The following description of the Council on Foreign Relations was published by the John Birch society. What sort of propaganda techniques or logical fallacies, if any, can you detect?

Why would anyone who professes to be an American hold membership in the Council on Foreign Relations?

It is a time-honored and sensible practice to judge others by the company they keep and the organizations they join.

Everyone not only employs such a test on a regular basis; we also expect it to be used to judge our own worth.

Members of the privately run, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations belong to one of the most prestigious groups in the United States. But this little-known organization is hardly one where any patriotic American should be found.

The CFR:

• was founded by a man who touted Marxism and spent his entire adult life working to fasten its freedom-destroying grip on the United States; (From his lofty position as top assistant to President Woodrow Wilson, Edward Mandell House led the group that founded the CFR. In his 1912 book, PHILLIP DRU, ADMINISTRATOR, House explained that he was working for "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx.")
• has for seven decades consistently advocated scrapping the independence of the U.S. in favor of a socialistic new world order; (The December 1922 issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the CFR's quarterly journal, called for an "international system" and "world government;" in 1974, one of its articles boldly suggested "an end run around national sovereignty eroding it piece by piece;" in 1988, another article sought "internationalism" at the expense of national independence. In 1944, a CFR publication denounced "the sovereignty fetish" existing in the United States; in 1959; a Council document called for "international order" where all nations are "interdependent.")
• has attracted domestic Communists to membership, (Communist Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie held CFR membership in the 1940s. After Hiss had been exposed as a Communist agent, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a CFR member publicly announced that he would never turn his back on Hiss - and he never did.)
• and repeatedly given overseas Communists a forum to dispense their deceit; (Continuing a long-standing policy, the CFR presented spokesmen at its closed meetings during 1987 and 1988 from the following Communist countries: Hungary, Poland, USSR, Bulgaria, East Germany, Mozanbique, China, Nicaragua, and Cuba.)
• has chosen for its leader one man who boasted of his long record of dealing with murderous Communist regimes (In 1982, when asked how his Chase Manhattan Bank could do business with socialist or Communist nations, then-CFR Chairman David Rockefeller stated, "We have found we can deal with just about any kind of government, provided they are orderly and responsible."); and another who publicly advocated economic policies that would destroy the free enterprise system and the sovereignty of this nation (Current CFR Chairman Peter G. Peterson served as one of two U.S. representatives on the Socialist International's Brandt Commission (1977-1980). In its 1980 report, this commission recommended international authority to regulate world commerce, international currency, a World Development Fund to finance Communist nations, and "a new international economic order." In short, the Brandt Commission's recommendations, endorsed by the CFR Chairman Peter G. Peterson, call for the end of U.S. economic and political freedom.)

The CFR currently lists approximately 2,500 persons as members. Numbered among this minuscule percentage of the U.S. population, however, are over 300 federal officials, several hundred media executives and journalists, hundreds of corporate leaders, and even America's top military officers.

Perhaps some of these individuals accepted CFR membership without full knowledge of the organization's history and subversive goals. Perhaps others joined because they are determined to create an all-powerful world government - run by them - that would supplant an independent America. Any CFR member who belongs to this latter category could not swear an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution without committing perjury. CFR members who joined the organization without complete knowledge of what it stands for ought to consider rethinking their affiliation.