Did E T Benson consider Eisenhower a Communist?

[_aussieguy55]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWhykFRJz5U

Benson says the John Birchers are a good group of patriots.

[_ajax18]

Ezra Taft Benson didn't make political statements once he became the prophet. I obviously agree with his view of communism as a moral evil. But to say that ETB pushed his political beliefs upon the membership of the church as prophet isn't being fair or intellectually honest. We just got a sermon in sacrament meeting today from the high council speaker about not being political in church lest we offend anyone.

[_aussieguy55]

I wonder what he would have thought of Trump's trade policies and especially Trump's 50 billion support of soya bean farmers. The silliest speech in my opinion was his fourteen-fundamentals-in-following-the-prophet. One wonders whether these men ever read much even their own history.

[_Maksutov]

I wonder what he would have thought of Trump's trade policies and especially Trump's 50 billion support of soya bean farmers. The silliest speech in my opinion was his fourteen-fundamentals-in-following-the-prophet. One wonders whether these men ever read much even their own history.

ETB couldn't get over Herbert Hoover's loss. And yet he was an authoritarian...but not from the government side, from the theological side. Benson also couldn't accept evolution or discussions of economics and was always meddling in BYU, directly or indirectly, for his pet conspiracy theories. He reminds me of Henry Ford, a man whose undeniable abilities in one area led him to believe himself an authority in all, even if it requires the most absurd distortions of history into paranoid fantasies.

[_Maksutov]

Here's some background by way of profiling Glenn Beck.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010 ... ng-fathers

At a Tax Day rally this past spring, the veteran conservative organizer Richard Viguerie described the Tea Party as “an unfettered new force of the middle class.” And, indeed, calling Obama a socialist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson is audacious enough to seem like the marker of a new movement—or, at least, a new twist in the nation’s long history of conspiracy-mongering. In fact, it marks a revival of ideas that circulated on the extremist right half a century ago, especially in the John Birch Society and among its admirers.

Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.

The early nineteen-sixties were a turbulent time in American politics, for the right wing in particular. In the South, racist violence against civil-rights workers was constant, deepening sectional splits in the Democratic Party that would in time deliver the once solidly Democratic South to the Republicans. Southern elected officials, in support of what they called “massive resistance” to civil-rights laws and judicial rulings, resurrected the ideas of nullification and interposition, which claimed that individual states could void federal laws within their own borders. Others focussed on what they considered a fearsome Communist menace inside the United States. General Edwin A. Walker caused an enormous stir when he resigned from the Army in 1961, after President John F. Kennedy’s Pentagon reprimanded him for spreading right-wing propaganda among his troops and accusing prominent American officials of Communist sympathies. Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat from South Carolina, spoke for many on the far right when he declared that various modestly liberal domestic programs “fall clearly within the category of socialism.”

The John Birch Society was one of the decade’s most controversial right-wing organizations. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, the society took its name from a Baptist missionary and military-intelligence officer killed by Communist Chinese forces in 1945, whom Welch called the first American casualty of the Cold War. The group was founded at a propitious time. After Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall, in 1954, many of McCarthy’s followers felt bereft of a voice, and Welch seemed to speak for them; by the mid-sixties, his society’s membership was estimated to be as high as a hundred thousand. Welch, exploiting fears of what McCarthy had called an “immense” domestic conspiracy, declared that the federal government had already fallen into the Communists’ clutches. In a tract titled “The Politician,” he attacked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” who had been serving the plot “all of his adult life.” Late in 1961, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, he accused the Kennedy Administration of “helping the Communists everywhere in the world while pretending to do the opposite.”

Wherever he looked, Welch saw Communist forces manipulating American economic and foreign policy on behalf of totalitarianism. But within the United States, he believed, the subversion had actually begun years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Conflating modern liberalism and totalitarianism, Welch described government as “always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” Consequently, he charged, the Progressive era, which expanded the federal government’s role in curbing social and economic ills, was a dire period in our history, and Woodrow Wilson “more than any other one man started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism.”

In the nineteen-sixties, Welch became convinced that even the Communist movement was but “a tool of the total conspiracy.” This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the eighteenth century, in the “uniformly Satanic creed and program” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Run by those he called “the Insiders,” the conspiracy resided chiefly in international families of financiers, such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service, and nongovernmental organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Since the early twentieth century, they had done a good deal of their evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift. “One broad avenue down which these conspiratorial forces advance was known as progressive legislation,” Welch declared in 1966. “The very same collectivist theories and demagogic pretenses which had destroyed earlier civilizations were now paraded forth in the disguise of new and modern concepts.”

In the worst case, Welch believed, military action might be necessary to dislodge the totalitarians. But for the moment a nonviolent political revolution would suffice. Accordingly, he designed the Birch Society roughly, if not explicitly, on the Marxist-Leninist model of a vanguard revolutionary party: a series of small cells that would work in secret to agitate the populace and elect right-thinking candidates to office. “It isn’t numbers we have to worry about,” Welch wrote, “but the courage on the part of our followers to stick their necks out and play rough—the same as the Communists do.”

[_DarkHelmet]

Ezra Taft Benson didn't make political statements once he became the prophet.

He didn't make many statements at all once he became prophet. He was a 'Weekend at Bernies' prophet for most of his tenure.

[_Maksutov]

Ezra Taft Benson didn't make political statements once he became the prophet.

He didn't make many statements at all once he became prophet. He was a 'Weekend at Bernies' prophet for most of his tenure.

He was mostly gone. That's one of the things Steve Benson has described in horrifying detail.