THE BALLARDS ARE VERY CLOSE TO AMERICAN FASCISM

 

“PEEWEE HITLERISM” IN AMERICA

 

By Gerald B. Bryan

 

In the summer of 1939 the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Martin Dies of Texas, made its report concerning some of the so-called patriotic movements in America.

 

The committee in that report concluded that many of these so-called patriotic movements “ape the methods of foreign dictators.” These “peewee Hitlers,” it said, are engaged in “a form of racketeering” and in “subversive activities,” and are trying to bring about “a radical change in the American form of government.”

 

It called special attention “to the deplorable prostitution of such words as ‘patriotism’ and ‘Christian’ to the selfish ends of these fascist racketeers.”

 

As all of this has a bearing upon the movement which we are exposing, it is well to take a short retrospect of the astonishing number of political and so-called patriotic movements which have arisen in our country during the last several years.

 

Most of these movements are generally considered to be American fascist organizations. They are built usually on the personal leadership of a single individual whose spleen is directed against either real or imaginary evils within the government. Their avowed purpose is to save the people from certain “enemies” which assertedly seek to overthrow the democracy and establish some other form of government in its place. In “saving” the country, these organizations usually seek to bring about a new government of their own!

 

Among some of the outstanding “American fascist” groups is William Dudley Pelley’s “Silver Shirt Legion.” Elsewhere we have referred to the similarity between the Pelley and Ballard movements. It was brought out that Pelley started out originally as a psychic or metaphysical leader, and then rapidly arose to become a political fuehrer with “storm troopers” or legionnaires in every state.

 

The Ballards likewise are psychic leaders, but have political ambitions too. Their “Master” in the early days, as we have seen, sought to take over the Pelley movement. They have since organized Minute Men, or, as we might say, “storm troopers” in every state.

 

The Silver Shirt leader has evidently over-reached himself in his ambitions to become the “American Hitler,” the fuehrer of the United States. He has been accused by the Dies Committee of printing and distributing literature “containing scurrilous, false and perfidious assertions, and reprints of propaganda of a foreign power,” according to a brief filed in the District Court in Washington by counsel for the Dies Committee.

 

For a number of weeks Pelley was a fugitive from the Dies Committee which wanted to serve him with a subpoena and question him concerning his activities. He later, however, showed up before this committee, admitted “a change of heart,” and showered glowing adjectives of approval upon the committee’s work. Convicted in 1935 for violating the North Carolina “blue sky” securities law, his sentence was suspended, but it appears that he is now wanted by North Carolina authorities for violating the conditions of his parole.

 

The record of the Ballard printings and assertions is likewise notorious, and as we have already seen, Ballard too has had difficulties with the “blue sky” securities law. The amazing thing is that this evident subversive movement should have continued so long without an investigation by this same Dies committee which went after Pelley and some of the other fascist movements so strongly. No doubt its “religious” set-up protects it.

 

Racketeers who hide under the cloak of religion are likely to become one of the most dangerous and difficult problems in the future, if not, indeed, at the present time. It is a weak spot in our protective armor against “Fifth Columns”; and although the main approach to it must be, as always, through education and enlightenment of the people and the public exposure of the methods of the religious charlatan, still, there is a real need for more courageous action by our public officials who should not swerve aside merely because a dangerous and subversive movement operates as a “religion.”

 

There are said to be at least a hundred American fascist organizations which have attracted the attention of the Dies Committee, whose records have been or are being investigated.

 

The subpoenaing of Maj. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley in May, 1939, to testify about his story concerning an alleged Jewish plot to seize America gave wide publicity to these fascist organizations, revealing to the public how prevalent today is this battle of individuals and their organizations against real or fancied evil which threaten our country.

 

It brought up for investigation the various anti-Semitic movements, some of which the Dies Committee characterized as “a most violent type.”

 

The Knights of the White Camellia, headed by George E. Deatherage; the Crusading White Shirts of George W. Christians; and other movements of similar nature, dominated usually by some racial or religious intolerance, are in active operation in the United States today.

 

The present political power of the Detroit radio priest, Father Coughlin, shows to what extent the personality of one man can sway the thoughts and actions of millions.

 

The danger in all such movements lies in inflaming the minds of irresponsible and misguided individuals, leading to street fights, mob uprisings, and the use of arms to put down “other uprisings.” Whenever this philosophy of hatred is preached, the spirit of the mob may readily be aroused, and the movement may get out of control of the one who originated it.

 

Among the Coughlinites, as among the Ballardites, have appeared so-called “Minute Men,” differently organized and controlled, but bearing the same name.

 

Gerald Winrod’s Defenders of the Christian Faith is another of the American fascist groups whose influence has been wide-spread among certain orthodox religious bodies who, like the Pelleyites and Coughlinites, profess to see the menace of Jewry in America.

 

The German American Bund, outpost for Hitler’s Western Hemisphere ambitions, has for years been insidiously spreading the philosophy of Nazism throughout the United States. Some of these American fascist movements formerly paid open allegiance to Hitler’s ideology, and it was not until the German fuehrer’s astonishing tie-up with Communist Russia and the imprisonment in America of the bundfuehrer, Fritz Kuhn, on a misappropriation of funds conviction that some of these fascist leaders in America half-heartedly withdrew their allegiance to Hitler. Perhaps Hitler’s blitzkrieg on Europe has completed their disillusionment.

 

All of these American fascist movements are reciprocal, i.e., one builds on the work of the other. Yet, the desire for personal power and many individual rivalries makes them incapable of raising a single leader who can represent and control them all. That is the weakness of the American fascist movement today, which is fortunate for our present constituted government.

 

Arrayed against these heterodox fascist groups are the organized left-wing radical groups themselves — the Communists and their offshoots. They seek to change the American form of government by injecting ideologies of their own, even going so far as to openly preach the gospel of revolution to bring in the new government.

 

And in this latest and weirdest organization of them all, known as the “Mighty I AM,” directed by its two fuehrers with the aid of so-called “Ascended Masters,” there is represented a most amazing conglomeration of forces and ideologies, largely psychic or psychological in character, which is being thrown against a medley of “evils” of various kinds and which is undoubtedly producing many evils of its own.

 

Surely, if ever a country was besieged by an army of embattled “shirts” of various stripes and colors, it is our county today!

 

A fervid patriotism is usually the explosive spark which propels these movements on their careers. They receive their power through “hating” something, and, conversely, through “loving” something. Without this emotional combustion there would be no force to propel them against the objects of their dislikes.

 

And always, whether they fight for a democracy, a communistic state, or an imperialistic autocracy, they must proceed through the power of a dictator.

 

To bring in their ideal of a “democracy,” they, oddly enough, start a little dictatorship! Something in itself the exact reverse of a true democracy.

 

Or else, like the American Nazis, they openly espouse an out-and-out dictatorship and hold up the ideal of a foreign government and its fuehrer.

 

It is this tendency towards a dictatorship which, despite their differing ideologies, makes all these movements brothers under the skin. They all seek to bring about some kind of dictatorship in America.

 

The Bund fuehrer wants to impose Nazism, the communist works for his so-called dictatorship by the proletariat, the Ku-Klux-Klaner wants a little private dictatorship of his own, and some of the American fascist groups hint at a military dictatorship.

 

At the Moseley and Deatherage hearings before the Dies Committee it was asserted that “military action would be necessary to get the gang out,” referring to an alleged Jewish plot to overthrow the American form of government. The fascist remedy, as brought out in the Dies hearings, is for a “military court” to take control of the Federal government and each of the 48 states.

 

Such fascist movements are usually counter-revolutionary — organizations set up to check alleged revolutionary movements which they consider the government unable to cope with, or may even be a party to, and so they seek to bring about a little revolution of their own and take over the reins of government themselves.

 

Doubtless some of the American fascist movements were originally founded on sincere patriotic ideals, but the evolution of them along emotional lines, with hate as their keynote, inevitably brings about the rise of mob psychology, the oppression of a minority, and a tyrannical dictatorship.

 

And now in this latest fascist-directed movement, popularly known as the Mighty I AM, we see many similarities to the methods of these other movements — yet, it is the strangest dictatorship of them all.

 

It is a “PSYCHIC DICTATORSHIP,” and it functions by means of the purported power and authority of a score or more of unseen “Ascended Masters,” who have for five years used as their mouthpieces two earth-plane fuehrers!

 

It is effective to the extent that people love, fear, or believe one Guy Ballard and his wife Edna, the emissaries of the psychic Dictator, “Saint Germain,” who told his “beloved family” that they will have a part to play in bringing into perfection “that Government of so long ago into America at this time,” and that the “New Government will require their services ere long.”

 

Now, in this cult’s attempt to set up an alien dictatorship of “Ascended Masters,” with the two fuehrers as representatives, there is revealed much of the same paranoid tendencies and delusions of grandeur which we find so manifest in the Hitlerian ideology. One cannot read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf without recognizing in Ballardism a great deal of the same cunning strategy, the same psychology, which brought the German fuehrer into power. Patriotism, hate, and the lie have been the subtle psychological weapons of this foreign despot, whose methods are being duplicated today, or drawn from the same hidden invisible source, by the Saint Germain cult.

 

Referring to his gospel of hate, Hitler says: “For purely psychological reasons one must present not two enemies to the masses, but only one! A single enemy must be pushed forward and all hate must be concentrated upon this sole opponent.”

 

This “master psychologist” goes on to say: “It is part of the genius of a true leader to make even widely different enemies appear to belong to but a single category . . .” And then this fuehrer of the German peoples lumps all his hatreds together — and calls them Jews!

 

The Ballard hatreds are likewise legion, ranging all the way from allergic Ascended Masters’ hatred of garlic and onions to violent tirades against “black magicians,” “communists,” “spies,” and “vicious individuals” who oppose their work. And, like Hitler, they lump all their hatreds under a single category — and call it the “Sinister Force!”

 

Having propounded in his book his doctrine of a single hate, Dictator Hitler goes on to stress the psychological value of the enormous lie.

 

“The primitive simplicity of the mind of the masses,” he says, “is more easily misled by a great than a tiny lie.”

 

He goes on to say the masses are “accustomed to telling insignificant lies,” and can therefore “detect such lies in others.”

 

“But,” says this master strategist, “they generally fail to detect a truly gigantic distortion!”

 

In a similar way the Ballards have either consciously or unconsciously followed the Hitler strategy. Can one think of any more “enormous lie,” any more truly “gigantic distortions,” than that represented in the Ballard cult?

 

If ever “peewee Hitlerism” in America becomes more like its big brother abroad, it will be because the American people fail to realize, and take steps to counteract, the subtle psychic or psychological inroads that are being made by various movements in this country.

 

 

 

(Psychic Dictatorship in America, chapter 29)

 

 

 

 

 

Cid’s observation

 

The Ballards began by recruiting their followers into the ranks of the fascist Dudley Pelley, and then to make their doctrine look less fascist they disguised it by pretending to be very patriotic.

 

 

And this is further proof that Guy and Edna Ballard was not in contact with the masters, because the masters advocate neither fascism nor patriotism but love for humanity as a whole.