Underground Movements Quotes
By secret societies, de Tocqueville meant societies or organizations where the membership was secret. He was not referring to organizations like the Masons which had secret oaths and rituals. Secret societies had historically been destabilizing forces in societies. At the time this was written, there were no secret societies in America, but in 1855 a major one developed—The American Party whose members were better known as “Know Nothings” as when they would be asked anything about the party and its organization of beliefs, they would claim that the knew nothing. They were virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Subsequently, there have been secret organizations in American politics from time to time, but they have generally been few compared to other countries, and their influence was not long lasting. Most recently, quirks in legal decisions and their interaction with the Constitution have produced non profit organizations which are financed and influenced by unknown people. The major officials of the organizations are known but the members and contributors are secret. These organizations then operate campaigns, most often to attack and damage the reputation of politicians running for political office—most frequently, the Presidency.
small Jewish Zionist groups who unlike the majority Jewish organizations in Palestine used terror tactics After the 2nd World War, European Jews who had survived the holocaust were trying to emigrate to Palestine. The Arabs wanted all the Jews who were there to be gone. The English were caught in the middle and tried to limit the Jewish immigration. Most Jewish organizations worked to smuggle European Jews into Palestine but 2 small ones resorted to a type of terrorism. However, as the ambassador observed there was a large moral distinction between the terrorism of those 2 small Jewish Organizations and the current Palestinian terrorists. The important moral distinction is that the Jewish terrorists were fighting to establish their state with no program or desire to prevent Arabs from having their own state, but the Hamas terrorists of Palestine (not the Fatah Government) want not only to establish a Palestinian State but to destroy the Jewish State (Israel) and murder all the Jews that they can as their charter requires.
