OMG. I read an expose on these people today and the tenacles stretch into every facet of our society.
http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htmsnip
(a history lesson)
Vereide and Buchman had important allies on Wall Street. According to Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, he was approached by a group of wealthy Republican industrialists to lead an anti-Roosevelt Fascist coup against the government. As with today’s Fellowship, Vereide and Buchman were merely front men for anti-Socialist big businesses who hid behind the façade of a Christian evangelical movement. To them and their bankrollers, Roosevelt was some sort of anti-Christ who was going to go to bat for the workers, blacks, the poor and women while, at the same time, menacing the ultra-rich and the rising Nazi and Fascist specter in Europe. The coup was to be financed mostly by the J. P. Morgan and Du Pont financial empires. General Butler, who had no time for these industrialists since his military forays into Central America and the Caribbean as a foot soldier on behalf of wealthy capitalists, rejected their overture. Gerald MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman and former Commander of the Connecticut American Legion, was the chief recruiter for the coup plot. Butler informed Congress of the plans for the coup. However, Congress was owned by Wall Street and no charges were ever brought against the plotters. Butler was incensed and went public but he was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Not until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the secret Congressional report, was Butler’s version of the events validated. In the report of the Special Committee to Investigate Nazi Propaganda Activities in the United States, Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY) concluded that there was evidence of a coup plot by the right-wing against Roosevelt. However, much to Butler’s chagrin, no criminal action was taken against the plotters.
Butler said MacGuire’s plan was for Butler to force Roosevelt to declare he had become too sick from polio and create a powerful new Cabinet position, the Secretary of General Affairs, to run the government on his behalf. The New Deal, something the U.S. fascists and Nazis referred to as the “Jew Deal,” would have be scrapped. The comparison between the Secretary of General Affairs and the present Secretary of Homeland Security is striking. If Roosevelt did not agree to the coup plotters’ demand, a half million American Legion veterans would march on Washington to physically remove Roosevelt from office. But MacGuire decided that the perception management campaign would work and an armed force would not be required. He told Butler, “You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second…” Shortly after his testimony before the House investigation committee, MacGuire died of pneumonia at the age of 37.
The perception management concerning the attempted right-wing coup against FDR was a harbinger of more ruses that would come from the same right-wing elements: that the first Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was suffering from mental illness when he threw himself out of the sixteenth story of Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949, that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone, pro-Communist assassin, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The coup plotters involved some of the biggest names in American business and politics, including Irenee Du Pont of the wealthy chemical company family and founder of the pro-Fascist American Liberty League; J. P. Morgan officers Grayson Murphy and John Davis; General Douglas MacArthur; southern segregationist Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia; and, in what represented a sea change for the extreme American right-wing, two influential Catholics, former Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, who had become very anti-Roosevelt, and John Raskob, a senior Du Pont official and a high ranking member of the Catholic Knights of Malta. The concordat between right-wing Protestants and Catholics presaged a later alliance between The Fellowship and the proto-Fascist Opus Dei movement.
Buchman, who was also involved in the creating the psychologically abusive Alcoholics Anonymous (which enticed many converts from booze to “Jesus”), created an organization called First Century Christian Fellowship. In 1939, while preaching against life’s extravagances, Buchman set up his headquarters in New York’s posh Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Buchman also found common cause with right-wing racist groups. In addition to his anti-Semitism, Buchman had no time for the civil rights movement. Like Vereide, he rejected women’s suffrage and the labor union movement. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, many of Moral Rearmament’s leaders sought conscientious objector status in the draft as “lay evangelists.” As with today’s fundamentalist Christians, Buchman was rejected by his fellow evangelicals and mainstream religious leaders, including his old evangelical colleague Sam Shoemaker and Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, leader of the United Lutheran Church in America, who called Buchman’s connection with Lutheranism “minimal.” After Senator Harry S Truman received the 1944 nomination for Vice President, he also dropped his past tenuous connections to Buchman. Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous theologian, and George Orwell both labeled Buchman’s Oxford Group and his successor Moral Rearmament Movement as “fascist.”
snip
After President Truman announced that he was going to continue FDR’s programs – what he called the Fair Deal – the religious right of Republicans and southern Democrats decided to attack Truman. His vulnerability to charges that Communists were embedded in his administration would give rise to the cancer of McCarthyism. However, for the religious right of Vereide, Buchman, and their political allies, this was a necessary and God-driven form of political and moral cleansing. The radical right would also force Truman to consolidate power in a new post-war intelligence agency that would replace the Office of Strategic Services – the Central Intelligence Agency.
Senator Smith was a colleague of fellow Republican and anti-New Dealer Senator Prescott Bush from Connecticut (father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush). According to Smith’s archived papers, he was also active with Buchman’s Oxford Group. Prior to the war, Alexander’s New Jersey was a hotbed of Nazi activity. The home of German admirer Charles Lindbergh (and the crime scene for a Nazi conspiracy to kidnap and murder his son) and the first port of call for the ill-fated Nazi airship, the SS Hindenburg, New Jersey was friendly territory for groups like Moral Rearmament, the Bund, the Ku Klux Klan, and Vereide’s Prayer Breakfast Movement. One of Alexander’s predecessors as a New Jersey Senator, J.P. Morgan investment banker Hamilton Fish Kean, was also a strenuous opponent of the New Deal until he left the Senate in 1935. His grandson, Thomas H. Kean would serve as New Jersey’s governor and co-chair of the controversial 911 Commission.
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