graziani.[5] In 1939, he was ordered to attend the Army War College in Washington, D.C. and after graduating was named Executive Officer of the Division of Plans and Policies, USMC.[1][5] [edit] World War II then-Major General Pedro del Valle (second from left) is greeted by then-Colonel Puller (Chesty) on Pavuvu in late October 1944, while Major General Rupertus (far left) looks on On March 1941, del Valle became the Commanding Officer of the 11th Marine Regiment, (artillery). Upon the outbreak of World War II, del Valle led his regiment and participated in the seizure and defense of Guadalcanal providing artillery support for the 1st Marine Division. In the Battle of the Tenaru, the fire power provided by del Valle's artillery units killed many assaulting Japanese soldiers before they ever reached the Marine positions. The attackers were killed almost to the last man.[4] The outcome of the battle was so stunning that the Japanese commander, Colonel Ichiki Kiyonao, committed seppuku shortly afterwards..[6] then-Major General Alexander Vandegrift, impressed with del Valle's leadership recommended his promotion and on October 1, 1942, del Valle became a Brigadier General. Vandegrift retained del Valle as head of the 11th Marines, the only time that the 11th Marines has ever had a general as their commanding officer.[4] In 1943, he served as Commander of Marine Forces overseeing Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Russell and Florida Islands. Left to right: Major General Geiger, Corps Commander; Colonel Silverthorn, Corps Chief of Staff and then-Brigadier General del Valle, Corps Artillery Commander, examine a plaster relief map of Guam on board the USS Appalachian. On April 1, 1944, del Valle, as Commanding General of the Third Corps Artillery, III Marine Amphibious Corps, took part in the Battle of Guam and was awarded a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit. The men under his command did such a good job with their heavy artillery that no one man could be singled out for commendation. Instead each man was given a letter of commendation by del Valle which was carried in their record books.[7] In late October 1944, he succeeded Major General William Rupertus as Commanding General of the 1st Marine Division, being personally greeted in his new command by Colonel Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller. At the time, the 1st Marine Division was training on the island of Pavuvu for the invasion of Okinawa. On May 29, 1945, del Valle participated in one of the most important events which led to victory in Okinawa.[8] After five weeks of fighting, del Valle ordered Company A of the 1st Battalion 5th Marines to capture Shuri Castle, a medieval fortress of the ancient Ryukyuan kings. Seizure of Shuri Castle represented a moral blow for the Japanese and was an undeniable milestone in the Okinawa campaign.[4] The fighting in Okinawa would continue for 24 more days. Del Valle was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for his leadership during the battle and the subsequent occupation and reorganization of Okinawa.[4] [edit] Post-World War II After World War II ended, del Valle was ordered back to Headquarters Marine Corps, where he was named Inspector General, a position which he held until he retired on January 1, 1948. On February 19, 1946 Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico and del Valle held a meeting with President Harry S. Truman in the White House, in which Senator Chavez recommended del Valle for the position of governor of Puerto Rico.[9] From 1898 to 1942, the governors of the island were officials appointed by the President of the United States. The first civilian and native Puerto Rican appointed governor of Puerto Rico was Jesus T. Piñero in 1942. If Congress had not approved legislation in 1947 allowing Puerto Ricans to elect their own Governor, del Valle may have been appointed to the governorship.[10] [edit] Later years After retiring from the Marine Corps, del Valle worked as a representative of ITT in the company's office in Cairo, Egypt. After some time with the company he was named president of ITT for all South America in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a position that he held until 1951. Believing that the United States was in danger of a communist threat, del Valle tried to convince the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Department of Defense to form a vigilante minuteman group. He also believed that the CIA should operate behind Russian and Chinese lines. After his ideas were turned down, he decided to form his own group. In 1953, del Valle met with Lt. Col. John H. Hoffman (USMC), Lt. Col. Eugene Cowles Poneroy, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, and Major General Claire Chennault (USAF) and formed the "Defenders of the American Constitution" (DAC). DAC's main goal was to purge the United States of any communist influence. The idea behind the group was to organize the citizens in each state as vigilantes against sabotage and other forms of treason, then link them up in some national headquarters.[11] Del Valle ran for governor of Maryland in 1953, however he was badly defeated in his quest to be nominated in the Republican primary election. The controversial views shared by some of the members of "DAC" was to blame for the organization's decline in popularity.[11] On April 12, 1961, del Valle invoked The Protocols of the Elders of Zion during a speech before the United States Daughters of 1812, in an attempt to prove that Communism and Socialism were introduced to Russia by an "Invisible Government" whose intention was to destroy that country. Del valle also belonged to a group known as the Sons of Liberty, established in 1967 in Annapolis, Maryland and named after the secret patriotic society which directed the actions of the Boston Tea Party on December 13, 1773.[12] Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle, who was married to Katharine Nelson (1890-1983), died on April 28, 1978 in Annapolis, Maryland. He was buried in the United States Naval Academy Cemetery and Columbarium. After del Valle’s death at age 85, the DAC ceased to exist.[13] [edit] Written Works by Pedro del Valle [edit] Books * Del Valle, Pedro Augusto. Diary and reports of the U.S. naval observer of Italian Operations in East Africa: March 1937 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937). * Del Valle, Pedro Augusto. Roman Eagles Over Ethiopia (Harrisburg, PA: Military service Pub. Co., 1940). * Del Valle, Pedro Augusto. Semper fidelis: An autobiography (Hawthorne, CA: Christian Book Club of America, 1976). * Lieutenant General Pedro A. del Valle, U.S. Marine Corps (retired) (Oral history program). [edit] Articles "Guam, the Classical Amphibious Operation" Military Review (1944). "Massed Fires on Guam" Marine Corps Gazette(1944). [edit] Awards and Recognitions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted September 3, 2009 Author Share Posted September 3, 2009 Here is Kevin Coogan on Pedro del Valle: http://www.iisg.nl/research/coogan.doc A really great article, by the way. Kudos to Kevin. Also read "Killing Commies for Christ the King" one of my other postings on Spartacus which covers more on del Valle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted September 4, 2009 Author Share Posted September 4, 2009 (edited) Did you guys see that the Holocaust Museum murderer was a close disciple and protege of Lt. Gen Pedro A. del Valle's from the USMC? Search on Constantine del Valle Van Brunn and watch what you find. And even Wm. Tucker from Rutgers said that Draper and del Valle had a lot of significant correspondence for years between them in both the del Valle and Draper archives along with that guy from Atlanta, the Colonel who was in the KKK who wrote White America... what was his name... oh, right Colonel Earnest Sevier Cox that was his name. World War I war hero turned into Georgia Cotton Plantation Klansman and his book "White America" was financed by Draper, too. These guys also translated, copied, printed and sold "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" and John Beaty's "Iron Curtain Over America", two of the MOST anti-Semitic books in history. So Wickliffe Draper, Earnest Sevier (as in Xavier or Savior) Cox and Pedro A. del Valle were all involved together for decades of murder, mayhem, mischief and anti-Democratic actions as it turns out. They all hated blacks, Jews, (Canaanites), the CIA, the Commies, non-Christians, JFK, FDR and Truman (over Korea) plus Dean Rusk and Dean Acheson. You should read what Kevin Coogan found out about a meeting between Roscoe Hillenkoeter, then incoming head of the OSS/CIA and del Valle in about 1951. Hillenkoetter thought he could get del Valle to go to Korea and help nudge MacArthur and Willoughby out of the picture but del Valle was such a MacArthur fan that he told Hillenkoetter to get another man to do the job. MacArthur was the greatest stateman and war hero in the history of the USA, yadda, yadda, yadda. Del Valle was a big help to all the Banana Plantation owners in Central and South America, too, including the Dulles brothers, Gen. Robert E. Wood, and the Cabots and the Forbes all of whom were giant shareholders in United Fruit with HQ in New Orleans near Guy Bannister's and Maurice Gatlin's offices and probably near their numerous orifices too. Of course, del Valle then squealed to MacArthur and Willoughby about the plans of the CIA and Hillenkoetter and their counter measures could do nothing to stop Truman from sacking Mac and Willoughby in a few months flat. Fast forward through 10 years of "chewing the rug" for both of them. Willoughby had already made H. L. Hunt a multi-millionaire by letting him in on the news about the pending Korean War in 1950 according to Prof. Bruce Cumings from Northwestern in Origins of the Korean War Volumes I and II which cost over $100 each when you can even find them. Then Willoughby went back to work after Korea working directly for Hunt in Mozambique seeking out oil drilling leases and territories and made even more money. In the early 1960's their plans turned to how they were going to snuff JFK and make more money during the expanded conflict in the Viet Nam War. Rockwell Intl bought out Draper Company in 1967 and later Allen-Bradley Corporation and they all got richer and richer and richer. All of them loved Hitler, the Confederacy, Holocausts, The Prevention of Hereditarily Ill Progeny (The Holocaust Laws), Eugenics, Involuntary Sterilization and the Pentagon and CIA War Machines. Del Valle was big in Shickshinny Knights of Malta and was one of those who believed in Killing Commies for Christ the King, too. And all the while he was a Puerto Rican born Hispanic White Supremacist and Eugenicist. What a parlay that was. Just like Laurence Dennis was a mulatto who always passed for white white he pretended to be enamored by Fascism, Naziism, Holocausts, Eugenics and Hitler, too. Crazy stuff. And del Valle was involved with something called The Suvarov Union in Argentina which was an enclave of pro-Nazi ex-Czarist White Russians who were so bad they could not even get into Canada so they went to Argentina with the other exiled Nazis. They were part of Vonsiatsky's little empire of White Russians, too. There is no way that del Valle and Vonsiatsky would not have known each other due to this common ground with The Suvarov Union in Argentina. Sometimes it is difficult to link together 2 such gigantically mischievous and devious miscreants like Vonstiasky and del Valle and it took a long time to do it but this is pretty conclusive evidence. Trust me on this one, dudes. This is how it all went down. "And that's the truth as Lily Tomlin used to say!" Phruuuttttthhhhtttzzzzz. Edited September 4, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 Most of the above were associated with Willis Carto considered to be the father of the neo-Nazi / Holocaust denier movements in the US. In the 80's (or was it the late 70's?) Lyndon LaRouche associated with him as well. More recently the forum's own James Fetzer has not shied away from hanging out with Capt Eric May and Maj William Fox a pair of far reich Holocaust denying anti-Semites (who fortunately are no longer part of the US Army) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted September 4, 2009 Author Share Posted September 4, 2009 (edited) Most of the above were associated with Willis Carto considered to be the father of the neo-Nazi / Holocaust denier movements in the US. In the 80's (or was it the late 70's?) Lyndon LaRouche associated with him as well. More recently the forum's own James Fetzer has not shied away from hanging out with Capt Eric May and Maj William Fox a pair of far reich Holocaust denying anti-Semites (who fortunately are no longer part of the US Army) Carto's Liberty Lobby was even cited in Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon as "The Strawberry Lobby" as early as 1959 when the book was published. And Condon also cites the "White Spotlight" when the house organ of The Liberty Lobby was called "Spotlight". Carto was involved with both the Institute for Historical Review and The Congress of Freedom when Milteer and Revilo Oliver talked about their "hit list" of 300 leftists within the USA as reported to Lt. Lockhart Gracey of the Miami PD who I met as a teenager before I knew anything about the JFK hit. And I did not know that del Valle was involved with Sons of Liberty which later used the Liberty Lobby address and office space as late as the 1990's until moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Birds of a feather flock together. And when Condon mentions "The Tuaregs" that ties right back into Draper. Just Google "Tuaregs Draper" or "Asselar Man Draper" and see what comes back for hits. Condon was just a brilliant investigative reporter who had to write in rhymes and anagrams and other word plays to protect himself. I am more convinced than ever that this neo-Nazi, Fascist, anti-Semite and segregationist nexus of characters did in JFK for their own ulterior motives. Why would Fetzer gain by hanging out with those 2 characters? How did you hear about this anyway? Seems like they share common ground on certain subjects? Birds of a feather flock together yet again? There are times when LaRouche hits the nail on the head with William F. Buckley's Carlist Catholic movement and there are times when his writers and followers go off the deep end, too. Hard to figure him out. Edited September 4, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 (edited) Most of the above were associated with Willis Carto considered to be the father of the neo-Nazi / Holocaust denier movements in the US. In the 80's (or was it the late 70's?) Lyndon LaRouche associated with him as well. More recently the forum's own James Fetzer has not shied away from hanging out with Capt Eric May and Maj William Fox a pair of far reich Holocaust denying anti-Semites (who fortunately are no longer part of the US Army) [...] Why would Fetzer gain by hanging out with those 2 characters? How did you hear about this anyway? Seems like they share common ground on certain subjects? Birds of a feather flock together yet again? Because they share his views on 9/11, their other views were pointed out to him last October but he continues to have them as guests on his radio shows*. But to be fair I think they discuss 9/11 and other supposed “inside jobs” rather than the Holocaust, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Jews) and other subjects where their views would offend much of Fetzer´s target audience. The thing is, there is no shortage of people with similar beliefs about 9/11 who are not neo-Nazi types he could interview instead. They are raving lunatics as well citing complex numerological analysis, apparently certain numbers are “Jewish” and this some how proves they were responsible for 9/11, once again they said this elsewhere and I imagine they didn’t mention it while being interviewed by Fetzer. * http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com/ And speaking of Fetzer’s radio shows and Holocaust denial, his former partner on the “Dynamic Duo” program was Kevin Barrett who: – has spoken sarcastically about “toasting Jews” – Calls himself a “9/11 revisionist” – Titled his autobiography “My Epic Struggle” – Got Amy Goodman (who is Jewish and who he thinks should be executed) to unwittingly autograph the 9/11 book by viciously anti-Semitic holocaust denier Eric Hufxxxx -Started a group called the Muslim, Jewish Christian Alliance (MUJUCA) with no Jewish members. – Labeled the notion that “the Germans hated Jews for no reason whatsoever” one of the “Zionist Big Lies” which “cast legitimate doubt upon ANYTHING Jews say about Jews and their recent history, including the Holocaust. As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-a-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like Green, Irving, and even Zundel. And even if the 6-million-deliberately-murdered-for-purely-ethnic-reasons figure is correct--which it very well may be; I have grown agnostic on that after studying the Big Lies of Zionism-- I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the US as a hideously destructive myth” http://www.oilempire.us/mujca.html There are times when LaRouche hits the nail on the head with William F. Buckley's Carlist Catholic movement and there are times when his writers and followers go off the deep end, too. Hard to figure him out. The cliche about broken clocks comes to mind, the man is a raving loon and the only guiding principle of his ideology and sycophantic flowers is that he is an infallible genius Edited September 4, 2009 by Len Colby Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted September 4, 2009 Author Share Posted September 4, 2009 (edited) Most of the above were associated with Willis Carto considered to be the father of the neo-Nazi / Holocaust denier movements in the US. In the 80's (or was it the late 70's?) Lyndon LaRouche associated with him as well. More recently the forum's own James Fetzer has not shied away from hanging out with Capt Eric May and Maj William Fox a pair of far reich Holocaust denying anti-Semites (who fortunately are no longer part of the US Army) [...] Why would Fetzer gain by hanging out with those 2 characters? How did you hear about this anyway? Seems like they share common ground on certain subjects? Birds of a feather flock together yet again? Because they share his views on 9/11, their other views were pointed out to him last October but he continues to have them as guests on his radio shows*. But to be fair I think they discuss 9/11 and other supposed “inside jobs” rather than the Holocaust, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Jews) and other subjects where their views would offend much of Fetzer´s target audience. The thing is, there is no shortage of people with similar beliefs about 9/11 who are not neo-Nazi types he could interview instead. They are raving lunatics as well citing complex numerological analysis, apparently certain numbers are “Jewish” and this some how proves they were responsible for 9/11, once again they said this elsewhere and I imagine they didn’t mention it while being interviewed by Fetzer. * http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com/ And speaking of Fetzer’s radio shows and Holocaust denial, his former partner on the “Dynamic Duo” program was Kevin Barrett who: – has spoken sarcastically about “toasting Jews” – Calls himself a “9/11 revisionist” – Titled his autobiography “My Epic Struggle” – Got Amy Goodman (who is Jewish and who he thinks should be executed) to unwittingly autograph the 9/11 book by viciously anti-Semitic holocaust denier Eric Hufxxxx -Started a group called the Muslim, Jewish Christian Alliance (MUJUCA) with no Jewish members. – Labeled the notion that “the Germans hated Jews for no reason whatsoever” one of the “Zionist Big Lies” which “cast legitimate doubt upon ANYTHING Jews say about Jews and their recent history, including the Holocaust. As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-a-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like Green, Irving, and even Zundel. And even if the 6-million-deliberately-murdered-for-purely-ethnic-reasons figure is correct--which it very well may be; I have grown agnostic on that after studying the Big Lies of Zionism-- I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the US as a hideously destructive myth” http://www.oilempire.us/mujca.html There are times when LaRouche hits the nail on the head with William F. Buckley's Carlist Catholic movement and there are times when his writers and followers go off the deep end, too. Hard to figure him out. The cliche about broken clocks comes to mind, the man is a raving loon and the only guiding principle of his ideology and sycophantic flowers is that he is an infallible genius Well, thanks for the heads up on these guys. After I sent Fetzer a manuscript for possible discussion on his radio show or on his blog his head must have disappeared into a deep Black Hole to do some more cogitating and exploration because he never responded to me. Or if he did, what he said was totally unintelligible due to the depth at which his vocal chords were buried inside that particular deep abyss. Now I know why he never responded. My entire thesis lays the blame for the JFK hit on those from among the very Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis and ex-Nazis and the blatant Fascists whom he apparently supports and consorts with on a regular basis. In fact, control of the direction of the entire JFK "investigation" has been taken over by friends of those who were the actual perps. By 1993-1994 C.O.P.A. and ASK conferences were riddled with and penetrated by Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, outright racists, pro-Fascists, neo-Nazis, Silver Certificate Federal Reserve paranoids and others of their ilk who were trying to lay the blame for the JFK hit on either the Jews, the Commies, the CIA or "The Jewish Commies in the CIA." When an "investigation" can be taken over by the "perps" you have to almost throw up your hands and give up in total frustration. By 2004 the JFK "investigation" was joined in great numbers by the 9/11 wackos, the Waco weirdos, the Oklahoma bombing bimbos, the Ruby Ridge retards and others of their ilk. Ever notice how the endgame of each of these "investigative leads" always ends up blaming the entire U.S. Government for these events? My guess is that almost 75% of the so-called JFK community is really just cut from the same cloth as the 9/11 wackos, the Waco weirdos, the Oklahoma bombing bimbos, the Ruby Ridge retards, et al. No wonder legitimate research is often flung by the wayside and ignored. It is done on purpose and with a vengeance. Then some innocent bystanders are drawn into those LaBrea Tarpits and get caught up in the morass. It is just ironic to watch the little old ladies of JFK research mingle on blogs or at conferences with these neo-Nazis, 9/11 wackos, pro-Fascists and anti-Semites as if they were going to a Mad Hatter Tea Party or something similar. Maybe Tom Scully was right after all. God set this all up for his own amusement, delight and edification. Must be laughing his face off right now. C.O.P.A. and A.S.K. were penetrated by The Perps and friends of The Perps and The Third Decade author's list was rampant with ghost writers, Nazified MIT grads in total denial, con men, FBI ringers and stringers and no one is ever the wiser. He-he-he. What a country! Edited September 4, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted September 4, 2009 Author Share Posted September 4, 2009 Back to Lt. Gen. Pedro Augusto del Valle once again... (who is the US Military associated linkage and the glue connecting Vonsiatsky, Morris, Willoughby and Draper) Have to admit that I have probably underestimated the contributions of del Valle from 1949 to 1969 among the most far right extremists of all the far rightists. But never again. Never again. Hopefully the U.S. Military has managed to prevent the repetition of their previous errors by allowing foreign born military officers rise to positions of extreme power where they can actually aid and comfort an eventual enemy, in this case Germany, in a world wide conflict like World War II. When war broke out with Germany people like Wedemeyer, Stratemeyer, Fellers, Willoughby, del Valle, Walker and others of their ilk should have either been guarded, monitored and observed or demoted, incarcerated and otherwise neutralized for the duration of that conflict. When push came to shove, their allegiances to the Fatherland were stronger than their allegiances to the USA, and certainly stronger than their forced affiliations with Russia as a temporary ally. Wonder who they were rooting for and aiding during Hitler's invasion of Russia? Certainly Vonsiatsky and Draper were also on the side of the Nazis. His most significant associations with the JFK Perps (which makes him a likely JFK Perp himself IMHO) 1) The Holocaust Deniers who promoted "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" 2) White Russian ex-Czarists from Argentina in League with the Nazis and with Anastase Vonsiatsky as well 3) The anti-CIA and pro-MacArthur forces like Charles Willoughby, Bonner Fellers and Stratemeyer and Wedemeyer 4) The Eugenicists, Segregationists and Master Race proponents like Earnest Sevier Cox, Wickliffe Draper, et al who published "White America" 5) The forces behind the military coup d'etat in Chile while working for IT&T and the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC 6) The anti-Semites who published 'The Iron Curtain Over America' by Col. John Beaty and other similar works 7) The membership and leadership of both The American Security Council and The Shickshinny Knights of Malta who wrote or promoted "No Wonder We Are Losing" by Robert J. Morris and related works by Admiral Chester A. Ward and Phyllis Schlafly or Bonner Fellers 8) The ex-McCarthyites and ex-MacArthurites like William P. Gale, Edwin A. Walker, Bonner Fellers, et al 9) The anti-CIA forces from the Marine Corps, U.S. Army Intelligence and Naval Intelligence 10) The leadership of The Sons of Liberty and Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC) and The League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) ...and so it was written. And so it will be told to future generations in order to avoid the repetition of such a sequence of events. By KEVIN COOGAN THE DEFENDERS OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AND THE LEAGUE OF EMPIRE LOYALISTS: THE FIRST POSTWAR ANGLO-AMERICAN REVOLTS AGAINST THE “ONE WORLD ORDER” The belief that any participation in global institutions such as the United Nations poses a clear threat to national sovereignty has been a cornerstone of the Anglo-American far right stretching back to the 1950s. This study examines one of the earliest of such groups, the Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC), an organization of retired high ranking American military officers that was founded in 1953 and led by former Marine Corps Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle (1893-1978). I also look at the DAC’s British counterpart, Arthur Keith (A.K.) Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), which was founded in 1954. The DAC and LEL continually warned against what they claimed was an attempt by murky international conspirators to strip U.S. and U.K. citizens of all vestiges of national sovereignty and patriotic feeling in order to reduce them to helpless slaves of a vast police state administered under the banner of the United Nations. Anti-globalist arguments first developed by groups like the DAC and LEL in the early 1950s continue to resonate inside the far right militia movement today. The DAC and LEL were equally obsessed with the notion that there existed an organized Jewish conspiracy intent on building a “One World Order.” Although both groups were fiercely anti-Semitic, neither of them was “Nazi.” Appeals – both overt and covert – to National Socialism were absent from their publications. The DAC and LEL existed in a twilight world that included far right military men, religious fundamentalists, Franco supporters, staunch segregationists and longtime anti-Semites. It is the core conspiratorial anti-Semitic belief structure of both organizations that places them well beyond the confines of conventional political discourse. Part One: Pedro Del Valle and the Creation of the DAC WHO WAS PEDRO DEL VALLE? The stereotype of the American far rightist as a buffoonish figure with little sense of the outside world could not be less apt when looking at Pedro del Valle, the DAC’s founder and leader until his death in 1978 at age 85. Pedro Augusto Jose del Valle Barcay Muñoz was born on August 28, 1893, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when it was still under the control of Imperial Spain. His father, Francesco, a surgeon and former mayor of San Juan, had been educated at the University of Seville, the Sorbonne, and Johns Hopkins. In 1900 Pedro del Valle became an American citizen after his family relocated from Puerto Rico to Maryland. Upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, del Valle joined the United States Marine Corps (USMC). He first saw action in 1916, when he participated in the capture of Santo Domingo. In World War I he led a Marine Corps detachment on the USS Texas that deployed with the British Grand Fleet. In the late 1920s del Valle was stationed in Haiti before becoming active in the war against Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. He later reported that as a young officer, “I found everywhere evidence of Communist organization commencing with Sandino’s red bandits.” He next served in Havana as an intelligence officer under Admiral Charles Freeman following the 1933 Cuban Sergeant’s Revolt. Del Valle was then assigned to Rome, where he served as an Assistant Naval Attaché in the U.S. Embassy from October 1935 to June 1937. He accompanied the Italian Armed Forces in the conquest of Ethiopia as a U.S. military observer and received the Order of the Crown of Italy, the Colonial Order of the Star of Italy, and the Italian Bronze Medal for Military Valor. During his stint in Ethiopia, del Valle also became good friends with some of Fascist Italy’s top military officers. Following his return to the United States to attend the Army War College, del Valle worked at USMC headquarters as an Executive Officer in the Division of Plans and Policies. During World War II, he led the 11th Marine Regiment of the First Marine Division in the defense of Guadalcanal where he earned the Legion of Merit. After a brief stint in Washington, del Valle again returned to the Pacific in April 1944, this time as Commanding General of the Third Artillery, Third Amphibious Corps, and fought the Japanese on Guam. His crowning achievement came when, as Commanding General of the First Marine Division, he played a critical role in the capture of Okinawa in June 1945 for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. After the war, he again returned to Washington serving first as the USMC Inspector General and – from 1946 to his retirement in 1948 – as Director of Personnel for the Marines. After his retirement and in financial debt, del Valle turned to Sosthenes Behn, the head of ITT and an old friend of his father, for employment. Behn first chose him to represent ITT in the Middle East. From his office in Cairo, del Valle visited Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut and Athens. After a short stint at ITT’s Rome office, he relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he served as president of ITT for all South America. OVERTURES TO THE FAR RIGHT Del Valle’s ties to the radical right – ties that almost certainly existed during his Marine Corps days – continued unabated while he worked for ITT. On 12/19/49, for example, he sent a letter of support to Conde McGinley, founder of Common Sense, one of the most notorious far right and anti-Semitic journals in America. Del Valle told McGinley, “If the Truman welfare state triumphs we shall lose our republic and emerge a very sad socialist oligarchy which will shortly be overthrown by a communist dictatorship.” In another letter, del Valle reported, “I have warned Senator McCarthy because I know his life is in danger.” In an 8/8/50 missive to Captain J.M. Kimbraugh, del Valle claimed Treason is everywhere about us and I do not believe that we have any chance unless some strong military person is able to seize power by means of a “coup d’etat” and take the Communist bull by the horns right at home. In still another letter from Buenos Aires, del Valle said, “If the Truman government were not completely in the power of the Zionist-Marxist minority, we should not have any difficulty” in getting the United States to leave the UN as long as Russia remained a member. Del Valle’s increasing public visibility, which included the insertion of his 1951 “Open Letter to President Truman” into the Congressional Record, made Behn increasingly uncomfortable. Nor did his position improve after ITT’s Washington representative labeled him anti-Semitic. In late 1951 del Valle left ITT and returned to his home in Maryland. CLASHES WITH THE CIA While still in Buenos Aires, del Valle regularly wrote letters to the Pentagon and CIA urging them to create a new organization under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to wage guerrilla warfare behind Soviet and Chinese lines, an organization that he offered to lead. Del Valle then received an invitation from Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, to visit Washington to discuss his ideas. After arriving in D.C, however, del Valle was told that Admiral Sherman was away but that Walter Bedell Smith, the new head of the CIA, wanted to meet him. One of Eisenhower’s closest aides in World War II, Bedell Smith had just replaced Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter at CIA. Instead of discussing plans for guerrilla warfare, Bedell Smith told del Valle that “he had just the job” for him as head of the CIA station in Japan. He did so in the false belief that del Valle “had crossed swords” with General MacArthur during World War II and would therefore be willing to help “pull the rug out from under MacArthur.” Del Valle promptly informed Bedell Smith that he considered MacArthur “the ablest general and statesman the country possessed.” The confrontation between del Valle and Bedell Smith also echoed a longstanding dispute inside U.S. Intelligence dating back to World War II when General MacArthur prevented the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor agency to the CIA, from effectively functioning in areas under his command. The CIA’s reluctance to engage in aggressive “rollback” operations against the Soviet Union further angered hardliners. CREATING A POLITICAL/PARAMILITARY NETWORK Del Valle’s clash with the CIA took place at a time when the predominantly Midwest-based isolationist wing of the Republican Party was coming under increasing attack from the internationalist branch of the Party. The internationalists’ roots were largely in East Coast banking and industrial interests as well as in internationalist-oriented policy organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation. Ivy League graduates from elite Eastern families also played a prominent role in organizations like the CIA. The struggle between the “isolationists” and the “internationalists” for the soul of the GOP reached a peak at the party’s 1952 convention. Senator Robert A. Taft, the choice of the isolationists, entered the convention hall with an apparent clear majority of delegates, only to lose the nomination to former General Dwight D. Eisenhower after a series of questionable parliamentary maneuvers disqualified a number of key Taft delegates. Del Valle, for his part, set out to organize a network of hard right organizations to galvanize public opinion against the internationalist elite. In a 7/19/51 letter to an American rightist named Jane Graham, he argued, “We must organize the citizens in each state as vigilantes against sabotage and other forms of treason. Then link them up in some national headquarters.” Del Valle initially placed his hopes in America Plus Inc., a Los Angeles-based group that operated in some fourteen states. In an 8/14/51 letter to America Plus leader Irvin Borders, del Valle stated I am going to suggest that we have a body of Minutemen or vigilantes, which in fact all your members are. While your movement is entirely political, the vigilantes could in addition have a semi-military purpose in checking the violence and sabotage, which the enemy constantly perpetrates in our country. In an 8/27/51 letter he sent from Buenos Aires to General Douglas MacArthur in New York (with copies to leading right-wingers Merwin K. Hart, Conde McGinley, Major R.H. Williams, California Senator Jack Tenney and Lt. General A.C. Wedemeyer [Ret.]), del Valle called for the creation of The Minutemen of America. Its most important functions would include “Intelligence, Operations, Supply, Finance, Public Relations and Personnel.” The “central authority of the Minutemen” would keep the members advised of sabotage, intended sabotage, and all subversive activities. At such times as appropriate, the necessary action will be taken to supplement the work of the FBI in bringing subversives to justice, and especially in forestalling them in their nefarious activity wherever possible. When confronting “saboteurs,” particularly inside the labor movement, del Valle warned that “great resistance, and some violence, is to be expected.” In his draft articles of incorporation for the Minutemen, del Valle said it would be organized with one squad leader and four men each, at the smallest local level; into platoons of one platoon leader and two or more squads each at the next largest level; into companies of 100 men led by a centurion; commandos led by commanders of two or more companies; into legions of two or more commandos led by a legionary, and finally, at state level, into divisions led by a State Councilor. Del Valle’s draft also included a denunciation of the supposed threat to U.S. sovereignty posed by the UN: Further to corrupt, misinterpret and weaken our national fundamental political philosophy we have become a member of a huge international aggregation, known as the United Nations, into which the United States of America has surrendered a large part of its sovereignty into the hands of a heterogeneous conglomeration of representatives of all races, colors, and states of enlightenment, most of whom cannot properly “represent” their peoples because they did not select them, and none of whose interests exactly coincide with ours. In the United Nations Christianity, the basis of our form of government, can only with difficulty make its voice heard in this modern Tower of Babel amidst the din and clangor of clashing materialistic interests, including those of Soviet Russia, our sworn enemy and protagonists of anti-Christ. Americans, he argued, were especially threatened with proposed international agreements like the “so-called ‘Genocide Convention’” which would allow a U.S. citizen “without his consent, because he has caused mental discomfort to a certain minority, [to] be deported for trial in a foreign land by a foreign court” and thus be denied “our guarantees of free speech, trial by a jury, and habeas corpus.” Del Valle elaborated on his belief that America was under siege in a letter to Marine Corps Colonel Samuel Griffith. He told Griffith: “should our own government unfortunately fall into the hands of the Communist Anti-Christ, I for one will follow my great-grandfather’s example [who fought with Wellington against the French in Spain – KC] and will take to the hills, gun in hand, until I am killed or they are driven out!” LAUNCHING THE DAC After meeting in Washington’s Army-Navy Club in 1953, del Valle, Lt. Col. John H. Coffman, USMC (Ret.), and Lt. Col. Eugene Cowles Pomeroy (Ret.) formed the Defenders of the American Constitution with del Valle as president to spread the anti “One Worldist” gospel into the highest ranks of the U.S. military. Coffman, the DAC’s secretary and legal counsel, had seen action in Nicaragua, China, and Guadalcanal during his service with the Marines. As for Pomeroy, he had served in World War I as well as on intelligence missions in the Far East. An Executive Council also was established with Brigadier General Bonner Fellers (Ret.) as Chairman. Other members included Major General Claire Chennault, USAF (Ret.), one of the leading figures in the pro-Taiwan “China Lobby,” as well as a handful of right-wingers from civilian backgrounds. The DAC first gained public notice in December 1953 after Coffman filed a Habeas Corpus proceeding in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against the Secretaries of State, Defense and the Army in the “Keefe Case,” named after Army Private Richard Keefe, who was serving with U.S. forces in France. After getting drunk one night and driving off from a bistro in a stolen cab, Keefe was arrested by local gendarmes. The French government then decided to put Keefe on trial instead of following the usual procedure of turning him over to American MP’s for an Army court-martial. The DAC turned the incident into a cause celebre and argued that the Senate ratification of a treaty placing U.S. servicemen in foreign countries under the jurisdiction of local authorities was an abrogation of their rights under the U.S. Constitution. The DAC further hoped the Keefe case would aid the Senate’s passage of the proposed “Bricker Amendment” to the Constitution. The measure, introduced in 1951 by Ohio Senator John Bricker in the midst of the Korean War, would have dramatically reduced the power given to the President and Congress by the Constitution to negotiate and sign foreign treaties by making treaty ratification essentially dependent on the approval of the then 48 states. An article in the far right News Bulletin of the Cinema Education Guild, reprinted by the DAC, argued that the Bricker Amendment will permanently curb those starry-eyed dreamers who are obsessed with the illusion that we can solve all of our problems and emerge into a shining new world by just eliminating all national governments . . . and having in their place one big super-duper dictatorship to rule “the brave new world.” In April 1953 hearings before Congress, pro-Bricker congressmen mercilessly attacked Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over U.S. involvement in foreign treaties. An exasperated Dulles responded by insisting that the Bricker Amendment would have made even the creation of NATO impossible; an argument that failed to win many converts. The Senate finally defeated the Bricker Amendment by a single vote. Taking advantage of the controversy surrounding the DAC, del Valle ran for governor of Maryland, only to fail miserably in the Republican primary. The DAC also began publishing its four page monthly newsletter Task Force, whose first issue appeared in May 1954. Its second issue prominently featured del Valle’s “Open Letter to the American People,” where he laid out the DAC’s views on foreign entanglements: We have seen the United Nations fail to promote peaceful intercourse between its member nations, and to become a dangerous international soapbox for the Kremlin. We have seen spies and saboteurs of the Kremlin penetrate almost every branch of our own government. It is reported that there are over five million illegally living in our country. . . .We have seen our every effort to support the real anti-communist nations, Nationalist China, South Korea, Germany and Spain sabotaged by foreign influences. . . . The impotence of the sinister United Nations has been amply demonstrated. . . . Mere numerical majorities of peoples can override our will . . . and can, through the devious means of treaties and conventions forced upon us, open the way for the surrender of our precious Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Beast of the Kremlin sits in the highest councils, together with some of its puppets. Yet Spain, the one country which has defeated communism within its borders in a bloody conflict, is not invited to be a member. Del Valle was not alone in his fervent opposition to the UN. The September 1954 Task Force ran an article that quoted Indiana Republican Senator William E. Jenner, who memorably described the UN Charter as “the machine gun that looks like a baby carriage.” According to Jenner, the UN would abolish the Bill of Rights and replace it with “a body of . . . privileges and duties modeled exactly upon the Soviet Constitution.” North Dakota Republican Congressman Usher Burdick claimed that the “real purpose (of the UN) was to build a world government controlled by the Communists and their dupes in the United States.” THE CONTRADICTIONS OF A “SUPER PATRIOT” Pedro del Valle appeared on the surface to be a somewhat unconventional military man turned super patriot who appealed to the heritage of George Washington and the Founding Fathers. An examination of his personal papers, however, provides a much more complex picture. Although del Valle regularly denounced “big government” for limiting individual freedom – even calling for the abolition of both the IRS and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) – he clearly admired Mussolini’s Italy. After the war del Valle maintained good ties with Italy’s “Black Prince” Junio Valerio Borghese, whom he had first met during the Ethiopia campaign. A convicted war criminal, Borghese became one of Italy’s most powerful postwar far rightists as well as the first president of Italy’s neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). Del Valle also argued that America should back Eastern European governments-in-exile in order to encourage “so-called ‘fascist’ groups” to build a new “underground” should the Soviet Union overrun Europe militarily. Del Valle was also close to Franco’s Spain. In a 2/23/50 letter to Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, del Valle even offered to become the first U.S. Ambassador to Spain should America recognize Franco. Through his good friend, the Madrid-based Marques de Prat y Nantouillet, who headed a rightwing religious movement called Active United Christians, del Valle met Franco in 1952. He returned to Spain on other occasions, most notably in 1964 when he tried to help the Marques put together an anti-communist “worldwide Christian movement” with proposed financing from Arab nations and far right Texas millionaires. During this visit, del Valle also met with another good friend, General José Diaz Villegas, a member of the Spanish Army general staff who had a special interest in Africa. As a Hispanic Catholic, del Valle had little sympathy for Nordic racialism and Nazi ideology. His view of Nazi Germany, however, was peculiar to say the least. In an 8/9/1962 letter to J. Paul Thornton, a California organizer for the far-right National States Rights Party (NSRP), del Valle said: I knew Mussolini personally and served with his forces in Ethiopia as U.S. observer. I never met Hitler but lived in Germany under his creation and believe he might somehow [have] fought free of his bosses and created a free world far better than the one we now live in. But let this be known! Hitler was sponsored and financed by the same House of Rothschild bankers who eventually liquidated him. From the late 1950s on, del Valle maintained a friendly correspondence with American Nazi Party (ANP) leader George Lincoln Rockwell and he gave Rockwell occasional small financial contributions. Del Valle’s main disagreement with Rockwell seems to have been over the fact that the Nazis were anti-Christian. Del Valle also had no hesitation in favorably citing a statement from Rockwell’s Nazi successor in his memoir Semper Fidelis. THE DAC AND “THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA” While working as an ITT executive in Buenos Aires in 1949, Del Valle became involved with a group called the Suvarov Union, an Argentine-based network of White Russian exiles. The Suvarov Union was led by General Boris Smyslovsky-Holmston, a former White Russian officer who had fought the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. He then joined the German Army as “Colonel von Regenau” and led a fierce guerrilla warfare campaign behind Soviet lines during World War II. Smyslovsky-Holmston told del Valle that he had some 10,000 supporters worldwide who were eager to open up offensive operations in Siberia with American backing should the Pentagon approve such an operation. The Suvarov Union, along with a group of far right Russian monarchists based in New York and London, recognized the former Russian Grand Duke Cyril – a Nazi sympathizer who lived in France during the 1930s – as the true Czar. The DAC’s involvement with the White Russian community led many of its members to join a far right pseudo-chivalric order known as the “Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta,” which was headquartered in the small town of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. The Military Affairs Committee of the Knights at one point included an astonishing list of former generals and admirals, including del Valle, Gen. Lemuel Shepherd, Lt. Gen. George Stratemeyer, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, Admiral Charles M. Cooke and Rear Admiral Francis T. Spellman among others. The “Shickshinny Knights” were led by Charles Pichel, a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s who maintained murky ties to the White Russian community. Pichel claimed that his Knights represented a branch of the Order that had survived in Russia under the Emperor Paul I after Napoleon had suppressed the main group. He further said he derived his order’s legitimacy from “Czar” Cyril himself. Part Two: The DAC and Conspiracy Theory THE DAC AGAINST “THE UNSEEN MASTERS” Although in outward appearance the DAC seemed to be an association of intensely anti-Communist former military men, Del Valle and his colleagues never truly believed that there was an independent threat to America from Russia. It is striking just how little information there is about Soviet-style communism in the pages of Task Force. There are no informed discussions about Politburo changes, Soviet foreign policy, the Sino-Soviet split, or the composition and deployment of Soviet military forces. This is because the DAC viewed the U.S.-Soviet conflict through an intense conspiratorial prism. The group argued that Russia itself was secretly controlled by a “one-worldist conspiracy” led by Jewish banking houses headquartered in New York City. Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch – and not Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin – were the real power behind twentieth century Communism. The June 1955 Task Force claimed, “the Communist regimes are weak and their people rebellious. The only strength they possess is the faction within the American government which puts the Soviet Union first.” [italics in original.] This mysterious “faction” was itself, of course, controlled by the Jews. The DAC viewed contemporary world history in general as a massive conspiracy of shadow men, puppets and politicians controlled from behind the scenes by a small cabal of secret Jewish masters. DAC fear mongering came in two basic forms; the first downplayed the Hand of Zion while the second highlighted it. While Task Force perpetually alluded to the existence of a vast shadowy conspiracy, it frequently avoided directly accusing the Jews of being in charge and let the reader fill in the blanks. One example of “Anti-Semitism Lite” comes in an article entitled “Regardless of Who Is Elected President, Invisible Rulers Govern United States” that appeared in the October 1955 Task Force. In it we learn that top advisors to President Eisenhower – Including his brother Milton and Nelson Rockefeller – exist “merely to transmit orders handed down from higher sources much as a messenger boy delivers a Western Union telegram.” To see the “Unseen Masters” or “International Conspirators” as composed of “any one racial group as is so often charged” is wrong. But “to the extent that some racial groups’ representation in the World Conspiracy is greater” because “they are more astute at seizing opportunity than others, more avaricious in their greed for power, more skilled in the art of deception and intrigue and more adept in the pursuits which concentrate the bulk of the world’s wealth in their hands,” such observations were accurate. Whatever the racial composition of the conspiracy, “crack-brained” social scientists paid by wealthy foundations and international bankers were now hard at work pushing for “one universal government in which the industrial economy, religious beliefs and social customs of the human race” would be forced into a common mold resulting in “slavery for all men and freedom for none.” The academic eggheads and bankers who used the UN to create the World Bank, the Mutual Trade Agreements Act, and the International Labor Organization were now ready to add on such “little frills as Human Rights, Genocide, UNESCO, the social mixing and inter-marriage of the white and black races” as well as “all the other queer little ideological touches so dear to the hearts of the boys with the tinted lips, mincing steps and high-pitched vocal equipment.” The UN’s proposed power to interfere in domestic legislation would especially wreck havoc with segregation and labor law. As an article in the February 1955 Task Force stated, “Our marriage laws and our laws with relation to employer and employee are no part of the United Nations.” COLONEL POMEROY’S FAMOUS MAP In January 1955, Task Force revealed conclusive proof of the conspirators’ master plan for world domination in the form of a map. DAC vice president Colonel Eugene Pomeroy said that on a 1954 trip to London he had been given the map from a brave British woman patriot who had infiltrated the September 1952 London conference of the World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government (also known as the United World Federalists). The map, which divided up the world into a series of zones and regions with longitude and latitude lines duly noted, was the World Parliamentarians attempt to envision a rationally organized globe and not one split along preexisting national political lines. The DAC, however, saw the map as the blueprint for One World domination that would commence once the UN began changing its Charter. The map split the U.S. into four zones, leading Pomeroy to warn that “a Mau Mau Chief” could rule the South “as Commissar” while the states from “the Atlantic to the Rockies quite likely would be under the dictatorship of Huk Filipinos while the Pacific Coast states in all likelihood could expect a Red Chinese as their overlord.” Because the conspirators desired the standard of living throughout the world to be uniform, they further planned to reduce the average American to “somewhere on a level of an Australian Bushman, and practically all American surplus production would be exported.” The One World economy would be built on “a deforested desert of America.” Pomeroy then warned, The blueprint for One World will not tolerate control of immigration. The United States can expect that its West Coast will be inundated by hordes of Red Chinese coolies. The East and the rest of the country can expect to be overrun by millions from the Levant, India, Malaya, East Indies, Africa. The American branch of the white race will be another “lost race” and would take its place in history along with the Aztecs. Of course to operate this global scheme, force, overwhelming force, is essential. This has been foreseen and every national unit as now existing must contribute recruits for an International Police. We can look forward to being policed by Turks, Hindus, African Tribesmen and Red Chinese distributed throughout the four regions. Pomeroy concluded his article with the prediction that “by 1960, the United States as we know it, Constitution and all, will disappear from the Earth.” Far from repudiating Pomeroy’s extraordinary claims when 1960 came and went, del Valle embraced them. In an 8/30/63 letter to a California far rightist West Wuichet, del Valle wrote: As to the projected sub-division of the USA by the UN, we have absolute proof of this from a fine British lady who became a United World Federalist for the purpose. Task Force has published this un-challenged three times. Make no mistake, this is part of the plan of the take-over. The race war is just the cover for the main operation and has fooled many otherwise intelligent White Christians. Pomeroy’s magic map, a contemporary version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was so popular that Task Force reprinted it three times. The DAC also published the map – along with other documents from the September 1952 London conference of the World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government – as a special pamphlet. FROM THE KHAZARS TO THE PROTOCOLS Along with Anti-Semitism Lite, the DAC cognoscenti freely imbibed the harder stuff. A far right book entitled Iron Curtain Over America, which was published in 1951 by John Beaty, served as an ideological linchpin for the DAC. An English professor and former head of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Beaty had been an Army Intelligence (G-2) officer in Washington from1941 to 1947. Del Valle knew Beaty and, after Beaty’s death, his widow Josephine spent many years as the DAC’s Vice President. Beaty argued in Iron Curtain that Communist Russia was really under the domination of the Khazars, a group originally from the South of Russia that had converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages. According to Beaty, the Khazars had now taken control of both Russia and America. In his book Religion and the Racist Right, Michael Barkun summarizes Beatty’s argument this way: The reforms of Czar Alexander II, misguided in Beaty’s view, gave the “Judaized Khazars” the ability to infiltrate and corrupt Russia as a whole. They did so with four aims in mind: the development of communism, the fomenting of revolution, the growth of Zionism, and the transfer of their numbers to America. Hence, he argued, they were able not only to seize control of Russia but to provide their conspiracy with an American base as a minority “obsessed with its own objectives which are not those of Western Christian civilization.” Beaty further claimed that the Khazars – after more or less taking control over the Democratic Party – tricked America into war with Germany to kill off as many Aryans as possible. The Khazars were simultaneously the masters of Soviet Russia because “Stalin, Kagonovich, Beria, Molotov, and Litvinoff all have Jewish blood or are married to Jewesses.” Iron Curtain went through an astonishing seventeen printings in the 1950s. Del Valle publicly endorsed it and helped Beaty distribute copies to select military officers. Other leading retired military men like General George Stratemeyer – himself a member of the Military Affairs Committee of the Charles Pichel-led Knights of Malta – publicly praised Beaty’s opus. When asked by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to repudiate Iron Curtain, Stratemeyer refused to do so and instead publicly attacked the ADL. Del Valle’s conviction that Russia was under Jewish control led him to a major clash with Common Sense, a hard right magazine famous for its obsession with Jewish power. A major patron of Common Sense, del Valle served as president of the journal’s parent body, the Christian Educational Fund. In its 6/5/1967 issue – around the time of the Six Day War – Common Sense broke with orthodoxy and ran a story suggesting that Joseph Stalin has actually saved Russia from a Trotsky-led Jewish takeover; an opinion not entirely unknown inside the far right. Del Valle, however, was so outraged by the article that he broke his long-standing ties to the journal. Del Valle also had no qualms about citing from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In an April 12, 1961 speech before the United States Daughters of 1812, he repeatedly invoked The Protocols to prove the existence of an “Invisible Government” that was now hard at work plotting to reduce America to a province or set of provinces in a future World Government centered around the UN. Del Valle also used The Protocols to buttress his claim that “Communism and Socialism” were first introduced to Russia by the Invisible Government to destroy that nation. Part Three: The DAC and the Paramilitary Right FROM THE CONSTITUTION PARTY TO GUERRILA WARFARE In 1960 the DAC achieved new prominence inside the far right after Brig. General Merritt B. Curtis USMC (Ret.), the Secretary and General Counsel for the DAC, was chosen as the presidential candidate of the Constitution Party, a third party effort set up to compete in that year’s presidential election. The DAC’s role in the Constitution Party seems to have served another purpose as well since there is evidence that the DAC attempted to organize “militia type” networks under the guise of electorial politics. Del Valle’s papers show that the former general played a role in the creation of a shadowy paramilitary network that divided up sections of the United States into four “zones.” In a 7/23/1963 letter to Brig. General W.L. Lee, USAF (Ret.), del Valle said that it was agreed to organize everything “under cover of voter organization [for the Constitution Party – KC], which is not inconsistent with our being an effective state militia as well.” Del Valle explained his approach to organizing resistance in the “USSA (United Slave States of America)” this way: My struggle is two-fold: 1. Strictly legal, constitutional, political efforts to restore constitutional government, and 2. alerting all White Christian Americans to the nature of the enemy within and urging that they use Article II of the Bill of Rights to arm and organize for the defense of their homes, families, community, state and country. From the 1950s on, del Valle was a featured speaker at countless far right gatherings that included representatives from the KKK, Christian Identity, the Minutemen, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and innumerable other far right splinter groups. He also developed his own information network to keep him abreast of developments inside the radical right. COUP FEARS IN AMERICA In an 8/12/1966 letter to the American rightist Mary Davidson, del Valle suggested that the solution to America’s problems was clear: “the only way to cut the Gordian knot is by a military coup d’etat.” Throughout the early 1960s, in fact, the fear of a coup d’etat from either the right or left was surprisingly commonplace. On November 24, 1961, the prominent American syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson published a story in the Washington Post about the increasing turn to the far right by high-ranking U.S. military men. Pearson singled out Major General Edwin Walker, head of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany, for politicizing his troops with rightwing propaganda. Pearson highlighted a letter to one of Walker’s military supporters, Arch Roberts, from the French rightist Hillaire du Berrier, who compared the Kennedy Administration’s crackdown on Walker to de Gaulle’s attack on the rebel French generals who led the O.A.S. The article also cited del Valle who, Pearson said, comes close “to urging armed insurrection” when he made statements calling for the “organization of a powerful armed resistance force to defeat the aims of the Usurpers and bring about a return to constitutional government.” The fear that American generals were thinking along O.A.S. lines helped inspire a series of liberal cultural icons from the early 1960s like Seven Days in May and Doctor Strangelove. Nor can there be any doubt that far right groups like Robert De Pugh’s Minutemen did in fact fantasize about fighting a guerrilla war against the establishment. Two books, The John Franklin Letters (by an anonymous author) and Get Ye Up into the High Mountains by the Reverend Dallas Roquemore, capture the mentality of many of these far right would-be Che Guevaras. The John Franklin Letters was premised on the idea that after the U.S. has been betrayed into the hands of UN bureaucrats, a civil war ensues that is led by a paramilitary group called the “Rangers.” According to The John Franklin Letters: The beginning of the end comes in 1963, when the World Health Organization sends in a Yugoslav inspector, under powers granted by the President of the United States, to search any house he chooses. The Yugoslav discovers in the house of a good American a file of anti-Communist magazines, seizes them as deleterious to the mental health of the community, and is shot by the American, who escapes into the woods. But the infiltration continues. By 1970, the United States has become part of the World Authority dominated by the Soviet-Asian-African bloc, and this Authority suspends the country’s right to govern itself because of the “historic psychological genocide” against the Negro race. United Nations administrators, mostly Red Chinese, are sent in to rule. Harlem, triumphant, arises and loots the liquor stores. The city proletariat, its sense of decency destroyed by public housing, begins to raid the suburbs. In short order, twenty million Americans are “done away with,” while the people are subjected to torture by blowtorch and rock-n’-roll, the latter on television. Meanwhile the good American begins to fight back. As far back as 1967, John Franklin and his friends had been stockpiling rifles. And now they act. Franklin describes in gory detail a total of fourteen patriotic murders: two by fire, one by hammer, one by strangling, two by bow and arrow, one by defenestration, one by drowning and the rest. These brave actions are sufficient to turn the tide – despite the atomic bomb, a huge invasion army, and absolute terror. By 1976, the people all over the world go into the streets, and everywhere Communism falls. Roquemore’s Get Ye Up Into the High Mountain served as a training manual both for guerrilla warfare and survivalism and included advice on how to properly mutilate the dead body of the Communist enemy. Like The John Franklin Letters, Roquemore’s book is also premised on a U.S. civil war breaking out sometime around 1970. Although distributed by the far right Liberty Lobby, Get Ye was produced by an extreme rightist organization called The Soldiers of the Cross led by Kenneth Goff. Goff reported that Roquemore, a Baptist Minister, had also worked “with our cadet groups for several years and had developed a corps of young people who can exist in the mountains under the most hazardous conditions.” THE PERILS OF “OPERATION WATER MOCCASIN” While liberals fretted that the American military top brass was about to launch a rightwing coup d’etat, the notion that the “Eastern Establishment” elite was conspiring to sell the nation out to the UN became an idée fixe inside the far right. Campaigning in the 1962 California Republican primary for governor, Richard Nixon found himself being bombarded with a pamphlet “with the United Nations insignia on the cover, Department of State Publication 7277.” The pamphlet was presented as proof “that the government was about to sign over America’s armed forces to a Soviet Colonel.” In reality it was a typical UN document outlining the idea of the creation of a UN Peace Force sometime in the distant future to help prepare for a world free from atomic weapons. As the current UN assistant general secretary was a Soviet colonel, however, the far right was convinced that the document really revealed a UN plot to disarm America and hand it over to the Russkies. A March 1963 Task Force story on a planned U.S. military maneuver codenamed “Operation Water Moccasin” helped launch another panic wave. According to the Army, Water Moccasin was a planned exercise in counter-insurgency involving 2,000 to 3,000 troops – along with “foreign military participation” – that was scheduled to take place over some 2,500 acres in the backwoods of Georgia. Task Force insisted that Water Moccasin was really a cover for “a crash program to disarm the United States of America and make us a province of the United Nations.” The scare set off by Task Force and other far right outlets forced the Army to dramatically limit the scope of the deployment after frantic calls began pouring in to Congressmen about Water Moccasin. Nor was Water Moccasin the only plot against the Republic. The July 21, 1963 New York Times recorded a host of others: 35,000 Communist Chinese troops bearing arms and wearing deceptively dyed powder-blue uniforms are poised on the Mexican border, about to invade San Diego; the U.S. has turned over – or will at any moment – its Army, Navy and Air Force to the command of a Russian colonel in the United Nations; almost every well-known American or free-world leader is, in reality, a top Communist agent; a U.S. Army guerrilla-warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is in actuality a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country. Del Valle’s papers also provide rare glimpses into the underground world of the far right. He was in contact with the far rightist Col. William P. Gale (Ret.), whom he described as “a natural leader and a fighter and perhaps miscast in a purely political role.” Nonetheless, Gale was “doing a fine job of another sort out there, preparing for the inevitable clash between Christianity and the anti-Christians.” Del Valle, however, had problems with Gale and other British Israelites like Wesley Smith. Smith, in particular, was seen as “wildly anti-Catholic.” Gale, however, seems to have been considered indispensable. There is also a suggestion that Gale was acting on orders from some unidentified group above him. Exactly how much del Valle’s paramilitary network operated in reality – as opposed to Walter Mitty-like fantasy – is hard to determine and many questions remain unanswered. It seems undeniable, however, that the DAC was, in fact, committed to building an armed underground resistance movement to the “New World Order” even if the scope of such activity remains highly murky to this day. Part Four: The DAC and the League of Empire Loyalists FIRST OVERTURES The DAC and LEL were set up within a year of each other; the DAC sometime in mid to late 1953 and the LEL in October 1954. (The LEL’s publication Candour, however, began publishing in late October 1953, almost simultaneous with the DAC’s creation.) There were other intriguing similarities. Like the DAC, the LEL had some leading retired military men in its ranks, most prominently Field-Marshal Lord Ironside, who had headed up the British expedition to overthrow the Soviet government in 1919. Ironside was a member of the LEL’s General Council, along with the Earl of Buchan, Lt. General Sir Balfour Hutchison, Brigadier A.R. Wallis and other retired military men. Del Valle was also a friend of Admiral Charles Freeman (Ret.). Freeman became the U.S. agent for Kenneth De Courcy’s Intelligence Digest after the war. De Courcy, in turn, had extensive contacts with far-right British military and intelligence circles favored by the LEL. The LEL’s founder and leader Arthur Keith Chesterton (better known as “A.K.”) was the cousin of the famous writer G.K. Chesterton. A one-time member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), Chesterton broke with Mosley in 1938. During World War II, he supported England’s efforts against Hitler and thus never had to face the charge of treason that haunted Mosley throughout his postwar career. In the late 1940s, Chesterton even held a fairly prestigious job in Lord Beaverbrook’s press empire. From its inception, the LEL combined “rightwing Tory Empire loyalism and conspiratorial anti-Semitism.” Its members regularly heckled speakers and disrupted political meetings, most famously the 1958 Tory Political Conference in Blackpool that culminated in fist fights between League members and Tory stewards. (After that debacle, the Tories implemented strong measures against LEL sympathizers in its ranks.) The LEL also served as the most important training ground for the next generation of British neo-fascists and extreme loyalists. It contained men like John Tyndall, Martin Webster, Colin Jordan and John Bean, men who, after leaving Chesterton and indulging in the Nazi fantasy, returned (with the exception of Jordan) to provide the leadership of the National Front. Chesterton was the focal point of ‘respectability’ around which these men circulated. The journalist George Thayer, who interviewed leading members of the LEL, summarized its program this way: 1) British sovereignty should be maintained at all cost; 2) instead of liquidating its Empire, England should continue to build it; and 3) Third World immigration to England must be stopped. For the LEL Any tendency towards world government or international alliances that requires a partial relinquishing of British sovereignty is an anathema . . . The UN, NATO, SEATO, CENTO, and the Common Market are all “monster plots to rob Britain of her independence and strength.” In November 1954 the DAC’s co-founder Col. Eugene Pomeroy spent eight days in London where he held extensive talks with LEL leaders. Pomeroy told Task Force readers that the DAC and LEL “have in common the driving force of the same ideology.” In a more candid 11/10/54 letter to del Valle, Pomeroy reported that the LEL felt that “the Jews seem to exercise even greater influence here over the British Parliament and politicians than they do at home.” The group was firmly convinced that Winston Churchill and his son Randolph (along with Anthony Eden) were “the abject slaves of Bernie Baruch.” The LEL shared the DAC’s obsession with the “hidden hand.” One 1950s LEL pamphlet, The Menace of World Government, claimed There is a hidden power, which only to close students of international politics is a revealed power, wielded by a known group of international financial interests, who brought into existence the UN and the International Bank as instruments to secure its further advance to world domination. It has openly declared war on nationhood and racial pride. It approves of every approach, direct or functional, which will render mankind defenseless against its cold war in the West and the hot war in Asia to stampede us into NATO, the European Union, and their projected Pacific counterparts. It uses dread of the H-bomb to try to secure acceptance of its full World Government. Once our sovereignty is abandoned, and we are completely at its mercy, it will drop its disguise as the foe of Russian aggression and betray us to the Soviet conspiracy as surely as it betrayed us at Yalta through the incredible simpleton Roosevelt and his incredible adviser, Alger Hiss. Hiss, let it be known, was only a fugleman. His protectors were powerful men who constituted – and still constitute – the effective hidden government of the United States. FROM THE NEW UNHAPPY LORDS TO THE NATIONAL FRONT The LEL’s polemics against the “one world order” culminated with the1965 publication of Chesterton’s book, The New Unhappy Lords (NUL). In NUL, Chesterton set out to document a conspiratorial plot by “Money Power” to establish “world tyranny” by using both “Communism and Loan Capitalism as twin instruments with which to subdue and govern, not the British nations alone, but all mankind.” NUL quickly went through several editions and it continues to be sold today. Its success led Chesterton’s biographer to remark that A.K’s “extremely doubtful privilege” is “to go down in modern history as the man most responsible for keeping alive, spreading, and developing the British tradition of conspiracy thinking.” Writing in seemingly reasonable tones, in NUL Chesterton attacks British foreign policy for the loss of the Suez Canal and other former colonies as well as for the government’s support for Third World immigration. He also criticized British involvement in a “Federated Europe,” the European Common Market, the Treaty of Rome, and any attempt to implement a NAFTA-like “Free Trade Area” that would bring Britain’s tariff policies into line with the Common Market: This would have meant joining the British economy to competitive economies, and the reservations intended to safeguard the British farmers and overseas producers must soon have been jettisoned, the complementary economy covered by the Imperial Preference system would have been abandoned and the British market flooded by products from Common Market countries with a lower standard of living. Chesterton, however, used his critique of what he saw as specific failures by the British establishment to prove that “Money Power’s” hidden hand now pulled England’s strings. His attacks on such elite groups as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the American Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), and the Bilderberger Society as well as on organizations like NATO and the UN, served a larger narrative goal; namely, proving the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. In a chapter entitled “Is the Conspiracy Jewish?” he claims that “the major Zionist objective” is no less than “One World.” “Moscow and Peking” were “no more than branch headquarters of the conspiracy” whose “supreme headquarters” for the “overthrow of the West” was actually based in New York. According to A.K., World Jewry is the most powerful single force on earth and it follows that all the major policies which have been ruthlessly pursued through the last several decades must have the stamp of Jewish approval. Indeed, “when Hitler rebelled against the Money Power,” World Jewry decided to “smash him and his barter system.” Not long after the publication of New Unhappy Lords, Chesterton LEL’s played a pivotal role in the 1967 founding of the National Front (NF), England’s most significant postwar far-right party. The NF was established out of a merger of the LEL, the British National Party, the Greater Britain Movement, and the Racial Preservation Society. Chesterton served as the NF’s chairman for its first four years. Unlike the DAC-backed Constitution Party, the NF was a real political force until the late 1970s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party stole much of its anti-immigrant thunder and the group spiraled into rapid decline. DEL VALLE AND CHESTERTON Del Valle and Chesterton maintained regular contacts for two decades. In 1962, for example, Chesterton asked del Valle to supply him with contact addresses for American rightists who might be willing to help Candour out of some serious financial problems. After Del Valle sent Chesterton some names, Austin Brooks, the LEL’s number two man, then visited the United States in 1963 on a fundraising tour. A.K. also sent del Valle updates on his trips to South Africa and Rhodesia. In 1966 Chesterton asked del Valle to write an introduction to a proposed American edition of NUL that the Chicago-based rightwing publisher Henry Regnery had agreed to issue. Regnery, however, backed out of the deal at the last minute. Chesterton next approached another American conservative publisher, Devin Adair, but it too rejected the book. At Chesterton’s request, del Valle searched for yet another American publisher. Through Josephine Beaty, the DAC Vice President and widow of Iron Curtain over America author John Beaty, del Valle found OMNI Press/Christian Book Club located in Hawthorne, California. When OMNI’s edition of NUL appeared, it included a short introduction by del Valle that praised Chesterton for bringing the reader “face to face with the fact that a conspiracy to rule the world does exist and that it is rapidly approaching its goal.” NUL also showed that “the powerhouse of this conspiracy resides not in Moscow, nor in London, but in New York.” For del Valle, The New Unhappy Lords was “a treasure house of facts which patriots of all nations can use in the struggle against the Satanic power of the Conspiracy.” SAMOVARS AND SPOOKS The DAC and LEL were also linked to the same White Russian network that del Valle first encountered when he was an ITT executive in Buenos Aires. Task Force’s special London correspondent George Knupffer embodied these connections. Born in Saint Petersburg, Knupffer was a leading figure in the White Russian monarchist community in London. He published his own newsletter, The Plain Speaker, while also contributing occasional articles to Candour. Knupffer first met Colonel Pomeroy in London in November 1954 as a representative of “His Imperial Highness” the Grand Duke Vladimir, the son of the late Grand Duke Cyril. Knupffer also helped lead Mladorossy (Union of Young Russia), a far-right and extremely anti-Semitic political organization that maintained a quasi-military wing known as the Russian Revolutionary Forces (RRF). A former intelligence officer himself, Pomeroy used his visit to London to seek out contacts with East European exiles such as General Wladyslaw Anders, a Polish military leader who wanted the West to back a Polish exile army. Captain Henry Kerby, the man who arranged Pomeroy’s meeting with Anders, was a former MI6 officer and Russian expert turned Tory parliamentarian. Kerby, in turn, maintained longstanding close ties to Knupffer. In his first article for Task Force in December 1955, Knupffer claimed that New York banking houses like Kuhn Loeb were behind the Bolshevik Revolution. He then argued that Russia was no longer completely under the control of the “conspiracy” that had its roots in a two-thousand year old clash of “two Messianisms”; namely, the Christian world view that looked to the “world beyond the grave, of life everlasting” and the messianism that focused on “this world of material power and possessions.” The Russian Communist regime, Knupffer said, was now being forced “slowly but surely” to adjust itself “to the wishes and needs of the Russian people.” Since Moscow “is no longer an effective tool for the achievement of world domination by the materialistic messianists,” if we continue to see only the enemy in Moscow, we will be stabbed in the back by the enemy in New York, who wants to lead us. But that enemy, like the one in Russia, is only using America as a base. Knupffer concluded that both Russia and America were “victims of a subtle and powerful subversive force which they have not recognized in time.” In 1956 the DAC touched off a heated controversy after Task Force reprinted a lengthy attack on a Russian exile group known as the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) by Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, then a protégé of Knupffer. The article, “Insecure Security,” accused the CIA of financing the NTS that Huxley-Blythe claimed was really under KGB control. Knupffer and other White Russian monarchists especially despised the NTS because it had collaborated with CIA plans to balkanize the former Russian Empire by supporting an independent Ukraine. Huxley-Blythe’s piece so enraged the Solidarists that Task Force was forced to print a rebuttal by NTS’s Washington representative to avoid a lawsuit. Knupffer and del Valle also tried to develop a far right network around the globe that included a proposed “World Committee for Truth and Liberty.” In a 6/26/1967 letter to del Valle, Knupffer reported that he had visited Rhodesia, South Africa, Portugal, and Spain to seek backing for the committee. In his 7/3/1967 letter replying to Knupffer, del Valle noted: There already exists a measure of cooperation between our nationalists and those of other countries, especially yours. Coordination would increase our effectiveness. Chesterton and I have helped one another in a small way . . . I too was in Spain in May and I believe I have good sympathetic contacts there. You may be certain I understand that the sources of help must not be mentioned. I’m sure [Wickliffe] Vennard, Oliver [R.P. Oliver, a leading American far rightist] and [Frank] Serpico [OMNI’s publisher] understand the need for discretion. Finally, both Del Valle and Knupffer became entangled in the weird “Knights of Malta” group headed by Charles Pichel and Del Valle’s continued ties to Pichel, whom Knupffer despised, would eventually end their collaboration. Part Five: Conspiracy Theory, Globalization, and the Contemporary Right THE PERSISTANCE OF CONSPIRACY THEORY Even as British National Front flourished in the1970s, the American right populist third party movement led by Alabama Governor George Wallace collapsed in the wake of the Nixon Administration’s “Southern Strategy” and the attempted assassination of Wallace. America’s defeat in Vietnam – combined with the Watergate crisis – led to a further weakening of the right. The 1970s also saw a dramatic decline of the DAC, although Task Force continued to publish and del Valle grew closer to the far-right Liberty Lobby. After del Valle’s death on April 28, 1978 at age 85, however, the DAC ceased to exist. The DAC’s addiction to conspiracy theory never waned from its founding to its demise. A conspiratorial mentality, in fact, seems endemic to the American far right. In the late 1950s, for example, the John Birch Society (JBS) arose as the preeminent group on the far right. Although the JBS rejected anti-Semitism, it proved incapable of abandoning a conspiratorial mindset. JBS founder Robert Welsh even famously accused then President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a conscious agent of the Kremlin. In the 1960s a more popular version of the idea that the “Eastern elite” was engaged in weakening America for the benefit of Communism was promulgated in a series of rightwing best sellers; most famously John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason and two Phyllis Schlafly books, A Choice Not an Echo and The Gravediggers. Activists from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign spread these and similar writings across the country. During the early 1980s, the militia movement rediscovered arguments first advanced by groups like the DAC. Contemporary militia polemics about “UN invaders” on American soil, for example, recycle myths first developed in the1950s. These fantasies were updated to include – among other things – plots involving UFOs, weather control, Satanic cults, the Trilateral Commission and Y2K. We have also seen charges that Bill Clinton murdered one of his close White House advisors and dumped his body in a federal park; Hillary Clinton is a lesbian witch; George Bush Sr. used the phrase “new world order” to speak in code to his Masonic-Illuminati cronies; and that Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity secretly runs America on behalf of the Illuminati. Although the militia movement covers a wide variety of individuals and organizations, the seemingly endless proliferation of wild conspiracy theories remain central to it. THE RADICAL RIGHT As events have shown, the “hidden hand” model – far from being obsolete – possesses a remarkable ability to mutate with circumstances. The hidden hand model resembles a basic plot narrative or fable that exists in a perpetual state of endless mutation of characters and sub-plots while never losing it major themes. Understanding the way rigidly prefabricated worldviews function as internally consistent interpretative systems may usefully supplement more conventional “cause and effect” social science attempts to understand the radical right. Because revolutionary utopian groups frequently derive their identity from a hyper-ideological outlook that does not neatly map onto conventional political logic, we must take this reality into consideration. One fundamental question – for me anyway – when looking at anti-globalization movements from both the left and the right is the degree to which they are committed to what is essentially a skeptical (as opposed to Jacobin) Enlightenment view of humanity that posits parliamentary politics as part of a continual debate over the nature of the good. Groups that reject such an approach are frequently predisposed to conspiratorial interpretations of history – no matter how divorced such theories may be from material reality. They can also have a potential “revolutionary” dimension whether or not they function on the far right, far left or in the garb of religious movements/New Age sects. Extremist groups frequently view pluralistic discourse, parliamentary government, and civil society itself – in the form of democratic capitalist, democratic socialist, or even moderate theocratic or monarchic forms – as intrinsically evil. In such a view, the persistence of civil society obfuscates 1) the machinations of a monolithic ruling class for the far left; 2) the domination of evil international Jewish bankers and their Illuminati cohorts for the far right; and 3) the relentless spread of godless atheism for fundamentalist Christians, fanatical Jews, Muslim zealots or New Age millenarian sects. In all these cases the fundamental target of critique is, for lack of a better word, the “system” itself. As we have seen in the case of both the DAC and LEL, what such oppositional groups may perceive as an adverse result of globalization – which for the far left could be the increase in the power of multinational corporations, for the far right the rise of foreign immigration, and for the domestic religious right the introduction of competing religious ideologies (all of which are not in themselves intrinsically irrational observations) – are simply used to prove the existence of the larger hidden hand conspiracy. THE JANUS FACE OF THE ETHNOCRATIC RIGHT For purposes of this analysis, I would distinguish between two kinds of groups on the right as “ideal types”; namely, the traditional conservative, either in the Edmund Burke Anglo-American vein or the Christian Democratic Continental tradition on the one hand, and the revolutionary groupuscular right on the other. Populist right movements such as Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National, Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nationale, Jörg Haider’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs and similar formations fluctuate between both poles. They may even embrace an ostensible commitment to a “long march through the institutions” while holding on to a conspiratorial way of seeing the world. Roger Griffin describes new right populist political parties that accept Enlightenment discourse to some degree (as opposed to merely mimicking pre-war fascist ideology) as being based on “ethnocratic liberalism” which he defines as a type of party politics which is not technically a form of fascism, or even a disguised form, for it lacks the core palingenetic vision . . . Rather it enthusiastically embraces the liberal system, but considers only one ethnic group full members of civil society . . . This contaminated, restrictive form of liberalism poses considerable taxonomic problems because, while it aims to retain liberal institutions and procedures and remain economically and diplomatically part of the international liberal democratic community, its axiomatic denial of the universality of human rights predisposes it to behave against ethnic out groups as violently as a fascist regime. To my way of thinking when examining such hybrid formations, one size simply does not fit all. Nor are all these parties frozen in time and incapable of mutation. Griffin’s definition may be more apt in regard to France’s Front National, Germany’s Partei die Republikaner, and Belgium’s Vlaams Blok but such parties, it should be noted, also have a long history of fascist (or Vichy) nostalgia. But does this same model also apply to Norway’s Fremskrittspartei, Holland’s Lijst Pim Fortuyn, Italy’s Lega Nord or Denmark’s Dansk Folkepartiei? Do these parties “axiomatically” deny the universality of human rights just because they object to illegal immigration, high taxes, or full integration into the EU? And where does one place more ambiguous parties like the AN that modeled its own turn away from fascist nostalgia and towards the center-right on the example set by Italy’s Communist Party? While traditional leftist “watchdog” groups often operate on the basis of a 1930s paradigm in which the rise of the populist center-right is invariably prelude to a seizure of power by the far right, this way of thinking may prove as misguided as that of those 1930s American rightists who were convinced that the growth of Roosevelt’s New Deal was paving the way for the Bolshevik takeover of the United States. We may even see the growth of European right parties that mimic more American themes involving low taxes, law and order, small government, and even certain libertarian tendencies rather than more orthodox fascist positions. After all, the right populist parties in Denmark and Norway first arose as popular movements against high taxation, a model that also played an important role in the 1970s America right electorial revival. Even the widespread popularity of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani inside an increasingly crime-infested urban France may be indicative of this broader trend. As elements of the European right pass from “groupuscularity” to mass politics at least some groups (or some fractions inside them) may feel increasingly inclined to abandon a commitment to conspiratorial thinking when dealing with issue of globalization. Against this, I would posit the continuing influence of a more marginal and frequently violent fringe right that still inhabit a crepuscular world somewhere between Adolf Hitler and Madame Blavatsky. This world – where conspiracy theory easily blends with racial determinism and rampant anti-Semitism – continues to hold high the banner of fascist revolution. One could view the history of the 1970s British NF – which suffered a series of bruising factional struggles between more conventional orthodox Tory-leaning elements and the core fascist nostalgia clique of John Tyndall, Martin Webster and their skinhead supporters for control over the party – in this light. It was in fact the NF’s inability to purge fascists and anti-Semites like Tyndall and Webster from top leadership positions that dramatically contributed to its political marginality in spite of its popular views against immigration. In that sense the NF may have been the result of two outside bodies of political gravity, the hard groupuscular right and the right Tory establishment, covertly fighting each other for the future direction of the party. The same may be true in regard to the fights between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret in the FN and between Fini and Pino Rauti inside the old MSI. A rough model that incorporates the groupuscular right, the right populists, and the establishment right might look something like this: Right Radical Groupuscule Right Populist Party Established Conservative Party Strong tendency to conspiracy theory, Hatred of conventional parliamentary politics Strong ideological commitment the main force holding the group together Prone to deadly factionalism inside rigid internal structure Base frequently from fringe bohemian elements of society / Pagan, atheist, extreme Christian Examples: Unite Radicale/Young Europe/National Alliance Fluctuating influence of conspiracy theory and ideology, waivers between parliamentary and groupuscule practices and worldviews Frequently has both authoritarian/charismatic leader as well as strong factional opponents willing to split from the party Marginalized elements of established religious groups (Lefebrve Catholics/Ulster Protestants) and small businessmen Examples: Front National, Alleanza Nationale/1970s British National Front Rejects conspiracy theory Parliamentary Practice Tendency to pragmatically moderate ideology in order to maintain power Marked by internal faction fighting within context of broader unity and willingness to compromise Backed by established religious and business tendencies Examples: Tory Party Christian Social Union Christian Democrats → ↔ ← There may well exist fuzzy (and at times not so fuzzy) crossovers between elements of the Janus-face “ethnocratic” right and the more “groupuscular” radical right, including a shared interest in conspiracy theory. However, political formations from the right may also continue further down the parliamentary path just as the Italian Communist Party did from the left. One possible way to determine where the actual center of political gravity lies inside such parties would be to seriously examine both the extent to which a particular party’s literature and rhetoric either actively promotes or panders to variations on the hidden hand conspiracy theory in explaining issues related to globalization as well as how influential and widespread these views are among the group’s members. Conclusion Looking back on the DAC and LEL, it is clear that they were among the first radical right groups to operate in an “interdependent world” and with the multinational institutions – the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO, SEATO, and the European Common Market – that helped shape it. Far from being “isolationists” in the case of the DAC – or “anti-American” as the LEL is sometimes described – both groups saw themselves as part of a worldwide “counter-conspiracy” against their imagined enemies. Using conservative rhetoric and patriotic images, they actually expressed deeply radical views directed against the established political, cultural and economic elites of their time. The ferocity of their fervor against the “one world order” strongly suggests that they didn’t simply react to the creation of groups like the UN or the World Bank in a cause and effect way. If anything, I would argue that it was their pre-existing conspiratorial ideology that allowed them to see such institutions as demonic in the first place. Because this was so, their views were largely immune to logical refutation, as the case of Colonel Pomeroy’s famous map so vividly demonstrates. Yet an unswerving commitment to a rigid conspiratorial worldview can easily doom a group to political marginality. In the case of the DAC, it is clear that it first emerged not from the streets but from former high-ranking U.S. military officers who mirrored beliefs held in broader layers of society. At its inception, the DAC maintained ties to important sections of the Republican Party just as the LEL included sympathizers from the Tories. Yet as anti-Semitism continued to be further and further discredited in the 1950s – while the threat of Soviet Communism increased – the DAC and LEL remained incapable of ideologically adapting to the new reality. As a result, they quickly went from being influence peddlers on the fringe of well-established parties and institutions and entered into a shadow world of political and social marginality from which they never returned. Their very marginality, paradoxically, led them to play an ideologically – and at times organizationally – significant role in the rise of new radical populist tendencies from the right. Finally, a more careful examination of the complex role that conspiracy theory plays both within the far right and the larger community as a whole may, I suggest, give us further insight into predicting how such groups will respond to broader issues related to globalization. The power that conspiratorial thinking of the most virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Western form now holds in large sections of Muslim societies further reminds us that the issues addressed in this paper are far from being limited to either the United States or Europe. An investigative journalist, Kevin Coogan is the author of Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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