Ramparts Magazine often critiqued what the editors and contributors perceived to be fascist characteristics, either implicitly or explicitly, in American imperialism and society writ large. In the spring of 1964, prior to the magazine moving its headquarters from Southern California to San Francisco, Ramparts published a symposium including two essays about the John Birch Society.

The first, “A Note on the Birch Society,” written by John Cogley, and the second, “The Catholic Church and the John Birch Society,” written by Stillwell John Connor, both indicated that the JBS, which seemed to be increasingly popular in Southern California, was a fascist organization. Cogley, who was a former editor of the Catholic journal, The Commonweal, and who lived in Rome, described the Birchers as “psychologically sick” and lacking rationality, but hoped they could be reasoned with. He also indicated that JBS was more harmful to the nation than the communists.

Cogley’s essay was followed in the spring 1964 edition of Ramparts by the article written by Connor, who a businessman and a member of the Council of the John Birch Society; this Council was a group of 26 white men who meet regularly with Robert Welch, who headed the JBS, to evaluate and advise on the Communist threat and the effectiveness of the organization in combating this so called “evil.” The society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of 12 led by Welch, a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. Welch named the new organization after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and military intelligence officer who was shot and killed by communist forces in China in August 1945, shortly after the conclusion of World War II.

Connor unwittingly wrote about Welch as if he were a cult leader and the religion was anti-communism, which both men seemed terrified of and pugnacious towards. The JBS was an especially vitriolic anti-communist organization and opposed the 1960s civil rights movement, claiming that it had Communists in important positions. The JBS also opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Rights Amendment, claiming that they were evidence of the Federal Government overstepping individual states' rights to enact civil rights laws and also evidence that communists had infiltrated the highest echelons of the American polity. The organization also subsequently advocated the impeachment of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren and was also an ardent opponent of the United Nations. Many of the organizations members also openly endorsed Barry Goldwater for President of the United States in 1964.

The focus shifted from fringe fascist groups to institutional fascism embedded in American society in the August 1965 edition of Ramparts in an essay titled “The Fictitious Freedom of the Press,” contributed by Howard Gossage, who worked at an advertising agency in San Francisco. He argued that the notion of freedom of the press was a misnomer because publication decisions were dictated by selling advertising space, which in turn determined both the quantity and often the substance of content designed to facilitate economic exchange. In other words, regardless of the ideology espoused in publications such as The National Review or Ramparts, both were ultimately designed to sell ad space to produce more magazines.

In January 1966, Ramparts published an essay titled “The Case of the Spies Who Weren't” written by Rex Stout, who was the author of The Doorbell Rang (1965). Stout’s essay rehashed the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1954, parents of two young boys who were convicted of treason for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Many, including Stout, considered the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism writ large to be snarling evidence of American fascism and the banality of evil deeply entrenched in Cold War American society.

In April 1966, Ramparts published an opinion column titled “Amerika, Amerika Uber Alles” written by Christian Geissler, in which he argued that the American power structure in the Vietnam Era was not a dissimilar brand of fascism associated with the Nazis a generation earlier. He noted the glaring irony of the Nuremberg Trials in which the ruling class of a victorious nation attempted to pass judgment on actions resulting from precisely the same motives that led the ruling class itself into power – war. The realist, Geissler wrote, “must thus conclude that the people on top help each other in the struggle against the advancement of the masses, in the struggle for the preservation of the old power structure, above and beyond Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” And it did not matter, he asserted, in the least if the rulers did it with evil intentions or because of the economic or ideological pressures of the system they created. They created it, he wrote, and that made them responsible for the consequences.

To condemn and do away with war in 1945, he explained, would have been necessary to condemn and completely change the power structure, i.e., the property relations, throughout the Western world. War will not be abolished by those for whom it benefited, Geissler concluded, in one way or another, profitable, either in the area of economic power, or in the area of spiritual and intellectual power.

The allusions to the Nazis during World War II and the American empire in Vietnam continued in the October 1966 edition of Ramparts in an editorial titled “Hitler’s Bishops.” Many Church leaders, the editors informed their Catholic readership, either openly supported or remained silent as Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in the interwar era. The editors proceeded to beseech the leaders of the American Catholic Church to publicly condemn America’s war in Vietnam, lest they be remembered in the pages of history as “Hitler's bishops’ of America.”

In October 1966, Ramparts published an excerpt from Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable (1964) titled “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann” that especially presented the point that there was a deeply embedded banality of evil in America’s Cold War militarized society. Merton’s eulogy of Eichmann continued the theme of comparing the American war in Vietnam to being symptomatic of the same disease suffered by the homicidal and genocidal Nazis. Merton, the Christian mystic and peace activist, wrote his meditation on Eichmann as a lamentation on what it meant to be sane in a world gone completely mad with nuclear weapons and war.

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial, Merton wrote, was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. He also had a profound respect for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, and a faithful officer of the state. It was, Merton noted, the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who could without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that would initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, had prepared.

In January 1967 Ramparts published an editorial that likened William Wirtz, who was the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1962 – 1969, to be a prime candidate to be a presidential candidate in George Orwell’s 1984 for his recent suggestion that military service be made compulsory for 18-year-old Americans, a notion backed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who, like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, considered himself a liberal and progressive. McNamara also proposed that the Armed Services lower mental and physical standards for acceptance into the service, which would be a compulsory profession as part of a “humanitarian” salvage system for lower-income and minority Americans. “McNamara,” the editors wrote, “termed an ‘inequity’ the prospect that these underprivileged kids might otherwise be denied the educational, moral and vocational opportunities that the Armed Forces could provide them.”

The editorial underscored how the military was becoming the de facto American jobs program. The military, in short, was one of the few avenues to social mobility for poor Americans, most especially minorities who also found in the military a path to full recognition as Americans. The military thus increasingly served as a counterrevolutionary force in American society because it increasingly lured the greatest potential revolutionaries American society had – poor minorities – into the military, which perpetuated inequality around the globe.

In January 1967, Ramparts published an essay contributed by Bill Turner titled “The Minutemen” about an organization comparable in their hatred toward and fear of communism to the John Birch Society. Turner focused especially on the Minutemen’s founder, biochemist Robert DePugh. DePugh and the Minutemen were convinced that communists would soon take over the country. They thus built an army to prepare for a counter-revolution.

In February 1968, just days after the Tet Offensive and the indictment of Dr. Benjamin Spock for conspiring to aid, abet, and counsel draft registrants to violate the Selective Service Act, Ramparts published an essay titled “The Repression at Home” as a preface to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “On Genocide.” The editors described America’s war in Vietnam as an “example,” an admonition to those who would challenge the status of American power. This admonition, the editors explained, was directed at home as well as abroad.

The charges levied against Spock and his co-conspirators, including Yale’s Chaplain, were more than a crackdown, the editors asserted; it was a provocation and, in an important sense, a test. This “test” was, they argued, designed to limit free speech. This new act of repression represented a fundamental break with previous handling of opposition to the Vietnam War—and it foreboded a greater desperation. Up to 1968, the government had sought, as far as possible, to trivialize dissent rather than to repress the anti-war movement because the government had been terribly anxious to avoid the appearance of a national crackdown, of hysteria, of McCarthyism. It has been careful because, aside from its precarious international image, it did not want to consolidate anti-war sentiment around a decisive case, and it did not want to stimulate the often-sleepy forces of civil libertarian liberalism into support for militant opposition to the war.

The Spock case would, the editors concluded, undoubtedly be one of the most important political trials in American history. “If these five men are conspirators,” the editors wrote, “then we must become a nation of conspirators. If we do not stand with them, it is impossible to see where the repression at home and the oppression abroad will stop.”

This editorial was followed some pages later by Carl Oglesby’s description of the conception of Sartre’s essay “On Genocide.” Oglesby, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society and author of Containment and Change (1967), was also a member of the International War Crimes Tribunal, which was called by Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell to consider the criminality and amorality of U.S. actions in Vietnam. Among the charges taken up by the Tribunal was genocide.

Genocide, Oglesby explained, presented itself as the only possible reaction to the rising of a whole people against its oppressors. The American government was, he explained, guilty of having preferred a policy of war and aggression aimed at total genocide to a policy of peace, the only policy that could, he asserted, really replace the former. A policy of peace would, he explained, necessarily have required a reconsideration of the objectives imposed by the large imperialist companies through the intermediary of their pressure groups. The ties of the “One World,” on which the United States hoped to impose its hegemony, had grown tighter and tighter in the 1960s.

For this reason, Oglesby asserted, the genocide in Vietnam was conceived as an answer to people's war and perpetrated in Vietnam not against the Vietnamese alone, but against humanity. The Vietnamese, he noted, fought for all men and the American forces against all… And not only because genocide would be a crime universally condemned by international law, but because little by little the whole human race was being subjected to this genocidal blackmail piled on top of atomic blackmail, that was, to absolute, total war… The group which the United States wanted to intimidate and terrorize by way of the Vietnamese nation was, he concluded, the “human group in its entirety.”

In May 1972, Ramparts published a eulogy to George Lester Jackson titled “Deaths I Have Known,” contributed by Jose Yglesias, who was a journalist and author of The Truth About Them: Pioneers of Modern U.S. Literature (1971). Jackson was an African-American activist and author. While serving a sentence for armed robbery in 1961, he became involved in revolutionary activity and co-founded the Maoist-Marxist Black Guerrilla Family. In 1970, he was charged, along with two other Soledad Brothers, with the murder of prison guard John Vincent Mills in the aftermath of a prison fight. The same year, he published Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, which was a combination of autobiography and manifesto addressed to a black American audience.

The book became a best-seller and earned Jackson personal fame. In 1971, he took several guards and two inmates hostage in a bid to escape from San Quentin Prison. However, the incident ended with Jackson being shot and killed by a guard, in addition to the deaths of five hostages. Yglesias contextualized Jackson’s death into a larger twentieth-century history of what he perceived to be the politically motivated murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. All these deaths, Yglesias indicated, were evidence of American fascism.

In August 1973, Ramparts published an essay titled “The Second Frame-up of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” which was a review of Louis Nizer’s recently published The Implosion Conspiracy (1973), contributed by Walter Schneir, who was a co-author of Invitation to an Inquest (1965). The Implosion Conspiracy did not address itself to the guilt or innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were tried, convicted, and executed for treason in 1954 for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Russians. He instead raised an essential legal question: Was there sufficient evidence for the jury to find the Rosenberg’s guilty? Nizer argued that there was.

Schneir, whose Invitation to Inquest, was a kind of defense of the Rosenbergs, argued that Nizer freely edited and condensed trial testimony, without indicating deletions, and so made the stories of prosecution witnesses appear far more lucid and coherent than they actually were in real time. In 1983, the updated and expanded edition of Invitation to an Inquest was published. It contained new chapters based on some 200,000 pages of FBI and other government documents relating to the Rosenberg-Sobell case. These documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by means of an eight-year-long legal battle waged—against the determined opposition of the FBI—by attorney Marshall Perlin on behalf of the Rosenbergs’ adult sons, both of whom were active in the New Left.

The bureau was still withholding tens of thousands of files, and a substantial proportion of those released were heavily censored. Clearly, in working with such rich yet problematic source material, questions of accuracy and authenticity were bound to arise, and some honest differences of interpretation between researchers would hardly be surprising. In other words, despite new evidence that seemed to suggest the Rosenbergs were in fact Soviet spies, the question of their guilt or innocence remained shrouded in mystery. One’s opinion on their innocence or guilt often depended on whether one voted Republican or Democrat.

In November 1973, Ramparts published a profile titled “The Sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” contributed by Jonah Raskin, who was the author of The Mythology of Imperialism: A Revolutionary Critique of British Literature and Society in the Modern Age (1971). Julius and Ethel’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, were active members of the New Left and dedicated their lives to defending the innocence of their parents. They were orphaned by the executions and were not adopted by any relatives, many of whom felt compelled to change their names so as not to have to bear the burden of that Scarlet Letter attached to them in an age of Cold War hysteria towards communism.

A high school teacher, poet, songwriter, and social activist, Abel Meeropol, and his wife, Anne, finally adopted the Rosenberg boys. After Martin Sobell’s 2008 confession, the Rosenberg boys reluctantly acknowledged that their father had been involved in espionage, but asserted that whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was, they reminded critics, riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence in order to place leverage on her husband who the government was desperate to get a confession from; and neither deserved the death penalty. Michael and Robert co-wrote a book about their lives and their parents' lives, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975). Robert also wrote a memoir, An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey (2003). The Rosenberg sons viewed the execution of their parents as evidence of a brand of American fascism in which the nation was willing to use the legal system to destroy political opposition to capitalism.

In May 1975, the Vietnam War was winding down. But the militarization of the U.S. was still in its infancy. That month,h Ramparts published an essay titled “The Great American Doom Machine” written by Leonard Rodberg, who was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He depicted the militarization of the U.S. to be fueled primarily by the Pentagon, which advocated the use of nuclear weapons, as did Robert McNamara, who believed that principal military objectives should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces by any means necessary, even if it meant civilians would be collateral damage in that process. In other words, the death of civilians was, in McNamara’s mind, a necessary evil in terms of winning the quickest military victory possible.

Economist James Schlesinger, who had recently been appointed as President Richard Nixon’s new Secretary of Defense, quickly discovered, Rodberg wrote, that the “options” that included nuking civilians which McNamara tried to build into America's nuclear strategy, in order to give the President some measure of “control” over the missiles and nuclear-armed bombers, had disappeared during Melvin Laird's reign as Secretary of State. Laird had turned most of the planning functions back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they had simply reverted to their preferred strategy -- the full unleashing of the entire nuclear arsenal in time of war, what was fondly called, in the Fifties, the “wargasm strategy.” The Joint Chiefs promptly unleashed a flurry of requests for new weapons to implement the new options—more accurate guidance systems, more powerful nuclear warheads, and at least 600 more missiles.

The Pentagon's difficulties in learning what new technologies the Russians were developing served as a pretext for moving into the next stage of the arms race. What the Pentagon really desired, Rodberg wrote, was the ability to destroy underground missile silos with a single ICBM warhead. Once it had such high-precision warheads, the U.S. would then be able to destroy a land-based missile force, such as that the Russians relied on, before it could be launched. It would have, in other words, the capacity for nuclear surprise attack. Increasing talk of war-fighting intensified the ever-present pressures from the military services for fuzzing the line between nuclear and conventional weapons and for the use of nuclear weapons in situations where, until the 1970s, civilian leaders would have resisted their use.

During the Vietnam War, Rodberg noted, there were repeated suggestions from high military officers, and from some of their civilian technical advisors, that nuclear weapons be used to end the war sooner, eliminate North Vietnam's war-making capacity, clear away jungle foliage, or achieve some other technological quick-fix. “Fortunately,” Rodberg wrote, “these proposals were dismissed.” Rodberg depicted the militarization of the U.S. since World War II as both a symptom and disease of a brand of fascism, part and parcel of designing a society with the Armed Forces as the preeminent cultural institution because hired killers ultimately dictated the parameters of the culture’s values and morals, or lack thereof. America had, in short, grown so consumed with winning and losing wars that right and wrong and moral and amorality increasingly lost all meaning outside of a militarized context.

In June 1974, Ramparts published an essay titled “General Motors and the Nazis” written by Bradford Snell, who was assistant counsel to the Senate Monopoly and Anti-Trust Subcommittee. His essay, which was financed by the Stern Fund, was an excerpt from his report to the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. He noted that during the OPEC embargo, the major international oil companies had a curious dual role to play: 1. as domestic sellers of petroleum products, they were charged with maximizing supplies of crude oil to the U.S.; 2. as agents of the oil-producing countries, they were charged with enforcing the cut-off of those same supplies. The seeming paradox created new political urgency regarding the question of whether multinational corporations should be entrusted with such vital matters as assuring the availability of energy. However, Snell argued, the problems posed by multi-nationalism were not entirely new.

The astoundingly cynical functioning of America's automobile giants during World War II was, he argued, particularly illuminating. He employed recently declassified military and diplomatic source materials to document the insidious extent of wartime double-dealing, especially on the part of General Motors. Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford both became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well as for the forces of democracy during the 1930s. “Had the Nazis won,” Snell wrote, “General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost, these companies were able to reemerge impeccably American.”

In either case, “the viability of these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved.” He concluded by elaborating yet another paradox of the opportunistic, amoral, and fascistic nature of multinational corporations who cared about nothing but profits: the inevitable conflict of loyalties and potential for abuse inherent in such a corporate posture seemed to Snell to suggest that in the case of powerful concentrated industries engaged in war-convertible production, multinational expansion might likely adversely affect America's legitimate interest in national security.

Time and again, Ramparts depicted fascism as entrenched in Cold War American society. But there was also a great deal of room for dissidents to demand basic human rights. In other words, a tension between the freedom, liberty, justice, and equality promised in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, in contrast to the U.S. being a bastion of fascist capitalist ideology, shaped American identity and fueled the social conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s.