The annual labor website of the year competition — which the IWW won four years ago — has led me to discover many strange and wonderful websites. Some of these are more strange than wonderful. And some of the strangest of all have got to be the websites of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society.
\nI should begin by explaining that while there are “officially nominated” sites in the annual competition, anyone with an email address can vote for any site they want. This has led to some anti-union websites getting votes, though never more than a handful of votes. Companies sometimes create the web equivalent of a company union, websites which tout the advantages to employees of not organizing. But this year, I discovered something far more dangerous.<\/p>\n
\nIt began with a single vote cast for a site called RescueAmericanJobs.org. I decided to have a look at the site. One’s initial impression is that this is just another union website — and that impression is deliberately cultivated. There’s a banner with the slogan “One person can make a difference”. There’s an appeal to buy American-made products. There’s even a quaint story behind the site, apparently — one which is designed to make a person think there couldn’t possibly be an racist motive behind the campaign. “The founders of Rescue American Jobs are a unique pair of patriots – an American-born citizen from the rural South and her husband, a Chinese-Singaporean immigrant who is in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen,” we are told. So there you go, we’re not racists at all. One of us isn’t even white.
\nOne has to dig deeper, however. Rescue American Jobs is part of something called the Coalition for the Future American Worker which unites, it claims, some 100,000 people in a wide range of organizations — none of which I can honestly say I have ever heard of. These include a number with very innocent sounding names, such as the National Association for the Employment of Americans, American Jobs Coalition, and American Labor First. No mention yet of anything as nasty as the John Birch Society, but hang on a minute.
\nOn the site’s news page, you’ll find a link to two stories from The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. The articles are both by William F. Jasper, the magazine’s senior editor, and are both from 2003.
\nOne of them concludes with these words: “. . . more and more Americans are feeling the harsh reality of the planned ‘new world order’ or are beginning to see the writing on the wall concerning their own jobs, businesses, and professions . . . These newly awakened Americans can be reached and organized into a formidable force to upset the subversive globalist agenda and preserve our independence. But we have no time to waste.”
\nA visit to John Birch Society’s own home page reveals that its main campaign is now to “Stop the FTAA”. It’s even more prominent than its efforts to get the US out of the United Nations, or get the Panama Canal returned to US control. And they’ve created a special website at www.stoptheftaa.org.
\nThe Birchers are clearly trying to tap into two genuine concerns of the labor movement in the US — job loss and opposition to globalization. They’re working on fertile ground. Their sites are virtually indistinguishable from genuine left wing and trade union sites, with their fluttering American flags on the one hand and opposition to the capitalist “new world order” on the other. They are trying — with some success — to blend in.
\nAll the various anti-immigration\/anti-globalization sites in this network link to one another — but they also link to sites which are part of the mainstream labor movement. For example, follow a couple of links from the Coalition for the Future American Worker site and you’re on the “How Americans Can Buy American” website. This site promotes “Union Jeans and Apparel”, a company which appears on the “Union Mall” together with a number of union-backed shops. There are also links to genuine union sites, such as the Communications Workers of America, or WashTech, the union organizing high-tech workers in the Pacific Northwest.
\nOn the web, one can quickly throw together a website, creating what appears to be a genuine grassroots organization in a matter of minutes. The Birchers and their allies seem to have done this over and over again. Front organizations of this kind were invented by twentieth century totalitarians of both the Communist and Nazi variants to make it easier to recruit and organize. These websites are net-based versions of the old front organizations.
\nUnions which engage in over-the-top patriotism and flag waving, which don’t know the difference between “buy union” and “buy American”, are making it easier for the ultra-rightists to get a foot in the door. And left-wing anti-globalization protestors who substitute xenophobia for international solidarity are also setting themselves up for Bircher’s “stop the new world order” propaganda. Only an informed, critical approach to these issues — and a commitment to genuine internationalism — can protect us from this danger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The annual labor website of the year competition — which the IWW won four years ago — has led me to discover many strange and wonderful websites. Some of these are more strange than wonderful….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrial-worker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}