Attack Soviet Russia Now

Carl Magnus Torsten Armfelt, the son of Count and Countess Armfelt of Finland and Sweden, was an American citizen living in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was picked up by military officers the following day and interned for 20 months. After Armfelt and several other detainees filed a lawsuit in 1946, Secretary of War Robert S. Patterson insisted that the 617 interned Hawaiian residents were held because the evidence of their disloyalty made them a security risk.

Far from being detained on the erroneous assumption that he was an enemy alien, said Patterson, Armfelt was interned on the basis of FBI information that he was "a fanatical follower of Hitler, that he was outspokenly contemptuous of the principles of democracy and of the president and constitution of the United States, and that he was a bitter anti-Semitic, an advocate of Nazism in this country, an intimate of Axis diplomats and their families, and a member of the Swedish Nazi party."

In 1954, the man who hated democracy struck a pose as its defender. He founded the Patrick Henry Congress as a pressure group to build public support for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. The membership dues were $1 a month after an initial $5 join-up fee, but subscriptions seem to have been underwhelming: Armfelt filed for bankruptcy in 1955. The country's elected leaders formally rejected the possibility of a first-strike on the U.S.S.R., though recently-declassified documents make it clear that many generals were highly sympathetic to the arguments put forth in this pamphlet. A preemptive strike on Russia and/or China was secretly on the table throughout the late '40s and '50s.

Rare Cold War ephemera with just one OCLC listing.