Fighting The Fifth Column In The Americas

President Barack Obama promised that his administration would fundamentally transform America. A tenet of this book is that leftists and fifth columnists have been fundamentally transforming the United States for more than a century. Apparently, they believe that America’s capitalist system and democratic form of governance should be replaced with socialism. They have community organized, spied, agitated, obfuscated, taxed, committed voter fraud, and incited class warfare to weaken and polarize the country. Transformation started as a ripple of collectivism during the tenures of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, gained momentum during the socialistic administrations of FDR and LBJ, and has become a tsunami in the Obama years. Even worse, changes on the horizon make it a near certainty that liberals will dominate elections after the midpoint of the 21st century. This book examines the wages of liberalism, including injurious ideological environmentalism, unfair taxes, stultifying political correctness, and incompetence and corruption in government.

Nazi Germany's efforts to weaken the United States by subversion failed miserably. Bungling spies were captured and half-hearted efforts at sabotage came to nothing. Yet anyone who lived through WWII remembers the chilling posters warning Americans that "Enemy Agents Have Big Ears" and "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Even Superman joined the struggle against these insidious foes. In 1940, polls showed that 71% of Americans believed a Nazi Fifth Column had penetrated the country. Almost half were convinced that spies, saboteurs, dupes, and rumor-mongers lurked in their own neighborhoods and work-places. These fears extended to the White House and Congress. In this book, Francis MacDonnell explains the origins and consequences of America's Fifth Column panic, arguing that conviction and expedience encouraged President Roosevelt, the FBI, Congressmen, Churchill's government, and Hollywood to legitimate and exacerbate American's fears. Gravely weakening the isolationists, fostering Congress's role in rooting out Un-American activities, and instigating the creation of the modern intelligence establishment, the Fifth Column scare did far more than sell movie tickets, comic books, and pulp fiction. Insidious Foes traces the panic from its origins in the minds of reasonable Americans who saw the vulnerability of their open society in an age of encroaching totalitarianism.

From the French and Indian War in 1754, with Benjamin Franklin's Join or Die cartoon, to the present war in Iraq, propaganda has played a significant role in American history. The Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda provides more than 350 entries, focusing primarily on propaganda created by the U.S. government throughout its existence. Two specialists, one a long-time research librarian at the U.S. Information Agency (the USIA) and the State Department's Bureau of Diplomacy, and the other a former USIA Soviet Disinformation Officer, Martin J. Manning and Herbert Romerstein bring a profound knowledge of official U.S. propaganda to this reference work. The dictionary is further enriched by a substantial bibliography, including films and videos, and an outstanding annotated list of more than 105 special collections worldwide that contain material important to the study of U.S. propaganda. Students, researchers, librarians, faculty, and interested general readers will find the Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda an authoritative ready-reference work for quick information on a wide range of events, publications, media, people, government agencies, government plans, organizations, and symbols that provided mechanisms to promote America's interests, both abroad and domestically, in peace and in war. Almost all entries conclude with suggestions for further research, and the topically arranged bibliography provides a further comprehensive listing of important resources, including films and videos.

Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates including the National Rifle Association had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states’ rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Following the enactment of the Gun Control Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began to stake out firm positions. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights became increasingly tied to the Republican Party. Drawing on a vast range of archival evidence, Charles offers new insight into the evolution of the gun rights movement and how politicians responded to anti–gun control hardliners. He examines in detail how the National Rifle Association reinvented itself as well as how other advocacy groups challenged the NRA’s political monopoly. Offering a deep dive into the politicization of gun rights, Vote Gun reveals the origins of the acrimonious divisions that persist to this day.

In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production—especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika." In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired—for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood—and envied—for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews. Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.

What this all adds up to is the reestablishment of "freedom"--freedom to be ourselves, to have the right to our feelings, to have the right to our own thoughts, to have the right to free speech on whatever it is that we have to say and to say it whenever and wherever we find ourselves, to have the right to see the truth in all things as we are able to perceive it, and to deliberately recognize the reality that surrounds us as we engage in the continual struggle for genuineness. "Keeping it real" is good for all people without this faculty, fantasy, and prevarication takeover. Our culture is our social environment. We need to have the power and the will to protect it. It is the womb of our civilization. Our innately personal ideals as well as our interpersonal social norms, mores, and colloquialism--our national integrity is being cancelled out by the corrupt regime in Congress and the federal courts. We all have the right to live within the society and culture we were born into at the very least--the right to our own individuality, to our own opinions, and to express our love of who and what we are. Unfortunately, the current phase that the federal government has lapsed into is one of denying all of these rights to the degree that the Bill of Rights is superseded. Citizenship has become superfluous. It is time to get radical. It is past time for citizens to revolt. Otherwise, this will soon become no different than any other oppressed country with the federal tyranny of the D. C. Treason Regime.