Free Speech

Hate-Bacon Holocaust: Where Jews Lead, Muslims Follow

In Britain today, it takes a heart of stone to read about the suffering of Jewish students without laughing. The Jewish Chronicle has just published “Exclusive research” showing a “shocking volume of assaults, abuse and threats” suffered by Jews at British universities. Among the incidents that the Chronicle deems worthy of note are that “A student at Swansea University found bacon taped to her door in university halls in 2022” and that “At Cambridge University, a student said during one dinner, a peer ‘asked me to turn to the side so that he could gauge the size of my nose’.”

Senior Sacred Minority

I’m cherry-picking the hate-bacon and nose-gauging, of course, but nowhere does the article mention murder, rape or serious injury. Jewish students are not suffering a fraction of what White children have suffered in places like Glasgow, Southport and Rotherham. Nor does the article admit that Jews have engineered their own misfortune. Jewish students in Britain are being hate-baconed and nose-gauged by non-Whites and their allies because of Israel’s oppression of non-White Palestinians. And who was responsible for non-White immigration from the Third World, which the White majority always opposed and never voted for? It was Jews, of course. Who created minority worship, which was intended to demonize the White majority and sacralize minorities? It was Jews, of course, wanting to install themselves as Senior Sacred Minority.

How to end anti-Semitism for ever

Alas for Jews, the non-Whites whom they fondly regarded as “natural allies” haven’t accepted their Jew-assigned role. As I pointed out at the Occidental Observer in 2019, Muslims and other non-Whites regard Jews as “Hyper-Whites with Hyper-Privilege” and not as a fellow persecuted minority. On the contrary, they regard Jews as arch persecutors. Given the amount of high explosive recently rained by Israel on the Gaza Strip, it’s easy to see their point. I don’t myself agree with those who accuse Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, whom I’d rank with Pakistanis as societal pathogens. But I again find it amusing that Jews are wailing about the accusation. Who was it first used noisy accusations of genocide to gain political advantage and claim moral superiority? It was the Jews again. Their solipsism and arrogance blinded them to the obvious possibility that their own self-serving tactics would be taken up and used against them. That possibility has been realized: Muslims and other non-Whites have turned out not to be “natural allies” of Jews but natural enemies. One insightful — and honest — Jew wouldn’t have been surprised by this. The late Jonathan Sacks, once Britain’s Chief Rabbi, admitted in 2007 that Jews were the inventors of “identity politics” and founders of the Victimhood Olympics:

Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy

Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and threatens liberal democracy, Britain’s top Jewish official warned in extracts from [a recently published] book … Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an attempt to affirm Britain’s diverse communities and make ethnic and religious minorities more appreciated and respected. But in his book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society, he said the movement had run its course. “Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation,” Sacks wrote in his book, an extract of which was published in the Times of London.

“Liberal democracy is in danger,” Sacks said, adding later: “The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear.” Sacks said Britain’s politics had been poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been “inexorably divisive.” “A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others,” he said. In an interview with the Times, Sacks said he wanted his book to be “politically incorrect in the highest order.” (Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy, The Jerusalem Post, 20th October 2007; emphasis added)

“We’re disloyal to real, pure, white America”

That’s why I have no sympathy for Jewish students enduring hate-bacon attacks at Swansea and nose-gauging requests at Cambridge. Jews are not suffering a fraction of what Whites have suffered for decades at the hands of Muslims, Blacks and other non-Whites imported by our treacherous elite under Jewish orders and with full Jewish approval. The minor Jewish suffering bewailed by the Jewish Chronicle is entirely their own fault. So is the minor Jewish suffering bewailed in America. As the Horus Substack notes, the Jewish writer Bari Weiss has openly admitted the central role of Jews in the war on Whites and the West: “The far right says we are the greatest trick the devil has ever played. We appear to be white people. We look like we’re in the majority, we’re incredibly successful, but in fact … we’re disloyal to real, pure, white America. And in fact, we’re loyal to Black people and brown people and Muslims and immigrants.”

Semitic synergy: how Jews use and abuse Muslims to benefit themselves

But somehow killer quotes like that always escape the notice of the Semito-sycophants who rush to the defence of Jews after their non-White pets turn on them. The same Semito-sycophants ignore the central role of Jews in the war on free speech. For example, mainstream conservatives and libertarians in Britain have recently condemned Labour’s plans to impose an official government definition of “Islamophobia.” The conservative political scientist Matt Goodwin has said that “Labour’s crackdown on ‘Islamophobia’ is yet another crackdown on free speech.” He’s right. The Trotskyist libertarians at Spiked Online have warned that “New rules on ‘Islamophobia’ would chill discussion about anything even tangentially related to Islam.” They’re right too. And both Goodwin and Spiked describe how the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims first proposed the definition in 2019. But neither Goodwin nor Spiked mention a killer quote by the homosexual Labour MP Wes Streeting, who co-chaired the APPG on British Muslims. Streeting proclaimed that the APPG’s definition of Islamophobia was “presented within a framework resembling the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.”

Parallel pathologies

You can trust Streeting on that, because he was also co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism. I described Streeting’s labours for Jews and their natural allies in my article “Free Speech Must Die!,” where I explored the way Jews have guided Muslims in their joint campaign to censor and silence Whites. After all, it’s very easy to find proof of that. But Britain’s noisy mainstream defenders of free speech have always been silent about who guides Muslims. In other words, those staunch opponents of censorship have censored themselves. So let’s look more closely at what they refuse to discuss, namely, the leading Jewish role in the war on free speech. The University of Bradford has very helpfully put “Definitions of Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” on the same page at its website, drawn respectively from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Anti-Semitism and the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Working Definition of Islamophobia. Even the most myopic mainstream conservatives and libertarians will see how the deplorably vague and elastic definition of Islamophobia, which they loudly condemn, was directly modelled on the deplorably vague and elastic definition of anti-Semitism, which they either support or keep quiet about. To make the parallels even more clearer, I’ve inter-woven examples of the hate-speak and hate-think that Jews and Muslims say the government must crush:

  • Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
  • Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims as such, or of Muslims as a collective group, such as, especially but not exclusively, conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics, government or other societal institutions; the myth of Muslim identity having a unique propensity for terrorism, and claims of a demographic ‘threat’ posed by Muslims or of a ‘Muslim takeover’.
  • Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
  • Accusing Muslims as a group of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Muslim person or group of Muslim individuals, or even for acts committed by non-Muslims.
  • Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
  • Accusing Muslims as a group, or Muslim majority states, of inventing or exaggerating Islamophobia, ethnic cleansing or genocide perpetrated against Muslims.
  • Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
  • Accusing Muslim citizens of being more loyal to the ‘Ummah’ (transnational Muslim community) or to their countries of origin, or to the alleged priorities of Muslims worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.
  • Denying Muslim populations the right to self-determination e.g., by claiming that the existence of an independent Palestine or Kashmir is a terrorist endeavour.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of Muslims behaviours that are not expected or demanded of any other groups in society, e.g. loyalty tests.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic Islamophobia (e.g. Muhammed being a paedophile, claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating minority groups under their rule) to characterize Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’, inherently violent or incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies.
  • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
  • Holding Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of any Muslim majority state, whether secular or constitutionally Islamic. (“Definitions of Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” at Bradford University)

But Bradford University doesn’t mention two inconvenient facts: that Jews in Britain support Israel’s military massacre-machine; and that Muslims are now the chief anti-Semites in Britain. Like the rest of our current political and academic elite, the university wants to pretend that Jews and Muslims are united in powerless victimhood, both groups suffering from the cruel and irrational hate of the White majority. The current elite are very anxious to stop thought-crime against Jews and Muslims, but have no concern whatsoever about stopping flesh-crime against Whites.

Bradford University supplies another perfect example of that, because it does nothing to address horrific misogyny and patriarchy on its own doorstep. Like the town of Rotherham, the city of Bradford is in Yorkshire. The Muslim rape-gangs that made Rotherham infamous around the world have done much worse in Bradford. After all, Bradford is a much bigger place and has many more Muslims. The Labour party has controlled both Bradford and Rotherham for decades, collaborating with the rape-gangs and betraying the White working-class whom the party was founded to defend.

The great David Irving speaks the truth about World War Two

Now Labour want to expand their betrayal by imposing a definition of Islamophobia that will further censor discussion of Muslim pathologies. But no conservatives and libertarians in the mainstream will admit the obvious: that Jews are responsible for the presence of Muslims in Britain, the proliferation of Muslim pathologies, and the free-speech-chilling definition of Islamophobia.

Nor will those conservatives and libertarians admit that Jews have led the way for Muslims in another front of the war on Whites and the West.

The rape and sexual enslavement of White women by Muslims were long preceded by the White Slave Trade, which Jews created before the Second World War, and by the pornography industry, which Jews created after the Second World War for the same reason: to turn shiksas into shekels. Jews and Muslims are homies in hate. But while they both claim to suffer hate from Whites, they’re both lying. What really unites them is that they both direct hate at Whites. That’s why neither Jews nor their Muslim bio-weapons belong in the West. As a wise man once said: the world is divided into those who know who opened the gates of Toledo and those who don’t.

The Murder of VDare

This is horrifically sad, not only because our side has lost a principal asset, but also because of the financial and personal effects on the Brimelows and the people who will lose their jobs. As Peter says, they likely be blackballed in the future. We can only hope that free speech returns to America someday.

PETER BRIMELOW: Why We’ve Suspended VDARE and I’ve Resigned After 25 Years pic.twitter.com/tnWSz3L0xs

— VDARE (@vdare) July 23, 2024

Reflecting on this obscene turn of events, Sam Dickson posted this poem by James Russell Lowell on an email list.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,

Whiffing with the Bases Loaded: The Supreme Court Wrongly Decides Murthy v. Missouri

But sometimes the Court gets it wrong.  In its recent (June 28, 2024) decision in Murthy, et al.  v. Missouri, et al., the Court lapsed badly from its long traditions of protecting dissident speech.

As I noted in an earlier article on the Free Expression Foundation website (February 5, 2023) about the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, the case is extraordinary not only for the importance of the issues it presents but because it involved opposing parties roughly equal in legal resources, i.e., the plaintiffs included the Attorney Generals of two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and the defendants were officials of the federal government. This contrasts strongly with the usual cases involving dissident speech, in which the proponent of the dissident speech is often indigent while the opponents are governments or well-funded private organizations conducting lawfare campaigns.

As to the gravity of the issues the case presented — Justice Alito in his dissent (joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch) aptly wrote that “this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”  A little context puts these momentous issues into stark relief.

A fundamental principal applicable to First Amendment jurisprudence is that the First Amendment restrains only state actors – i.e., governmental entities – and not private actors, such as social media companies, e.g., Facebook (which was at the center of the issues in the Missouri case).  Thus Facebook and other social media companies, despite their enormous power over the boundaries and content of public debate, have always successfully argued that they are free to censor and limit as they see fit.  But what if a governmental entity – the Biden administration in the Missouri case – bullied and threatened the private entity – Facebook in the Missouri case – with the aim and successful result of coercing the private entity to comply with the Biden administration’s censorship demands?  This was the central question presented in the Missouri case.

Justice Alito in his dissent described numerous concrete instances of the Biden administration’s tactics, which he convincingly argued crossed the line from mere permissible Bully Pulpit advocacy by the President and his staff into unconstitutional threats and coercion. First, however, Justice Alito explained why the administration had the power to, as he expressed it, coerce Facebook into the role of “a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.”  Justice Alito wrote:

[I]internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business.  But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . . . which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.  They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests. For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability.

Justice Alito then spelled out, among many other instances in the administration’s “far-reaching . . .  censorship campaign,” the following conduct by high-ranking government officials, gleaned from the extensive discovery taken in the case:

  • In March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the White House Director of Digital Strategy, emailed Facebook about a report in the Washington Post that Facebook’s rules permitted some content questioning COVID-19’s severity and the efficacy of vaccines to circulate. Flaherty noted that the White House was “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” and demanded to know how Facebook was trying to solve the problem. In his words, “we want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on.” Facebook responded apologetically to this and other missives. It acknowledged that “[w]e obviously have work to do to gain your trust.”
  • In April 2021, Flaherty again demanded information on the “actions and changes” Facebook was taking “to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” To emphasize his urgency, Flaherty likened COVID–19 misinformation to misinformation that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Facebook, he charged, had helped to “increase skepticism” of the 2020 election, and he claimed that “an insurrection . . . was plotted, in large part, on your platform.”  He added: “I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” Facebook was surprised by these remarks because it “thought we were doing a better job” communicating with the White House, but it promised to “more clearly respon[d]” in the future.

Rob Flaherty

  • A few weeks later, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked at a press conference about Facebook’s decision to keep former President Donald Trump off the platform. Psaki deflected that question but took the opportunity to call on platforms like Facebook to “‘stop amplifying untrustworthy content . . . , especially related to COVID–19, vaccinations, and elections.’”   In the same breath, Psaki reminded the platforms that President Biden “‘supports . . . a robust anti-trust program.’”
  • About this time, Flaherty also forwarded to Facebook a “COVID–19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief ” that had been drafted by outside researchers and was “informing thinking” in the White House on what Facebook’s policies should be. This document recommended that Facebook strengthen its efforts against misinformation by adoption of “progressively severe penalties” for accounts that repeatedly posted misinformation, and it proposed that Facebook make it harder for users to find “anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant propaganda” from other users. Facebook declined to adopt some of these suggestions immediately, but it did “se[t] up more dedicated monitoring for [COVID] vaccine content” and adopted a policy of “stronger demotions [for] a broader set of content.”
  • The White House responded with more questions. Acknowledging that he sounded “like a broken record,” Flaherty interrogated Facebook about “how much content is being demoted, and how effective [Facebook was] at mitigating reach, and how quickly.” Later, Flaherty chastised Facebook for failing to prevent some vaccine-hesitant content from showing up through the platform’s search function. “‘[R]emoving bad information from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action,” he said. “If you’re not getting that right, it raises even more questions about the higher bar stuff.” A few weeks after this latest round of haranguing, Facebook expanded penalties for individual Facebook accounts that repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers deemed misinformation; henceforth, all of those individuals’ posts would show up less frequently in their friends’ news feeds.
  • Facebook subsequently told the press it had partnered with the White House to counter misinformation and had “removed accounts that repeatedly break the rules” and “more than 18 million pieces of COVID misinformation.” But at another press briefing the next day, Psaki said these efforts were “[c]learly not” sufficient and expressed confidence that Facebook would “make decisions about additional steps they can take.”  That same day, President Biden told reporters that social media platforms were “‘killing people’” by allowing COVID related misinformation to circulate.  A day later, Psaki said the White House was “reviewing” whether Section 230 should be amended to remove the Social Media platforms’ immunity to civil suits.

Justice Alito and his fellow dissenters thus made a compelling case that the Biden administration has been strong-arming Facebook into censoring disfavored views on vaccination and other issues in accordance with the White House’s dictates, a set of facts that clearly implicates First Amendment issues. The other six justices, however, in an opinion written by Justice Barrett, sidestepped these uncomfortable facts by invoking the doctrine of standing.  Standing is a rather esoteric doctrine that courts invoke when they conclude for various reasons that the plaintiffs who have brought the suit are not the proper plaintiffs to litigate it.  One of the required elements of standing is “traceability,” i.e.,  the plaintiffs must show that they incurred concrete and redressable harm that was traceable to the defendants’ conduct.  In the Missouri case, the majority, through Justice Barrett, held there was a break in the chain of traceability because Facebook, so they asserted, independently made its decisions about censoring and consequently the White House could not be held responsible for them. For the reasons previously discussed, however, this assertion seems deeply flawed, given that Facebook needed to worry about losing its Section 230 immunity and dealing with antitrust suits if it became too uncooperative with the White House. But on this basis the Court’s majority ruled in favor of the Biden administration.

So where do we stand now? A few points:

  1. Despite its victory in this litigation, I suspect the Biden administration is a little chastened by having its clandestine coercions brought into public view.  Perhaps it will back off a little.  But probably not much and not for long.
  2.  We should keep in mind that although the Missouri case focused on disfavored views about COVID vaccines, precisely the same concerns apply as to other disfavored topics, such as “hate speech,” Israel’s and America’s conduct with regard to Gaza, the prosecution of the January 6 Defendants, and a host of others. We should have no doubt that on these topics as well the White House has pressured and continues to pressure social media to suppress disfavored opinions.
  3.  What would be the effect of the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024? Certainly Trump, with his repeated “fake news” accusations, should not expect much cooperation from the likes of Facebook and other social media.  On the other hand, Trump is no stranger to making threats and demanding conformity to his views.
  4.  One hopes that Elon Musk and X are not as obsequious to government demands as Facebook has proved to be.

In summary, the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to vindicate, dramatically and with far-reaching consequences, the Court’s long tradition of protecting disfavored speech from an overreaching government.  Had Justice Alito’s incisive dissent become the majority opinion, it would have been a watershed victory for civil liberties. It was not to be.

Let me nonetheless end on a positive note. The vast document discovery in the Missouri case stripped away the camouflage surrounding the social media / government connections to reveal what many of us had long assumed – that high-ranking government officials have been aggressively pressuring social media to censor dissident viewpoints.  The plaintiffs’ theory of their case in the Missouri litigation was based on the First Amendment; regrettably, this theory failed.  But the government’s threatening communications with social media may have done more than violate the First Amendment;  if false, they may have been defamatory or tortious.  A plaintiff injured by government-engineered censorship on social media, accordingly, may have greater success based on common law tort actions than on the First Amendment.

Reposted from the Free Expression Foundation with permission.

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Champions of Judea: On the supplanting of British foreign policy

Churchill’s anti-German beliefs were as old as his adoration of what he called the “higher grade race”. He helped cause the Great War and was thrilled by it. After Versailles, he traduced Weimar governments less frequently than he had those of the German Empire, but on occasions in the 1920s still spoke of Germany as a threat.1 On March 23rd 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Churchill castigated the new Germany in Parliament for its “ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities [and] the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race”.2 He asserted that “The Nazis inculcate a form of blood lust in their children… without parallel… since barbarian and pagan times.”3

Portraying Germany as a military threat was, at that time, partly just a way for an unprincipled politician to attack Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister who, though sympathetic to the Soviets, was for disarmament to facilitate peace.4 Churchill, though, was unprincipled in a consistently anti-German direction. Had he ‘warned’ about Stalin the way he did about Hitler, Churchill’s post-war reputation as the politician who ‘saw the danger’ could have been twice as great. He had been staunchly anti-communist since 1917, and until 1930 or later, “His posture toward the Soviet Union was one of consistent abhorrence.”5 Yet as the Soviet Union proceeded to amass the largest armed forces in history, Churchill does not appear to have investigated the red threat at all.6 By 1935 he was scheming with the Soviet ambassador against the British government. By the summer of 1940 he had condoned the Soviet annexation of several countries. The Soviet regime, without war as extenuation, had by 1935 already caused civilian ruin and death on a scale Hitler’s regime would never match, with immense horrors still to be inflicted. Evidently neither Churchill nor anyone else lauded for their prescience in regard to Germany had any sincere objection to dictatorships that callously maltreated civilians and used vast forces to menace their neighbours, and any historical work implying that they did must be false and exculpatory.

Jewish foreign policy

As though at the same prompting, Churchill began to campaign against Germany simultaneously with an international alliance of Jewish interests organised and led publicly by Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer from the USA [and promoter of Christian Zionism]. Untermyer launched a boycott which the Daily Express referred to on March 24th 1933 as a ‘Judean declaration of war against Germany’.7 ‘War’ was scarcely an exaggeration, as Zbyněk Vydra describes: “The main goal was terminating Jewish persecution by overthrowing Hitler and the boycott was meant to be one of the means of bringing Germany down on its knees.”8 In Untermyer’s words, the aim of his “purely defensive economic boycott” was to “undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.”9 Tolernce of their “very existence” might be resumed once they clearly signalled their compliance. At least as early as May 1933, while Soviet collectivisation killed millions, Untermyer declared that Hitler’s government was carrying out a “cruel campaign of extermination”. His accusations were repeated in private correspondence as well as in speeches, newspaper articles and open letters. He specified in 1934 that not mere expulsion from Germany but the death of all Jews “by murder, suicide or starvation” was Hitler’s “openly avowed official policy and boasted purpose”. To the suggestion of verifying whereof he spoke, Untermyer replied “I have no intention of going to see Hitler, although asked by his friends to do so.”10 Churchill similarly spoke only about Hitler, never to him. Untermyer happily visited the Soviet Union during the Great Terror; Churchill did so in secret during the war.

In Britain, a boycott of trade with German firms was begun in the East End of London by Jews descended of immigrants from the Russian Empire. Though intimidation was employed to some effect, this effort alone could not force the hand of the whole British population. Regime change could more likely be achieved by compelling nation-states to act against Germany regardless of popular wishes, and of that aim Untermyer’s international campaign stood a better chance. He first launched the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights, but was persuaded later in 1933 to change the name to the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights in order to attract non-Jewish support. According to Richard Hawkins, “In early November 1934, the NALCHR announced that a world conference would begin on November 25 in London. Its aim was to intensify and coordinate the boycott of Germany.” As Hawkins describes, the World Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council to Champion Human Rights (WNSANCHR) was established as a result.

“The conference also resulted in the establishment of a British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council (BNSANC) with Sir Walter Citrine, the general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, as president … The activities of the BNSANC appear to have gone largely unreported apart from a successful demonstration of as many as twenty thousand and a meeting in London’s Hyde Park joined by many thousands more on October 27, 1935. It was addressed by prominent British politicians and academics from across the political spectrum including Eleanor Rathbone MP, Clement Attlee MP… Citrine, Professor JBS Haldane and Sylvia Pankhurst.”

Hawkins must imagine the political spectrum to run only from socialists to communists, but anyway the Council would soon become remarkably non-sectarian in that regard. Though he says they went largely unreported, Hawkins himself mentions that the state-controlled BBC broadcast the Council’s addresses.11

The burgeoning influence, assisted by the BBC, of socialists like Attlee and Haldane caused dread to British conservatives including Harold Harmsworth, the first Viscount Rothermere, who owned newspapers including the popular Daily Mail and who had opposed universal suffrage and the growth of the Labour Party.12 Rothermere supported revision of the treaties imposed on Germany and the other defeated states after the Great War. He was also sympathetic to Benito Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists for their fierce opposition to the many attempts at communist revolution in Italy and Germany. In January 1934, he began supporting the British Union of Fascists in Mail editorials. Rothermere was particularly alarmed at Stafford Cripps’ communist-friendly Socialist League, which campaigned for Labour’s next government to grant itself the power to rule by decree and prohibit all opposition.13 With the Socialist League intact and growing, Rothermere nevertheless ceased to support the BUF in July 1934. According to Paul Briscoe, “Jewish directors of Unilever … decided to present … Lord Rothermere, with an ultimatum: if he did not stop backing Mosley, they and their friends would stop placing advertisements in his papers. Rothermere gave in.”14 In November 1933, Untermyer had written that “A properly carried out boycott will cause Germany´s economic collapse within a year.” Shortly after, Pinchas Horowitz, a prominent member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, wrote that “Once the sixteen million Jews inhabiting the world stop buying German goods, they will represent a power which no country will be able to ignore.”15 Presumably, as Jews were relatively small in number and spread across many countries, neither Untermyer nor Horowitz seriously estimated their power as consumers so highly; the power which no country would be able to ignore more likely referred to the ability to coerce pezzonovantes like Rothermere to help ensure that Britain and other powerful states would prioritise international Jewish interests over those of their own people. Mosley, who strove to prevent war, would never have been anything other than a hindrance to “causing Germany’s economic collapse”.

Pinchas Horowitz was also a leading member of the Jewish Representative Council for the Boycott of German Goods and Services (JRC), founded in November 1933. The JRC was separate from the BoD though they had much commonality in membership. Neville Laski, the Board’s president, refused the JRC’s demands to involve his organisation officially in the Jewish boycott, arguing that such a move would likely provoke Hitler’s government to take repressive measures against Jews in Germany.16 This was consistent with the cautious stance taken by the German equivalent of the Board, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith.17 Whatever Untermyer said about “terminating Jewish persecution”, he and associates like Rabbi Stephen Wise led the faction prepared to aggravate such persecution in pursuit of “overthrowing Hitler”. As Zionists, they likely found provocations of Hitler desirable. Certainly Untermyer seemed to regard his Jewish opponents in America with contempt, saying in December 1937:

“The wave of world-wide anti-Semitism, led and encouraged by Germany, that is inundating our country should serve only to make us more race conscious, tie us closer together and confirm us in our determination to combat and overcome by every means in our power the vast propaganda of this world-bully and braggart and the forces of evil that inspire it. There are still too many turn-coats, hyphenated Jews and apostates in our ranks. The sooner we expose them and rout them out, the better it will be for our welfare and self-respect. They are an undiluted liability.”18

Neville Laski’s reticence toward the overt participation of the Board of Deputies in Untermyer’s boycott also derived from the value he placed on the Board’s close relations with the British government and civil service. The historians who have written on the boycott mostly treat it as a failure or a mistake the Board’s declining to join officially (though individual members were free to participate), but good relations with the likes of Robert Vansittart, the acutely anti-German head of the Foreign Office, were arguably more valuable. According to Laski, at a meeting in October 1934, Vansittart, referring to Untermyer and the American Jewish Congress (AJC), said that

the aggressively Jewish, flamboyant and narrow character of the anti-German propaganda carried on by certain Jewish quarters in America was having results which were very nearly provocation of anti-semitism on a large scale… He said that he approved of the use of an economic weapon against Germany, but he did not approve of a flamboyant user of such a weapon.19

Vansittart thus advised his allies on public relations, the better to achieve their shared aims. In 1936, as the World Jewish Congress was being founded (mainly by AJC members at first) with aims including “to coordinate the global economic boycott of Germany”, Laski, “who had originally been cautious, changed his opinion within a single month towards a complete refusal and did his best to prevent participation in the WJC.” According to Vydra, the prevailing view among the Board of Deputies was that “the Congress would strengthen the boycott movement, but the BoD´s participation would lead to the loss of influence on the British government.”20 Most historians are militantly incurious about how the Board, representing less than half a percent of the British population, came to have such influence.

Jewish domestic policy

Vydra remarks that “[t]he Jewish boycott of Germany was an international activity and can be understood as a type of Jewish foreign policy.”21 Gentile foreign policy was found wanting. Intercession (stadlanut) had been enacted by the Russo-Jewish Committee and Lord Rothschild since the 1880s. The Jewish elite in Britain had also founded the Conjoint Committee for such work. While men like Vansittart and Churchill worked to align British foreign policy with “Jewish foreign policy”, their colleagues did likewise in domestic matters, virtually without resistance. The British Union of Fascists, however unsuited to the role, appears to have been the only vehicle of any size for opposing the usurpation, and thus was targeted for violent suppression. On 4th October 1936, the BUF staged a lawful, police-escorted demonstration through several sites in East London, an area in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had concentrated, in which the unofficial, militant boycott of Germany had begun and in which British people were confronted by immigrant hostility exemplified by the violent crime operation led by Jacob Comacho (alias Jack Comer or Spot). As the police escort attempted to clear illegal blockades in Aldgate, they were assaulted by masses of armed Jews, Irish and communists. Comacho and his associates were leading figures in the assault. Jews organised under the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism. The communists were mainly from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which took orders from the Soviet Union via the Comintern. The ‘Battle of Cable Street’ was the largest of many such assaults on the BUF in the 1930s. The aggressors were rewarded with legislation within two months: a new Public Order Act which impaired the BUF’s ability to demonstrate.22

The Board of Deputies did not at first openly encourage anti-fascist aggression. As Daniel Tilles says, “much of the Board’s anti-fascist activity, for… good reason, took place privately and remained unpublicised.”23 In July 1936, a deputation from the Board, including Neville Laski and vice-president Robert Waley Cohen, expressed sympathy for Jewish violence against the BUF and prevailed on Simon to punish “those preaching hatred”.24 John Simon’s Act, passed in December that year, was “influenced by the personal intervention of Harold Laski” (Neville’s pro-Soviet brother) and “made the police act with even greater intensity” against the BUF.25 Let us assume that the hatred preached was so abominable as to justify bricks flung at British bobbies by gangsters, else we risk the conclusion that the deputies sought special treatment and power for the higher grade race.

The Board had begun to co-opt anti-fascist militancy before the assault in Aldgate, “establishing a body to direct defence policy in mid-1936, the Co-ordinating Committee (CoC — known from late 1938 as the Jewish Defence Committee).”26 Late in that year, “Sidney Salomon, the secretary of the CoC, in an interview with the Evening Standard, absolved his thugs of blame for their aggression, arguing that it was ‘not human nature… to stand calmly by while Blackshirts shout insults.’”27 Herbert Morrison, leader of the London County Council and a senior figure in the Labour Party, which affected to exist for the benefit of British workers, met in secret with Neville Laski and Harry Pollitt, leader of the CPGB, in October 1936 to co-ordinate the terrorism they mutually supported.28 By March 1937, Neville Laski was satisfied that condoning violence would not lose him politicians’ support: “in contact with the Home Office to discuss anti-Jewish meetings, [Laski warned] that ‘any self-respecting Jew in the crowd would have the greatest difficulty in restraining himself, not only vocally, but even physically.’” He also urged police to collaborate with Jewish and communist infiltrators or invaders starting fights at BUF meetings.29 Newsreel producers already routinely used misleadingly-edited footage of such fights to portray the BUF to the nation as the instigators.

Spreading dread

With the most avid opponents of hostility to Germany corralled by state suppression and terrorism, successive British governments, notwithstanding their Home Secretaries, remained an obstacle to the full adoption of “Jewish foreign policy”. Under MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin, peace with Germany continued, and Neville Chamberlain intended the same. Winston Churchill followed his anti-German aspersions about “war spirit” and “blood lust” with a fear campaign about Germany’s military strength. “As 1934 progressed Churchill developed an important subsidiary theme to disarmament: the growth of German air power”, according to David Irving, who continues:

“‘I dread the day,’ he told the House on March 8, ‘when the means of threatening the heart of the British empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany.’ Such melodramatic statements were typical of the debating stance that Churchill would adopt over the next five years. Sir John Simon predicted in cabinet on March 19 that Hitler would move east or into territories of German affinity like Austria, Danzig and Memel. His colleagues were unconvinced that Hitler harboured evil designs on the empire, and rightly so. We now know from the German archives that even his most secret plans were laid solely against the east. In August 1936 he would formulate his Four-Year Plan to gird Germany for war against Bolshevist Russia; and not until early 1938 did he order that Germany must consider after all the contingency of war with Britain — a contingency which, it must be said, Mr. Churchill had himself largely created by his speeches.”30

Churchill “found that Britain’s weakness in the air was a popular theme, particularly among leading London businessmen. Their doyen Sir Stanley Machin invited him to address the City Carlton Club on it. He developed his campaign on the floor of the House, in newspaper and magazine articles, and in BBC broadcasts too.”31

Churchill used Parliamentary privilege and his high security clearance to publicise statistics, and alarming interpretations of them, on behalf of a network of anti-German civil servants and intelligence agents led by Robert Vansittart, head of the Foreign Office. On 9th November 1933, the Committee of Imperial Defence had “decided that a body should be set up to determine Britain’s worst defence deficiencies. That body, which became the DRC, was approved by the Cabinet on 15 November” but “held its first meeting on 14 November, the day before it was formally constituted by the Cabinet.”32 The Defence Requirements Committee was “the body whose decisions largely determined the path that British strategic defence policy took in the years until 1939.”33 It was a vehicle for Vansittart and Warren Fisher, his equivalent at the Treasury, to wage institutional war against the Air Ministry which was “[i]n theory… the sole body responsible for the co-ordination and analysis of information on the German air force” and which insisted on reporting what it found.34 As Wesley Wark describes,

Despite the fact that no concrete intelligence had reached the air ministry during the DRC’s term, the committee nevertheless found itself preoccupied by the question of the future rearmament of Germany, especially in the air. Pushed by Vansittart, the DRC accepted, without conviction, the estimate of five years as the time it would take Germany to rearm, and adopted this as their deadline for British defence planning. Germany was fixed, using Warren Fisher’s terminology, as the ‘ultimate potential enemy’. When the chief of the air staff presented a very modest programme for the RAF to the committee, both Vansittart and Fisher threatened that they would not sign the report.35

The moderation of the air staff provoked Vansittart to bypass them. “The clash of political and military intelligence in the DRC had encouraged the central department of the Foreign Office to begin drawing up their own appreciations of the German air force.”36 Ralph Wigram, the head of that department, supplied Churchill figures until his death in 1936.37 Another supplier was Desmond Morton, formerly of the Secret Intelligence Service and in 1934 the head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Morton brought to Churchill’s home “secret files which the Prof. [Frederick Lindemann] illicitly photocopied for Churchill.” Morton’s figures only spoke of numbers of planes and “omitted any consideration of quality or range”.38 Churchill’s rhetoric aimed at maximising alarm: “‘Germany has already, in violation of the Treaty, created a military airforce which is now nearly two-thirds as strong as our present home defence airforce.’ By the end of 1935, he warned, Hitler would match Britain’s airforce; by 1936 he would overtake it — such was Churchill’s claim.” Irving paraphrases Churchill: “[I]f both countries continued to rearm at their present rate, in 1937 Germany would have twice the airforce Britain had.” He continues:

It is plain from the record of November 25th that the cabinet was concerned about the effect of Mr Churchill’s brash campaign on their delicate relations with Germany. Hoare felt they must make clear to the world that his ‘charges were exaggerated.’ Chamberlain expressed puzzlement that they themselves had no information backing Churchill’s claims… [T]he captured files of the German air ministry reveal both his statistics and his strategic predictions to have been wild, irresponsible, exaggerated scaremongering, delivered without regard for the possible consequences on international relations.39

Vansittart was aided by Reginald Leeper who became head of the Foreign Office news department in 1935. According to Richard Cockett, “Leeper shared the views of Sir Robert Vansittart on foreign policy and in particular his attitude to Germany.”40 Leeper sought “willing collaborator[s]” among journalists

to further the aims and policies of the Foreign Office. He realized that with a certain degree of openness and flattery diplomatic correspondents could be welded into a cohesive body who could be relied upon always to put the Foreign Office point of view in the press. [He] built up a set of diplomatic correspondents… loyal to him.41

The main enticement for correspondents was being shown confidential Foreign Office documents. “[T]he more correspondents were let into the News Department’s confidence, the more willing they would be to adopt the Foreign Office view.” Leeper’s “tame pets” repeated the Foreign Office’s views under their own names.42 At least one of the “most privileged diplomatic correspondents”, Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald, was a spy for the Soviet Union.43

In March 1935, Vansittart leaked the fact that Hitler had privately claimed to John Simon that his Luftwaffe, forbidden under Versailles, had already reached parity with the Royal Air Force.44 Leeper then fed out a more alarming story in April, and Churchill spoke of it as “official” in Parliament.45

Leeper’s team overlapped with Vansittart’s. According to Cockett,

they used the News Department to give out news of conditions in Germany, statistics of German rearmament, reports of German concentration camps to enhance this pessimistic view of Germany – the leak to the Daily Telegraph in 1935 was supposed to contribute to this general picture. Vansittart was particularly free with his confidences and encouraged Leeper to take the same attitude in the pursuance of their campaign against appeasement. Ian Colvin relates how ‘Rex Leeper sometimes came upon Vansittart in his room at the FO in full conversation with Winston Churchill.’ The excuse Vansittart gave to Leeper for communicating confidential information to a mere MP was that ‘it is so important that a man of Churchill’s influence should be properly informed’ and so he was quite content to ‘tell him whatever I know’.46

As Wark says, “The best intelligence which the [Secret Intelligence Service] gained on German air force developments was obtained through contacts with foreign secret services and through the exploitation of dissident German sources.”47 On the basis of such sources, some of whom approached him directly, from February 1936, Vansittart formed his own intelligence network, “separate from the SIS and the Foreign Office”.48 According to Cockett,

Vansittart was… particularly open in his communications with FA Voigt of the Manchester Guardian. Indeed, Voigt was a key member of Vansittart’s shadowy ‘Z Organization’, an intelligence service run principally for his own benefit to keep him informed of developments inside Nazi Germany. It was run with the co-operation of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), but otherwise was run clandestinely — unknown to the rest of the staff at SIS headquarters in London.49

According to Gill Bennett, the Z Organisation was set up by Hugh Sinclair, head of SIS, and assigned to Claude Dansey, who “ran his own small staff, including Jewish émigrés and other exiles, and supposedly communicated with SIS only through [Hugh] Sinclair, although the evidence suggests that Morton too received information directly from Dansey.”50

Churchill’s intelligence network also included Jewish émigrés like Jurgen Kuczynski, a spy for the Soviet GRU, and Leopold Schwarzschild, a journalist and publisher, whom Churchill called “two German refugees of high ability and inflexible purpose”.51 Using information from Kuczynski was especially absurd:

After publishing an anonymous article in Brendan Bracken’s The Banker in February 1937 with tongue-in-cheek ‘calculations’ of Hitler’s annual arms budget, he had been contacted by ‘certain circles, and these he had ruthlessly milked of both funds for the party coffers and secret information for the Soviet Union. These circles, he said by way of identification, were those that came to power in 1940 ‘with the overthrow of Chamberlain.’ …

Kuczynski also drafted a blimpish brochure on Hitler and the Empire, to which an R.A.F. air commodore wrote the foreword. ‘I chose the pen name James Turner,’ he wrote. ‘The whole thing was a rather improbable romp.’ Turner’s line was, he chuckled, to deny any personal dislike of fascism — that was a matter for the Germans alone — ‘If only it were not such a danger for the British empire.’52

Kuczynski and Swarzschild may have already been sources for the Z Organisation or Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre at the CID (or both). As Wark describes,

The IIC was created as a secret unit in 1931 to collect and evaluate information on industrial war planning in foreign countries… Their sources included material from industrial publications, statistics from the board of trade and department of overseas trade, Foreign Office reports, information volunteered by British industrialists and whatever covert material was supplied by the Secret Service.

For reasons unexplained, “At first the IIC concentrated on Russia but soon turned its attention to the German aircraft industry.”53

One “British industrialist” who volunteered information was Sir Henry Strakosch, a Jewish financier from Austria who, according to David Lough, was another of “the small group of experts who had been feeding Churchill confidential information about Germany’s armaments expenditure.” Of Strakosch’s expertise, Lough says that “As chairman of Union Corporation, the South African mining business, Strakosch passed on confidential details of the raw materials which his company was supplying to the German armaments industry.”54 The German armaments industry must have been awful enough to alarm Strakosh but not quite so terrible that he stopped contributing to it. As Irving describes,

When the air staff issued a secret memorandum on November 5, 1935 — based, we now know, on its authentic codebreaking sources — stating firmly that the German front line consisted of only 594 planes, Churchill sent an exasperated letter to the Committee of Imperial Defence: ‘It is to be hoped,’ he wrote, ‘that this figure will not be made public, as it would certainly give rise to misunderstanding and challenge.’55

Friendship with Strakosch became highly beneficial to Churchill and the anti-German front. In severe financial difficulty in 1938, Churchill told friends he would leave politics and put his mansion Chartwell up for sale. Strakosch agreed to pay off the debts (about £18,000 according to Irving and Lough). “Chartwell was withdrawn from the market, and Churchill campaigned on.”56 Lough stresses that there was no quid pro quo with Strakosch (other than membership of Churchill’s dining club). I find no evidence contradicting Lough here. Strakosch’s motive appears to have been to keep Churchill, perhaps the most well-placed activist for the cause, in politics to “campaign on” against “misunderstanding and challenge”. As Lough says of their collaboration, “Sir Henry… regarded Churchill as the one politician in Europe with the vision, energy and courage required to resist the Nazi threat.”57 Strakosch loaned another £5,000 to Churchill in 1940 and left Churchill £20,000 when he died in 1943.58

The Focus

Cockett describes how “Leeper and Vansittart enlisted [Churchill] in their campaign against Germany” as he “could be thoroughly relied upon to use their information in the way that they wanted”. Leeper

visited Churchill at his home at Chartwell on 24 April 1936 to encourage him to try and bring together all the various groups who were already concerned about the German danger. This meeting was the genesis of the anti-Nazi council which became known as the Focus Group. This duly tried to rectify what Vansittart had identified as the crucial flaw in Britain’s state of readiness: ‘the people of this country are receiving no adequate education — indeed practically no concerted education at all — against the impending tests’…59

Other than this “genesis” at Chartwell, the Anti-Nazi Council was already the British branch of Untermyer’s World Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council for Human Rights. As Richard Hawkins describes,

In April 1936, Winston Churchill joined the WNSANCHR… In July, the Board of Deputies of British Jews created a secret fund to support anti-Nazi groups including the WNSANCHR. At a meeting on October 15, the WNSANCHR, at the suggestion of Churchill, decided to establish a Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace movement. The Focus helped revive Churchill’s political career. As Eugen Spier later observed, ‘Later on it was easy to forget the part [the Focus] played in creating a platform for Winston Churchill at a time he was in the political wilderness.’60

The Focus served as an information exchange, a network of support and a fountain of money for the anti-German campaign of which he was the most valuable figure. Yet despite including prominent politicians, civil servants, businessmen and journalists, few of whom were abashed about their stance on Germany, Churchill was no more keen for the Focus to be a matter of public discussion than he was the real size of the German air force. To enable individuals with contrasting affiliations to join discreetly, the group had a loose structure, avoided formal membership and only staged events under other names.61 Eugen Spier, a Jewish immigrant from Germany and one of the founders and main funders, wrote a book on the career of the organisation, but did not have it published until 1963. Irving says that “Churchill pleaded with him not to publish it during his lifetime.”62 Court historians still frown at our disrespect for the great man’s privacy.

Churchill “wryly recognised who was behind this body. ‘The basis of the Anti-Nazi League,’ he would write later in 1936 to [his son] Randolph, misquoting its proper title, ‘is of course Jewish resentment at their abominable persecution.”63 Jewish resentment may have been a motivation, but the wealthy, well-connected Jews in the “League” were not under persecution and, as noted, the international effort of which they were part intruded upon the cautious practices of the Jewish organisations in Germany. The Focus’s aims were the same as those of Untermyer and the World Jewish Congress: Germany must overthrow Hitler or be destroyed. In Spier’s words, “we had to prove to Britain and the world that for us there could be no peace with the Nazi regime.”64 Whether the struggle was really for survival or supremacy, no cost was too great.

Bribery

Another “basis of the League” was Czech bribery. The recipients tended to be unapologetic. As Irving says,

Europe was awash with secret embassy funds… The Czechs were most prolific… When Robert Boothby, once Churchill’s private secretary and now a member of his Focus, was later obliged to resign ministerial office over irregularities involving Czech funds and a certain Mr [Richard] Weininger, he advised the House, as an MP of sixteen years’ standing, not to set impossible standards ‘in view of what we all know does go on and has gone on for years.’”65

Weininger, a wealthy Jewish immigrant, was working mainly for his own benefit.66 Jan Masaryk was the main conduit for Czech government bribery and a friend of Churchill. Reginald Leeper and Henry Wickham Steed, the Focus’s most committed journalist, were two payees.67 Sir Louis Spears MP was given regular cash and a lucrative directorship of a major Rothschild-controlled Czech industrial firm at the behest of Edvard Benes.68

The Czech government was headed by Benes and had formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935. The Soviets were permitted to use Czech airbases against Germany and Benes wholly trusted that they would provide sizeable forces in case of war; the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, encouraged his trust.69 The Focus’s aims dovetailed with Litvinov’s foreign policy and the aims of the Comintern. Robert Boothby was a co-founder of the Popular Front which lobbied for pro-Soviet policies from 1936 until being assumed into Churchill’s wartime government. The Focus also included former Labour minister Hugh Dalton MP, an apologist for the Soviet dictatorship since its founding.70 Focus members Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, leftist Tory MP Harold Macmillan, ‘peace’ activist Norman Angell and Liberal Party politician Violet Bonham-Carter, an old friend of Churchill, who wrote for The Future, a magazine published by Willi Münzenberg, a German communist who specialised in creating pseudo-independent organisations to enable celebrity intellectuals like Angell to support the Soviet Union deniably.71 The launch of The Future was funded by Munzenberg’s comrade Olof Aschberg, a Jewish banker from Sweden who had helped launder money for the Bolshevik regime after its repudiation of foreign loans and seizure of private assets. The editor was Arthur Koestler, also of Jewish ancestry, who had recently resigned as a Comintern agent when The Future launched.72

Zionists

Alongside servants of the Comintern, the Focus was populated by Zionists, Jewish or otherwise. A leader of Anglo-Jewry and member of the Focus along with his brother Robert was Henry Mond, the 2nd Baron Melchett, who had helped finance Pinhas Rutenberg’s plan for irrigation and electricity generation in Palestine (Rutenberg’s company was granted a monopoly on generation over most of Palestine in 1921).73 In this effort, Mond joined Edmond de Rothschild, the primary financier of Jewish settlement in Palestine (and Rutenberg’s scheme), and Edmond’s son James de Rothschild, a family friend of Churchill and a member of the Focus with his cousin and wife Dorothy. Churchill supported Rutenberg’s project while he was Colonial Secretary from 1921–22 just as he consistently supported the greatest possible Jewish immigration into Palestine throughout the 1920s and 30s (expressly to make Jews the majority there). Rutenberg was a leading Zionist activist closely associated with Churchill’s friend Chaim Weizmann as well as David Ben-Gurion and the racial Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first president and prime minister respectively in 1948. Jabotinsky was a Zionist militant and anti-British agitator who founded Irgun, members of which murdered British officials and servicemen in Palestine after the war.

Secret funding

Copious funding was available to the Focus. The “secret fund” Hawkins mentions was administered by Robert Waley Cohen, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. As Robert Henriques describes, “Bob” was one of the leaders of Anglo-Jewry, for whom there was a need “to find a platform which would enlist the whole-hearted support of the greatest possible number of Gentile friends.” He continues:

Every week Bob and a few other leaders of Anglo-Jewry met at New Court to plan a form of defence against anti-Semitic propaganda. In June, Bob, and several others had an interview with the Home Secretary and returned with the assurance that the Government would do everything in its power to arrest what it acknowledged to be “a growing evil’.74

The other leaders go unnamed. Henriques continues:

[Churchill] “enlisted many eminent men in his ‘Defence of Freedom and Peace’ movement, and this formed a nucleus of sympathetic, liberal, non-Jewish opinion with which the Anglo-Jewish leaders could co-operate. While Jewish Defence was continued by the Board of Deputies with direct propaganda which probably did more to reassure British Jews than to combat the infiltration of Nazi doctrine, it was decided at New Court to raise a secret fund, initially of £50,000, which would work with the sympathetic non-Jewish organisations as well as with the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the latter providing the hard facts of Nazi atrocities which were so seldom reported i— the press. Bob agreed to raise, control and administer this fund. It was started with a dinner party at Caen Wood Towers on 22nd July, from which over £25,000 was immediately subscribed, and the balance promised. Bob insisted from the start that the Jewish defence movement must concentrate on attacking Nazi philosophy and its denial of human rights, rather than on the direct refutation of anti-Semitic propaganda. …[H]e insisted that propaganda should be directed against ‘pursuing peace without caring for freedom and justice’ — a summary of the British policy of appeasement.75

Cohen, like Spier, took as read that “Jewish defence” entailed using one gentile nation-state to impose Jewish values and interests on another.

As David Irving says, £50,000 “was a colossal sum for such an organisation to butter around in 1936 — five times the annual budget of the British Council [a government-created organisation aimed at promoting British foreign policy], and it was only “initially” £50,000.76 Cohen, thanks in part to his means, took charge of the Focus, as Henriques describes:

[T]he ‘Defence of Freedom and Peace’ movement was publishing a series of pamphlets explaining what Nazi-ism meant and refuting the belief in the country that it had its legitimate aspects. Each pamphlet was read in manuscript by Bob and usually edited and amended profusely. Even Winston Churchill was not exempt; and one of his articles entitled ‘The Better Way’, which he sent to Bob in draft, was returned to its author with copious alterations, all of which were accepted. Soon the ‘Defence of Freedom and Peace’ movement, whose secretary was AH Richards, began publication of a journal known as Focus on which Wickham Steed and Bob — the latter described as ‘the veritable dynamic force of Focus’ — were Churchill’s main lieutenants.”77

Under the pretext of securing “human rights” and combatting “anti-Semitic propaganda”, the Focus strove to pressure the news media into a belligerent stance toward Germany:

To administer the ‘secret’ defence fund, Bob employed HT Montague Bell, recently retired from the editorial chair of The Near East, who was very largely engaged in drafting letters to the press and providing the necessary facts, for eminent people to compose their own letters in refutation of the very considerable correspondence published by most of the national newspapers excusing Fascism and even advocating it, including sometimes its anti-Semitic aspects.78

The Focus also worked to co-ordinate ostensibly separate media organisations toward a single aim:

While Montague Bell was arranging the publication of a series of so-called ‘Vigilance’ pamphlets, written by Colin R Coote, then a leader-writer of The Times, and other well-known journalists, Bob was personally interviewing various Tory Members of Parliament, including Harold Macmillan, Douglas Hacking, and Sir Waldron Smithers. Negotiations which had begun in 1937 between Bob, Professor Gilbert Murray and Sir Norman Angell led to the formation in 1938 of the Focus Publishing Company which took over Headway, the publication of the League of Nations Union. Meanwhile, Bob’s fund was being used to sponsor a large number of small, independent enterprises whose operations were co-ordinated by Montague Bell, now reinforced with an assistant and a secretariat.79

With Churchill, Macmillan, Boothby and others being sitting Conservative MPs, the Focus’s secretiveness was prudent as, according to Eugen Spier, “the policy of the new Headway would be to turn out the Conservative government.”80

Both the Focus and the Board of Deputies appear to have been subsidiary, at least financially, to the unnamed leaders of Anglo-Jewry who met at New Court and initiated the “secret fund”:

By tremendous efforts… Bob raised further gifts to the Fund to keep pace with its expenditure. It was found that the work of the Fund inevitably overlapped the official defence work of the Board of Deputies. Accordingly a very substantial annual sum was paid by the Fund to the President of the Board (Neville Laski, KC) so that he could temporarily sacrifice his legal practice and devote himself wholly to the co-ordination of Jewish defence.81

Under the threat of an advertising boycott, potential adversaries of the Focus like Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, had already been rendered compliant. Lord Beaverbrook, main owner of the Daily Express (in which Rothermere had a large stake too) was susceptible to the same menaces, and though at times privately sympathetic to Germany he printed what he thought good for business. His Express headline from March 1933, ‘Judea Declares War On Germany’, preceded an article lauding Judea for doing so. Beaverbrook was also a friend of Churchill, Vansittart and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador.

Perhaps the most consequential of the Focus’s activities was described by Eugen Spier to Churchill privately in June 1937:

It is one of the objects of the Focus to provide its members, and you most of all, with just those facilities which a party machine provides, publicity by public meetings, through the press and our publications. The Focus is steadily growing; its audiences daily become larger, its backing ever more forceful, with the support of some of the most important people in the country.82

With its forceful backing, the Focus did attract the support of important people. It could also make mediocre people seem important. By late 1936, “The editors of the influential weekly journals The SpectatorNew StatesmanThe Economist and Time & Tide were wooed and won: Wilson Harris, Basil Kingsley Martin, Lady Rhonda, Harcourt Johnstone.” They were joined by “Sir Walter Layton and AJ Cummings, chairman and chief commentator of the News Chronicle, as well as Lady Violet [Bonham-Carter] and two BBC executives.”83 The BBC, as noted, had already helped publicise the previous demonstrations of the Focus. They also gave Churchill respectable amplification for his ‘warnings’ about Germany as early as 1934.84 Henry Strakosch and Churchill’s friend Brendan Bracken jointly owned half of The Economist anyway.85 Walter Citrine was already a director of the Labour-aligned Daily Herald. The Daily Mirror was vehemently anti-Hitler without prompting from the Focus. There were others whom the Focus left alone as they were already model citizens: the Express’ cartoonist David Low, who specialised in ridiculing his enemies, or his counterpart at the Mirror, Philip Zec, who specialised in dehumanising them. Low was a supporter of the Soviets (except when they allied with Germany) and Zec was a director of the Jewish Chronicle, the grandson of a rabbi and son of an immigrant from Odessa.

According to Irving,

At Waley-Cohen’s request Brendan Bracken released German-born Werner Knop, who had been foreign news editor of his Financial News and Banker since 1935. The Focus set him up in an office in the fountain yard of one of the ancient Inns of Court near Fleet-street. Knop’s ‘front,’ Union Time Ltd, disguised as a press agency, was funded ‘by a group of British businessmen and newspaper editors’.86

Marcus Bennett describes Union Time as “a front for various German emigres working across various professional fields to encourage anti-Nazi opinion in Britain and combat Nazi propaganda in general.” He continues: “It was Union Time Ltd which had camouflaged, among many others, the activities of [Hilde] Meisel, who approached… [Labour MP George] Strauss asking for money to murder Hitler. Strauss sent her to the City of London to meet Werner Knop… Knop granted her the necessary financial support.”87

The Focus also benefited from partnership with a real press agency, Cooperation Press Service. According to Lough, Cooperation Press Service, “founded by Dr Imre Revesz, a Hungarian Jew… specialized in distributing articles written by European politicians across a network of 400 newspapers in seventy countries on the Continent. Cooperation had started in Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power, then moved to Paris just before a raid on its offices by the Gestapo.”88 Revesz (alias Emery Reves) offered Churchill a much wider readership and larger fees for his newspaper articles by syndication. He did the same for Clement Attlee, Tory ministers Anthony Eden and Alfred Duff Cooper, and anti-German politicians across Europ,e including Leon Blum, a central figure in the Popular Front.89

Vansittart-Litvinov

The Focus bound several forces into one fascio: journalists, Foreign Office men, the Popular Front, industrialists, Czech hirelings, Disraelite Tories, Zionists and mainstream Anglo-Jewry, all drawing upon Cohen’s secret fund and serving the same purposes as the international alliance headed by Samuel Untermyer and his colleagues at the World Jewish Congress. It also complemented the work of leading civil servants. The Foreign Office, as we have seen, had been committed to anti-German policies long before Hitler became Chancellor, and before Germany had done anything more threatening than condemn the Treaty of Versailles, Vansittart collaborated with the Soviet government against his own. The diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, were edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, who says that

In going about his ambassadorial duties in London, Maisky studiously followed the lead of [Maxim] Litvinov, who had spotted the Nazi threat as early as 1931. However, it took Litvinov almost a year to convince Stalin that Hitler’s rise to power meant that ‘ultimately war in Europe was inevitable’. The formal shift in Soviet foreign policy… towards a system of collective security in Europe and the Far East… occurred in December 1933…

Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary of state, was the advocate of such ideas in Britain… Britain could preserve a local balance of power in both Europe and the Far East by allying with the Soviet Union, which could place a check on both Japanese and German expansion… He… gravitated towards European security based on the pre-1914 entente of Britain, France and Russia.”90

The balance of power policy was established as Foreign Office doctrine by Eyre Crowe, Arthur Nicolson, Charles Hardinge and other favourites of King Edward VII.91 Maurice Cowling says that Vansittart “advocated a Russian alliance with France, British co-operation with Litvinoff and tripartite firmness towards Germany.”92 He “treated the Franco-Soviet alliance as non-negotiable.”93

Russia had ceased to be a state in 1917. The Russian monarchy had been usurped, the monarch murdered, the alliance with Britain repudiated in bello and the empire refounded as a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but these were, apparently, not too much of an interruption for the entente of 1907 to be considered obsolete; nor were the Bolsheviks’ brazen hostility toward and attempts to undermine the British Empire, which continued under the Comintern until 1943 (and in other forms afterward), nor that the crimes of Stalin’s regime exceeded even those of Lenin’s. Stalin himself had leader the Soviet attempt to impose “collective security” on Poland in 1920. Regardless, the school of Eyre Crowe merged happily into that of Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein (‘Litvinov’ was an alias). Gorodetsky says plainly (and approvingly) that Vansittart was an “ally” of Soviet Ambassador Maisky.94

Thus the Focus did not recruit men like Vansittart but rather teamed with them. As mentioned, Rex Leeper introduced Churchill to the Anti-Nazi Council in April 1936. In the previous year, as Gabriel Gorodetsky describes,

Vansittart assisted Maisky in setting up a powerful lobby within Conservative circles… Maisky was further invited to a dinner en famille at Vansittart’s home [in June 1935], where he met Churchill. ‘I send you a very strong recommendation of that gentleman,’ wrote Beaverbrook to Maisky… Churchill indeed told Maisky that, in view of the rise of Nazism, which threatened to reduce England to ‘a toy in the hands of German imperialism’, he was abandoning his protracted struggle against the Soviet Union, which he no longer believed posed any threat to England for at least the next ten years. He fully subscribed to the idea of collective security as the sole strategy able to thwart Nazi Germany.95

Churchill frequently referred to his desire to ‘encircle’ Germany again. At a royal reception in November 1937, he had made a show of spurning Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, and telling Maisky “I’m wholly for Stalin.”96 In March 1938 he told Maisky that “I am definitely in favour of Stalin’s policy. Stalin is creating a strong Russia. We need a strong Russia and I wish Stalin every success.”97 By May 1938, during the first Czech crisis, he had sunk as far as apologising to Maisky for including in a recent speech some perfunctory mentions of Soviet maltreatment of civilians. He regretfully explained that his constituents would not yet accept unconditional support for the Soviet regime.98 Vansittart told Maisky in August 1937 that Britain approved of the pact the Czechs made with the Soviets in 1935.99 Had the pact been activated by war with Germany, the question of whether Soviet forces could have been evicted after being granted passage and bases was a grave concern for the Poles and Romanians at the time. When, in April 1939, Churchill asked Maisky on behalf of the Poles whether they need worry, Maisky avoided answering to avoid lying; Churchill was undeterred.100

War Party

The Focus helped ensure that Chamberlain was assailed persistently from many angles. Irving mentioned that the initial secret fund was five times greater than the annual budget of the British Council, but in any case the Council was overseen by Reginald Leeper before Lord Lloyd became its chairman in July 1937; both men were supporters of the Focus.101 The Council began as a propaganda body under Leeper’s Foreign Office news department. Philip Taylor says that it was “created as a response to the malignant propaganda of the totalitarian regimes which had come into being following the Treaty of Versailles.”102 Taylor’s wording tidily excludes the most malignant “totalitarian regime” of all, but whatever the Council’s purview, Lloyd acted beyond it. John Charmley describes him as “an unofficial ambassador with the entrée to chancelleries from Paris to Ankara” and “a useful sounding-board whose words could, should it prove convenient, be denied.” He was intended as “an element of steel” in Chamberlain’s policy.103 However, Lloyd, like Churchill, had been unsympathetic to the Crowe school of balance-of-power foreign policy since long before the Great War, and demanded nothing but steel vis-ø-vis Germany.104

Baldwin and Chamberlain allowed diplomatic sabotage to continue under them. Had they only been as merciless to warmongering subordinates as the latter demanded of them toward Germany, civilisation might still stand. Cohen, the Board of Deputies, the Foreign Office and the Soviet Embassy had already co-created a secret war party cutting across existing alignments and through departments of state. It was complacent of Chamberlain to merely remove Vansittart from his post in 1938 and narrow Leeper’s remit and not extirpate their practices. He inflicted a loss Lloyd and others could negate.

Chamberlain would have been remiss not to have Churchill surveilled, but he went no further.105 Churchill was free to conduct “his own foreign policy” and established “his own direct links with foreign governments… [H]e called upon foreign statesmen, sent out personal envoys… and encouraged the diplomatic corps to look upon Morpeth Mansions as a second Court of St. James.”106 His “own” foreign policy was that of Litvinov: aggravating Anglo-German relations to the greatest possible extent. “For us, there could be no peace with the Nazi regime,” as Spier said. Opportunities to subvert the peace arose in 1938 and the Focus became more a force than merely a presence.


1

Churchill’s War, David Irving, 2003, p18, 23

2

Irving, p36

3

Irving, p37

4

According to David Irving, Churchill’s opponents “regarded the relentless assault on Ramsay MacDonald and his quest for disarmament as prompted by selfish political motives. But it was easy to contrast Macdonald’s tireless efforts with Hitler’s stealthy rearmament. It made good copy.” Irving, p37.

5

Irving, p23

6

Stalin’s War of Extermination, Joachim Hoffman, 2001, p30, 32

7

Daily Express, March 24th 1933, reproduced at https://www.nationalists.org/library/hitler/daily-express/judea-declares-war-on-germany.html. The Daily Express was the largest-circulation newspaper in the world at the time. Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook), the proprietor and an old friend of Churchill, became a minister in Churchill’s wartime government.

8

British Jewry and the Attempted Boycott of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939, Zbyněk Vydra, Theatrum historiae 21 (2017), p206

9

“Hitler’s Bitterest Foe”: Samuel Untermyer and the Boycott of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938, Richard Hawkins, American Jewish History, Volume 93, Number 1, March 2007, p31

10

Hawkins, p25, 26, 29, 30. Given Untermyer’s wild accusations, it is rational to wonder how often similar statements from others are uttered regardless of evidence.

11

Hawkins, p45. Irving says that “Citrine was angered by Hitler’s brutal closure of the trade unions.” Irving, p59. Stalin must have closed his unions less brutally.

12

See Labour and the Gulag – Russia and the Seduction of the British Left by Giles Udy, 2017. Much of the Labour Party, including Ramsey MacDonald, was pro-Soviet from 1917 to 1945. During the Cold War this became a fringe position in the party.

13

The Impact of Hitler, Maurice Cowling, 1975, p46

14

My Friend the Enemy : an English Boy in Nazi Germany, Paul Briscoe, 2008, p28. According to James Pool, Rothermere confirmed this to Mosley and Hitler. See Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919-1933, James Pool, 1997, p315-6

15

Vydra, p206

16

Vydra, p200

17

Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949, David Cesarani, 2016, part one, section ‘Protest and Boycott’. Cesarani notes that the American Jewish Committee originally took the same position as Laski’s Board of Deputies while the American Jewish Congress sided with Untermyer and helped form the World Jewish Congress.

18

Hawkins, p49. Vilification was used in support of the boycott from the start.

19

Anglo-Jewish Responses to Nazi Germany 1933-39: The Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Sharon Gewirtz, Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 26, Number 2, April 1991, p267

20

Vydra, p211

21

Vydra, p212

22

https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/no-pasaran-battle-cable-street/ – note the approval of the authors. The Act was the creation of John Simon, who as Home Secretary had ultimate authority over all British police, including those wounded trying to uphold the law in Aldgate.

23

“Some lesser known aspects” – The Anti-Fascist Campaign of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1936-40, Daniel Tilles, p138

24

Tilles, p139

25

Vydra, p212

26

Tilles, p136. “Over 1937 the CoC established the London Area Council (LAC), a subsidiary body in the East End that took over the anti-fascist campaigning of the Association of Jewish Friendly Societies (AJFS), which had already been working in harmony with the Board.” Tilles, p143

27

Tilles, p140

28

Tilles, p151. Morrison and the Board of Deputies were already linked by their collaboration on the Anti-Nazi Council, of which Pinchas Horowitz was a member and Morrison was a vice-president. Irving, Churchill’s War, volume 1, chapter 6, note 4

29

Tilles, p140

30

Irving, p40

31

Irving, p40

32

The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement, Keith Neilson, The English Historical Review, Volume 118, Number 477, June 2003, p662, 665

33

Neilson, p653

34

British Intelligence on the German Air Force and Aircraft Industry, 1933–1939, Wesley Wark, The Historical Journal, Volume 25, Issue 03, September 1982, p628

35

Wark, p630. The reasons for fixing Germany as the enemy are unmentioned; Wark simply calls it “obvious”.

36

Wark, p631

37

Irving, p48

38

Irving, p40-1. “There is no evidence to support the latter’s postwar claim that Morton did so with prime ministerial approval; other papers were just filched by Morton and never returned.”

39

Irving, p41-2. Simon, Hoare and Chamberlain were among those termed the Guilty Men in 1940 in a book published by the Jewish communist Victor Gollancz.

40

Twilight of Truth – Chamberlain, Appeasement and the Manipulation of the Press, Richard Cockett, 1989, p21

41

Cockett, p16-7

42

Cockett, p21

43

Cockett, p17-8

44

Cockett, p20

45

Cockett, p21

46

Cockett, p22

47

Wark, p629

48

Wark, p636

49

Cockett, p22

50

Churchill’s Man of Mystery – Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, Gill Bennett, 2007, chapter 9. Dansey was of some assistance to Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) in 1917 – https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jul/05/humanities.highereducation

51

Irving, p81. Jurgen Kuczyinski later recruited Klaus Fuchs as a spy for the Soviet Union. Fuchs was handled by Jurgen’s sister Ursula (alias Ruth Werner) while he betrayed the British and American nuclear weapons research programmes.

52

Irving, p82. The origins of ‘bulldog and Spitfire’ nationalism become clearer.

53

Wark, p635

54

No More Champagne – Churchill and his Money, David Lough, 2015,ch18. Also see Irving, p52

55

Irving, p52

56

Irving, p111-2, 116, and Lough, notes for chapter 18

57

Lough, chapter 18

58

Lough, chapters 18, 20 and 21

59

Cockett, p24

60

Hawkins, p46. According to Irving, “The reason for the ANC approach to Churchill in April 1936 was this: in London, authoritative Jewish bodies including the powerful Board of Deputies had come out against the more strident boycott activities, lest these provoke the Nazis to more extreme measures; in New York, the firebrand Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, an associate of Untermeyer’s, disagreed and founded a militant World Jewish Congress based in Geneva. As the Board of Deputies was the principle source of its British finance, the A.N.C. shifted to a political approach in 1936, and began hiring helpers on the political scene.” Irving, p59

61

Focus – a Footnote to the History of the Thirties, Eugen Spier, 1963, p13. See also Irving, p67

62

Irving, p58

63

Irving, p58, 67

64

Spier, p99

65

Irving, p99-100

66

Irving, p170-1. Richard Weininger was brother of the famous Otto – see Robert Boothby – a Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, Robert Rhodes James, 1991, p198

67

Irving, p59-60

68

Irving, p100, 117. The Wittkowitz Mines and Iron Works “manufactured armourplate, partly for British navy contracts. The Austrian Rothschilds held a 53 per cent controlling share. In 1938 the well-informed Rothschilds transferred the company to the Alliance Assurance Company, a London Rothschild firm. Blackmailing the family to sell off their controlling interest to Germany, the Nazis imprisoned Louis Rothschild in Vienna. Even after they physically seized Vitkovice in March 1939, the haggling went on until the bargain was struck for £3.5Million. Irving, p118

69

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler – The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 1930s, Igor Lukes, 1996, p192-3

70

See Labour and the Gulag by Giles Udy, 2017

71

The Red Millionaire – A Political Biography of Willy Münzenberg, Moscow`s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, Sean McMeekin, 2003, p194. Angell wrote in the Daily Herald that ‘patriotism was a menace to civilisation’. See Cowling, p242-3. “Münzenberg had not forgotten the visceral appeal the antifascist campaign [in Germany in 1923] had had for celebrity intellectuals…” McMeekin, p194. “Thomas Mann did contribute a short article, as promised, in late November, and his piece was flanked by another impressive celebrity coup, an essay by Sigmund Freud on anti-Semitism.” McMeekin, p298

72

Red Millionaire, McMeekin, p296-7. Münzenberg, when expelled from the German Communist Party in 1936, denounced Stalin as a traitor to anti-fascism. Koestler previously used his job with the Focus-aligned News Chronicle as cover for his Comintern work.

73

“In so far as possible the engineering staff is kept 100% Hebrew, but Arabs are used for pick and shovel work.” The Seventh Dominion? – Time Magazine

74

Sir Robert Waley Cohen, 1877-1952: A Biography, Robert Henriques, 1966, p361. Cohen was a director of Royal Dutch Shell, a company created with Rothschild finance; New Court was the business premises of N M Rothschild. Natty Cohen, Robert’s father, was on the Russo-Jewish Committee. See Henriques, p42-3. In the tradition of the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, Cohen and his wife Alice were first cousins.

75

Henriques, p362-3. The Focus’s longer name was the Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace. See also Hawkins, p46 and Spier, p9

76

Irving, p64. About the British Council’s budget, see Cultural Diplomacy and the British Council: 1934-1939, Philip Taylor, British Journal of International Studies, Volume 4, Number 3, October 1978, p244-265

77

Henriques, p363

78

Henriques, p363

79

Henriques, p364

80

Spier, p141

81

Henriques, p364

82

Spier, p108

83

Irving, p73

85

Lough, notes for chapter 11

86

Irving, p119

87

The Tribunite Who Tried to Kill Hitler, Marcus Bennett, 2021 – https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/12/the-tribunite-who-tried-to-kill-hitler. Knop is the source for his own role. Meisel, also known as Hilda Monte, appears to have been part of a terrorist network: “Monte had given notice to Knop that on 18 July her group would conduct a ‘demonstration attack’ – on that day, nine people on the Nazi-chartered Strength Through Joy were killed in a boiler room explosion.”

88

Lough, chapter 18

89

Irving, p87. “Soon every major Hitler speech was countered by a well-paid Churchill riposte published in most of Europe’s capitals. – ‘The new encirclement of Germany!’ he quipped to the Standard’s editor.”

90

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932-1943, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, 2015, chapter on 1934

91

ibid.

92

Cowling, p156

93

Cowling, p157. Cowling is speaking of 1936, but Gorodetsky shows it was already the case by 1934 or earlier

94

Gorodetsky chapters on 1934 and 1940. Advocates of alliance with the Soviet Union find it expedient to call it ‘Russia’, falsely connoting continuity.

95

Gorodetsky, chapter on 1935

96

Gorodetsky, chapter on 1937

97

Gorodetsky, chapter on 1938

98

Irving, p121

99

Gorodetsky, chapter on 1937

100

Irving, p173

101

Lord Lloyd and the decline of the British Empire, John Charmley, 1987, p208, p211. See also Taylor

102

Taylor, p264

103

Charmley, p222

104

Charmley, p14

105

Irving, p100. See also Cockett p9

106

Irving, p99

Who Watches the Watchers?

When the Roman poet Juvenal first used the phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes in the sixth of his second-century Satires, he was referring playfully to critics of his relationship with his wife. The phrase’s passage to its current status as a political lock-and-guard mechanism came via its misattribution to Plato’s Republic. But the observation of those whose role it is to observe, whether or not they are sanctioned by the state, is itself worthy of observation. Watching needs watching.

The idea is a simple one but it is a central supporting wall in the edifice of any entity that wishes to call itself a democracy; that those who are tasked with regulating the behavior of the citizenry must also be subject to the same level of scrutiny. This safeguard has been exponentially expanded and therefore complicated by the global success of the internet, and the rise of and ease of access to online information has led to the replacement of a culture in which political news and views were accessed solely via reading the newspaper and watching TV. Today, your telephone, even your child’s telephone, can allow you to watch world events unfolding in real time, and this small unit is a portal into a vast labyrinth of opposing political views and opinions. Juvenal’s conundrum (which leads, of course, to an infinite regress) has never been more pertinent than in our cyber-environment. This is an arena in which the watchers are able to do a lot more watching, but are becoming increasingly alarmed that this political voyeurism is reciprocal, and that they are being watched right back.

Watching, and being watched, is rapidly becoming the instinctive human activity which should concern us most. In our cyber world, the ability to watch increases steadily, and it is perfectly suited to the technocratic organization of control in which no one goes unobserved. In Martin Scorsese’s movie Casino, the boss – Sam “Ace” Rothstein, played by Robert de Niro – explains the surveillance system in his Las Vegas casino:

“In Las Vegas everybody’s got to watch everybody else. The players are looking to beat the casino. The dealers are watching the players. The box-men are watching the dealers. The floor-men are watching the box-men. The pit bosses are watching the floor-men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses, I’m watching the casino manager, and the eye in the sky is watching us all”.

Rothstein is referring to a central, revolving bank of cameras watching everything that takes place in the casino and monitored from a control room. This is a modern version of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, intended to control and secure prisons using the centralized ability to observe all the inmates and guards all the time. Bentham summarizes his design:

“The essence of it consists then, in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen.

But now this centrality and invisibility are under threat as everyone gets to join in. Modern online observation evokes the “sphere of nature” suggested by French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal, in which “the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere”. Anyone can be a watcher now, even of the other watchers.

Watching is a response to the need for security, beginning with physical security. The need to watch and thereby ensure one’s own safety and that of others is what links the soldier on guard duty with the visual entry-phone. Security, however, the making secure of something, is no longer concerned simply with the safety of the person. We hear much about national security, cyber-security, data security. The more security is required, in whatever different forms, the more watching will get done, and there will be more watchers to be watched.

The increasing invasiveness of Western states in the lives of its citizens is undeniable, and Big Brother is watching closely. The surveillance of citizens’ hitherto private lives, much of which now takes place online, seems to be a globalist objective in the West, and this is increasingly reflected in its legislation. Observation is moving away from being a physical transaction and becoming a virtual operation. Policing is shifting from the observation of what is usually accepted as criminality and towards the monitoring of statement and opinion, particularly online. The British police are increasingly criticized for, to use a contemporary phrase, “policing Tweets and not streets”. Definitive figures are hard to come by, but it seems clear that more people are currently being arrested in the UK for comments made on social media than in Russia. And it is not just the written word that is being monitored, but also the spoken.

As any hunter will tell you, hearing is as important as seeing, and so listening is as important as watching, and this certainly applies to the new Scottish Hate Crimes Bill, which was passed by the Scottish Parliament but is having a very hard time of it with those irritating people, the electorate. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf’s pet project passed into law on April Fool’s Day and means that a household conversation can now be reported by a family member (or anyone else) if they find it to be actually, or even potentially, offensive to themselves or others. A vast network of police patrol points was set up whereby ordinary people could make a complaint about comments either online or at the dinner-table, if families still dine together.

There were 8,000 complaints in the first week, just 0.6% of which have been shown as legitimate, and Police Scotland have admitted this is straining already failing police resources. Scotland has the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe, for example, and a rising crime rate in line with the rest of the UK, and so many feel that watching drug dealers and burglars may be a more worthwhile occupation for the police. Be careful what you watch for.

To allay slightly our Orwellian fears, there are organizations who are watching the state. With some, the clue is in the name, as with London-based Big Brother Watch, who have been monitoring state surveillance in the UK for 15 years. Another meticulous observer is Biased BBC, who have much to observe. These are single-issue watchers, set up precisely to monitor and with watching as their mission statements. It is not quite as obvious, however, that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s largest regulator of the finance industry, should be monitoring the employment quotas of private companies in the interests of financial probity, which is supposed to be their remit. A press release outlines their new policy:

The FCA has finalised rules requiring listed companies to report information and disclose against targets on the representation of women and ethnic minorities on their boards and executive management, making it easier for investors to see the diversity of their senior leadership teams.

We might want to challenge the suggestion that investors make their decisions on how much a company’s board of directors resembles a 1980s Benetton ad, but with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Equality) just as intrusive in the UK as the US, the FCA is just one example of monitored affirmative action among many.

So, sometimes the watchers are themselves watched, and are not reveling in the spotlight. HOPE Not Hate (HnH) is an organization dedicated to exposing Britain’s “far Right”, a movement they invent in its absence, as I wrote about for Occidental Observer here two years ago. This year, HnH have had a gain of function, moving from a wagging finger in the background to a political fist. Within three hours of the publication of their 2024 annual report, British political party Reform UK had de-selected three of their candidates for the upcoming General Election. Once HnH got a taste for this political power at one remove, they kept going.

The watchers, however, are being watched by someone becoming increasingly adept at the art. Tommy Robinson is a leading hate figure on the Left, and divides those on the Right. He has produced a video which makes several allegations about HnH for which they would surely sue if Robinson has got his facts wrong. They started the cycle by devoting a huge slice of their report to denouncing Robinson, as well as gloating about his legal and financial struggles. Now he is watching them right back. So much for the “watchdogs”, as observational and regulatory bodies are often referred to in the UK. How far can they see?

The ability to watch improves as quickly as technology, and the current European drive towards digital identity is panoptical. The entire financial infrastructure of an individual’s life can now be monitored, and implications drawn from it which may not be to the advantage of that person. I saw an early example in Sweden 30 years ago. In Gothenburg, there were two systembolagets, or large government-run liquor stores. Identity must be shown and recorded when purchasing alcohol and, if the amount bought is considered too high for the household in question, social workers are sent to the home address to discuss issues around alcohol with the family or individual concerned. Under “digital identity” measures, there is nothing to stop the great panopticon of state from watching which books you buy, which organizations’ newsletters you receive, or whose lectures you attend. The European Union is building its own Chinese-style social credit system, and the de-banking of individuals and businesses for holding the “wrong” political opinions proceeds apace, at least in the UK.

The arrival of IT also means that American philosopher John Dewey’s classical observation is far more relevant than in the era of paper. Litera scripta manet translates as “That which is written down, remains”. But that was then. Now, paper documentation, shredders and waste-paper bin (or trashcan) fires are antique. Paper can be destroyed, as Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle found out to his cost in 1834 when his servant accidentally burned the first draft of Carlyle’s great work, The French Revolution. There was no backing it up then, but online documentation is not so easy to dispose of.

The state is increasingly out-sourcing its ability to watch its citizens to big-tech companies, and their level of monitoring can be retrospective as well as current. So-called “forensic” examination of a person’s past on social media can be used to bring someone down. When an account is banned by Twitter/X, you can’t start another, but they don’t expunge your Tweets. The account – including my own – is described as “permanently suspended”, but it is more like suspended animation. They keep all your Tweets in case they ever come in useful, in case you become one of those people who, as school-teachers once said of errant pupils, needs watching.

As for supposedly private communications, how can you know whether someone is reading your emails other than the intended recipient? I was advised to change to an encrypted service after being warned by an editor that one well-known email platform was allegedly partly staffed by diligent SJWs who see it as their duty to regulate their company’s service in an unofficial capacity by flagging up what they deem to be “problematic” correspondence, and subsequently closing accounts.

Then there is the natural defense of the reluctantly observed, a prohibition against watching, from the banning of a speaker or film to more subtly technocratic means. Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) made to the UK Government may by their name seem straightforward, but they are fitted with locks and guards to protect certain ethnic minorities from unwanted scrutiny. In June 2023, the reply to FOI reference number 2023 1066 was published on the website of the Office for National Statistics, The query was as follows:

“I would like to request data on violent crime in England and Wales broken down by the ethnicity of the perpetrator from 2016 to the most recent available year”.

The British police are already hobbled by the ludicrously exhaustive amount of documented information that must accompany each arrest, which means that the information requested will almost certainly be available. The response is interesting, and summed up in the first paragraph:

Our publications and data concern crime as it is experienced by the victim, or as it is recorded by police. Unfortunately, we do not, generally, produce statistics or details on the offender.

So, we have a victim-based report focusing on the experience of the person suffering the criminal act. This is not much use to a murder victim, but it is at least an attempt at a procedural approach. But collected data exists “as it is experienced by the victim or as it is recorded by police” [italics added]. As football fans say of referees who they feel have treated their team unfairly, he must be watching a different game to the rest of us.

In the UK, as in many other Western countries, illegal immigrants are watched far less than tax-paying indigenous citizens, and Migration Watch is another self-explanatory name for an organization that does just that. In 2022, their research showed that just 2% of immigrants arriving in the UK held passports. It is estimated that up to 90% of illegal migrants throw their passports into the English Channel, thereby rendering useless a globally recognized method by which people can be monitored. No English person returning from abroad would be allowed into the country without a passport. Do you ever get the feeling you are not being watched?

So, if you are online in any way, you are watching and being watched. For the data-harvesters, the swing of the scythe never stops. A variety of colloquialisms are appropriate for those just logging in: “Watch out”, “watch it”, “watch your step”, “watch what you say”. If you wish to assist someone who requires such a warning, you “watch their back”. And we should heed all of those warnings.

Finally, we should not get too carried away with our newly acquired super power of being able to watch the watchers. Don’t underestimate exactly who it is watching you. The ruling elites don’t have binoculars and your license number jotted down somewhere, they command the most technologically advanced panopticon in history. Don’t be over-confident when it comes to your locks and guards. Those comforted by the security blanket of their VPNs and unregistered phones may be exhibiting the same psychology as very small children who think that by covering their eyes, no one else can see them. So, watch yourselves.

Britain’s Worst Amendment: The Online Safety Bill

Our new online safety laws will make the internet a safer place for everyone in the UK, especially children, while making sure that everyone can enjoy freedom of expression online.
From the summary of an early reading of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, 2022.

Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Hillaire Belloc, Matilda, 1907.

There are doubtless many technical differences between soft and hard totalitarianism, but one of them is surely the nature of power at its point of application. We might call the infringement of power as it impacts the individual “capillary”, after the tiny blood vessels that connect the body’s blood supply with its major organs and without which those organs could not function. Power is nothing without its application. Capillary power under soft totalitarianism does not take the form of night-sticks, tear-gas, and jail cells, but often presents as legislation. You will watch what you say in public if you know it may lead to your door being kicked in at 2am. But you will also be circumspect if the law of the land is engineered to outlaw certain opinions, and which, if infringed, could lose you your job, your bank account, and your credit rating. One such statutory instrument receives royal assent (and thus becomes UK law) this month, and King Charles III could be signing away his countrymen’s freedom of speech.

The Online Safety Bill: Emo

The Online Safety Bill (OSB), in its early parliamentary readings, was known as the “Online Harm Hill”, but re-branding was deemed necessary. (The word “harm” won’t go away, however, as we shall see). Governments have to sell legislation to the public in the same way as companies have to sell their product to potential customers, and there are rhetorical techniques that become familiar over time. Here, the stratagem is a classic advertising maxim: use children. With the OSB, the main point stressed to the British media — now a governmental policy delivery system — is the safety of children, who are thus used as a virtual human shield to make commentators reluctant to criticize the bill. This is the same country that endorses drag queen story hour in infant-school classes.

But the OSB cannot distract us with the little ones; it is aimed at adults. The first intimation of special interest comes 23 pages into a 255-page document, in Section 12, “Adults’ risk assessment duties”, which looks at the following:

5d. The level of risk of harm to adults presented by priority content that is harmful to adults which particularly affects individuals with a certain characteristic or members of a certain group. [Italics added].

This category will soon pull to the front of the pack of priorities, and the criteria for group membership will require close scrutiny as it is not inventoried. The issue of who might potentially be harmed is left vague:

“Section 18, 6b: “A member of a class or group of people with a certain characteristic targeted by the content.”  [Italics added].

Does this mean that if I go to a Morris Dancing Facebook page and tell them they look stupid in those bells and flowery hats, I have harmed them by the criterion above? We are entitled to expect definitions of these groups and characteristics. We do not get them. We’ll look instead at what might harm these characteristic groups, and at what form that harm might take.

It is always worthwhile, in the UK at least, to look at already existing laws which cover the same area and see if the new legislation has extended powers already in place. With the OSB, we can go back to two legislative instruments which both cover much of the same ground, and show that the OSB, in terms of its capability to repress free speech, has had what we might call “gain of function”.

The OSB includes many things that are already illegal, but these are distractions from the online activity the government is actually going after, and how they intend to close it down. Dan Milmo is Global Technology Editor at The Guardian, and in a piece on the OSB he notes that it has been revised from its draft version to make clearer exactly what it is that is being criminalised, or at least having its criminal status aligned with online communication. As he writes;

The DCMS (The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) has published an updated list of … content, which includes: revenge porn; promoting suicide; people smuggling; drug and weapons dealing; hate crime; fraud; encouraging suicide.

They seem particularly keen on suicide, mentioning it twice. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, incidentally, covers four areas which are pure private sector. The government should have nothing to do with them apart from ensuring financial probity.

It seems to me that these categories are covered by the Public Order Act of 1986, which states that an offence has been committed if a person “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting”.

But it is the second category which introduces what we might call “usable ambiguity”. A new offence, the paper states

…will make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as ‘grossly indecent’, ‘obscene’ or ‘indecent’. Instead it is based on the intended psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress, to the person who receives the communication, rather than requiring proof that harm was caused [Italics added].

This last sentence dispenses with “proof” of “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” and shifts its ground instead to the even more ambiguous category of “psychological harm”, which does not require any proof other than the perception of the individual.

Again, I thought this was already covered, this time by the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, but in fact this is a perfect example of re-engineering legislation. The 1988 Act finds an offence has been committed if, firstly, a communication has been sent via media which include electronic transmission and containing the following:

i. A message which is indecent or grossly offensive.

  1. A threat, or

iii. Information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender.

Although the 1988 Act goes on to consider the causing of “distress or anxiety to the recipient”, this reaction is measured against what the OSB is calling “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” fit only to be discarded. The checks and balances formerly provided by legal definition are thus being replaced by the unquantifiable measure of “psychological harm” which requires no proof. As always in these times of destabilization, emotio is allowed to outrank ratio.

The OSB specifically and explicitly does away with defined categories, and we are left in the now familiar situation of the perception of grievance, upset, or threat by the receiver of the communication rather than the weighing of these responses against existing objective categories whose presence can be proved or otherwise in a court of law. What is known as “standpoint epistemology” is now present in legislation passed by the mother of all Parliaments.

The British would be used to this had they paid more attention to 1999’s Macpherson Report on the death of Black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. This report stated that any incident is deemed racist if the “victim” felt it to be so, or any third party. Presumably this third party could be your protective mother or another gang member. It’s all about how people feel about things, not what they are and are agreed to be.

The whole idea of replacing objective evidence of harmful online content with subjective perception and its attendant degree of psychological harm makes meaning rudderless and subject to whim. What if I were to write a barbed email to my ex-girlfriend, rich in expletives and full of truths aggressively expressed, and she read it and snorted with laughter, pausing only to have a good laugh about the email with her new boyfriend before deleting it? As I intended to cause distress, have I committed a crime even though none occurred? Or suppose my email was mild and rather affectionate, although it did inform my ex that I had slept with her sister. Does she then put on her tragedienne mask and go out to look for a police station (if she can find one in the UK) to report a hate crime and online abuse, because she is so upset? If emotio is given precedence over ratio when crafting legal legislation, then the criminal law becomes mere mood music.

The government’s wily use of language throughout the passage of the OSB is, as always, worth forensic inspection. Nadine Dorries, boss of the CDMS during the early stages of the bill and described rather appropriately as “Digital Secretary”, wrote the following:

This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech.

Fitting, really. A shrine is where people gather to remember the dead.

As well as the strategic vagueness of “psychological harm” or, as the press release also phrases it, “ruining people’s lives” (the life of a sensitive plant on social media doesn’t take much to ruin it), there is a very explicit type of online Thoughtcrime which interests the new lawmakers. Here, as well as seeing what worries the government as a narrative-spoiler, we see every ideologue’s old and trusted friend: moral equivalence.

The new communications offences will strengthen protections from harmful online behaviours such as coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence; and deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid treatments.

Just look at the company kept by those anti-vaxxers! Rapists, killers and wife-beaters.

Many on the Right are frustrated that a nominally Conservative UK government should come down so hard on free speech, something that should be a core principle for them. But why should they care about the loss of such a liberty when it is the only luxury they can’t themselves enjoy? Three categories mentioned in the early-stage OSB as beneficiaries of the protection the Bill seeks to afford are MPs, celebrities and footballers. These people have no freedom of speech, far less than we little people do, and the Klieg lights of the media are trained on them at all times for potential gaffes or hasty Facebook posts. Of course, they don’t care if the peons go to jail for voicing an opinion. MPs have to spend every day clinging to the guard rail of the gravy train, scared to death that they might tweet the wrong thing and lose their grip.

Then there is the question of messaging, and the bill aims to end double-ended encryption because, as you have doubtless guessed, this creates “a safe haven for paedophiles”. Won’t someone think of the children? We will be advised to do that while government turns its attention to its real quarry, adults.

Quite apart from anything else, encryption is a feature which attracts users, and if your business niche loses its USP (unique selling point, the grail of marketing), then you are just another provider duking it out with the others, who now have everything you have. But more importantly, encryption is essential for many people in these Stasi-esque times. I use an encrypted service because I have it on good authority that young and zealous social justice warriors frequently work for at least one major email provider, and are not above cancelling accounts for Wrongthink found while they rifle through your private correspondence, or at least correspondence you thought was private.

Media Coverage

British press coverage has been interesting through the course of the OSB’s passage through parliament. Britain’s Daily Mail is one of the leading newspapers in the world now, largely because they adapted to online publishing quicker than their competitors. They are also deemed “Right-wing” by the Left, and always have been. The Mail made some noise about the dangers of the OSB during its early readings in 2022, but the downside pieces tailed off in Spring of this year, to be replaced by features by and about women worried about their children’s potential misadventures online. The last piece the Mail ran on the subject had the headline: “Becoming a mother has convinced me we MUST protect children from the ‘Wild West’ of social media”. The piece was written by Michelle Donelan. Ms. Donelan is not a journalist by trade, but rather Britain’s Technology Secretary, and thus in charge of the OSB. As I said earlier, government has to package and sell legislation like any other consumer good, and the British MSM double as their PR department.

Enforcement

Finally, the government has the problem of enforcement, and for that it has weaponized the Office of Communications (OfCom). This body, among its many other duties, oversees political partiality in broadcasting, which generally amounts to going after the likes of GB News — as I wrote about here at Occidental Observer — while giving the BBC a pass on everything. But now they are free to roam social media looking for suspicious ideas too freely expressed.

Here is confirmation, if such were needed, that big tech are now essentially governmental sub-contractors, very powerful NGOs to which the political class has outsourced enforcement — malicious examples of what the British used to call PPEs, or public/private enterprises. Big tech is now the Man from MiniTru. And the OSB is also a flick of the riding-crop on the rump of big tech to make sure it does what it is told:

Previously the firms would have been forced to take such content down after it had been reported to them by users but now they must be proactive and prevent people being exposed in the first place.

That’s quite a statement. A government is telling private companies not to listen to its audience, but to listen to the government. This is how soft totalitarianism hardens.

It might be assumed that the battle for free speech is being fought on level terrain on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not. While America still has the First Amendment woven into the very origins of its founding constitution, the United Kingdom has no such thing, and is about to add to its own body of regulatory law in less libertarian ways. The Magna Carta is often invoked as the British equivalent of the First Amendment, but this is wishful thinking once you see the denuded state of that founding document. Of the original 63 clauses present when King John signed Magna Carta in 1215, 59 have been repealed. The only important one left states that the government can’t throw you in jail without a trial. What the current government is doing to get round that is to widen the criteria of what can land you in court with the Crown as your opponent.

Conclusion

The OSB is a legislative instrument essentially intended, despite its pretensions, to police social media. Policing speech (or writing, if expressed online) is interesting in the UK. The fact that the actual British police are more likely to be found snooping online or participating in a gay pride march than doing any actual policing is duly noted, but this legislation will empower the state literally to act as commissars of what is said online, and by extension what is thought. It’s okay to like the British Blair — not Tony Blair but Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, which was a pen-name), but he must be lying in an unquiet grave.

The OSB is being presented as the benevolent state guarding its children from the predations of malevolent parties, but its own malevolence will be reserved for adults who speak out of turn. And this type of online infraction no longer leads merely to account suspension or deletion, but in some cases to jail.

We are used to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World being held up as a mirror to our current predicament. But there is a third novel in Britain’s dystopian trilogy. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a politician visits a jail to look for a subject for the Lodovico treatment which is designed to cure the offender of the impulse to violence. The reason the minister wants prisoners released safely back into society, and something of the sort is already happening in the UK, speaks to us: “Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”.

Canada Outlaws “Condoning, Denying or Downplaying” the Holocaust Mythos: Jewish Political Theology Enshrined in the Criminal Code

According to the OED, a “mythos” is a “traditional or recurrent narrative theme or pattern; a standard plot in literature.”  For many, the Holocaust Mythos conjures up the hope of universal redemption from the absolute evils of racism, anti-Semitism, and militant White nationalism.  Arising out of the allegedly planned extermination of the Jewish people by “Nazi” Germany and its collaborators, the story has acquired canonical status in officially-constructed “memory cultures” throughout the West.  In Canada, where the politically correct Trudeau regime clearly craves recognition as a humanitarian superpower, the government has followed in the footsteps of Germany and several other European states by enshrining the official narrative in the Criminal Code, s. 319.  Henceforth

(2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust

  • (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
  • (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

Even before the criminal law was amended to outlaw the “[w]ilful promotion of antisemitism,” schools, universities, churches, and the media in Canada routinely stigmatize anyone who publicly dares to doubt the truth of the Holocaust Mythos.  The Canadian parliament, therefore, meekly echoed Jewish historian Alon Confino who describes the Holocaust as “a foundational event that tests the limits of our humanity.”  Another Jewish historian, Matthew Feldman, acknowledges that the received interpretation of “the Holocaust” as “history’s greatest crime” emanates a quintessentially religious aura.  No Member of Parliament wanted to be seen “profaning” the memory of Jewish victims of “the supreme example of human inhumanity” by voting against the proposed amendments.  For its part, the Trudeau government can be confident that enforcement of its postmodern anti-blasphemy law will not be impeded by the much-hyped Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  For a long-time Charter sceptic such as myself, this is no surprise.

After the massive violations of a host of fundamental rights and civil liberties supposedly “guaranteed” by the Charter during the recent Covid pandemic, suppression of presumptive rights to form and publicly express controversial opinions on the history of the Third Reich is about par for the course.  Is it merely coincidence that this restriction of free speech reflects the power and serves the interests of one particular, highly-visible, economically well-endowed, socially privileged, and politically powerful ethnic group?  Curiously enough, at least one prominent Jewish spokesman fears that to make “condoning, denying, or downplaying the Holocaust” a criminal offence will not be good for the Jews.  Nevertheless, Carolyn Yeager, an American blogger of German ancestry, has documented the widespread support for such legislation within the organized Jewish community in Canada.

When it was announced, the text of the Trudeau regime’s proposed amendment to the Criminal Code was buried in Annex 3 of the federal budget papers presented to Parliament in the spring of 2022.  By the end of June, the government’s amendments had sailed through Parliament as part of a long and complex budget bill, receiving royal assent without debate on their merits (much to the relief of MPs, one suspects).  The current legislation adopts the definition of the Holocaust originally proposed in a private member’s bill blatantly mirrored by the government measure; namely:

Holocaust means the planned and deliberate state-sponsored persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945

As it happens, such a definition has been repeatedly “denied” or “downplayed” by the so-called “functionalist” school of mainstream historians who portray the Holocaust as an evolving reaction by bureaucrats, military personnel, and collaborators to events during the war years rather than the product of an “intentional,” “planned” or “deliberate” scheme directed from the top down.  It remains to be seen whether s. 319(3)(1)(c) will provide an adequate defence for someone publicly promoting a “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust.  According to this provision, no-one shall be convicted if “the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true.”  This defence does not, of course, prevent prosecutions in which the process is itself intended to serve as the punishment.  Outside the respectable realm of decorous academic debate, however, renegade “revisionists” risk the full measure of legal retribution.

Why, then, is the foundational event of Christianity, the paschal mythos surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, less deserving of protected legal status than an officially prescribed, crypto-theocratic single-sentence story arising out of the Second World War?  Is it merely coincidental that the Holocaust Mythos features a narrative arc remarkably similar to the Easter story?  Although set in the twentieth-century, the Shoah is a story of undeserved Jewish suffering in the “death camps” of Eastern Europe followed by their triumphant, ethno-religious resurrection in the promised land of Israel.

In Canada from now on, anyone publicly “condoning,” “denying,” or even “downplaying” the Jewish Holocaust narrative faces the threat of two years imprisonment.  This repressive measure was announced shortly after Christian pastors were charged merely for holding Easter Sunday church services in contravention of public health orders during the contrived Covid “emergency.”  When contrasted with the obsequious reverence accorded to contemporary Jewish sensibilities, such blatant disrespect for age-old Christian rituals represents a remarkable challenge to the political theology of every Anglo-Protestant church.

Are the truth claims of the official Holocaust Mythos any more or less contestable than the biblical and ecclesiastical narratives concerning the historical Jesus?  One often hears the claim that “the Holocaust” is the best documented “event” in human history.  But when, where, and by whom have the relevant and reliable documents been subjected to free, fair, and public forensic cross-examination and opened to continuing debate between all interested parties?

How did we reach the present sorry state of affairs? The answer to that question requires a fundamental critique of contemporary Anglo-Protestant political theology and, in particular, that of the Anglican church.  After all, given a literal definition of “political” as meaning “affairs of state,” any aspect of the theology professed by the Church of England is political in the sense that it is an established, state church.  True, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Anglican churches in the old White dominions were not state churches, but their overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon membership by and large trusted their governments and, following their lead, accepted the declarations of war against Germany in 1914 and 1939 without significant demur.

Moreover, in Great Britain, the bishops of the Church of England were members of the House of Lords.  De facto, the government of the day decided who were to be identified as enemies of the British people and punished as such.  Assigning guilt for the state of war between Germany and the British Empire was a matter of state policy.  In both the Versailles treaty (aka, the Diktat) imposed on Germany in 1919 and the Nuremburg trials following Germany’s defeat in WWII, the imperial and dominion governments upheld the charge that Germany alone was guilty of waging a war of aggression.

But political theology denotes more than the everyday activities of an established church complying with state policies.  According to the German jurist Carl Schmitt, politics, in the deepest sense, has to do with the existential distinction between friend and enemy.  Because the Church was not an autonomous ecclesiastical polity of, by, and for the English people, friends and enemies of the British state were, ipso facto, friends or enemies of the Church.

Unfortunately, neither the WASP laity nor the ecclesiastical leadership of the Church of England, either “at home” or in the dominions, have done much to defend and preserve the ethno-religious dimensions of Anglican identity.  This stands in stark contrast to the well-known ethnocentrism of the Jewish people.  By enshrining the Holocaust Mythos in the Criminal Code, the Canadian government has embraced a quintessentially Jewish political theology.

Dirk Moses, the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in his well-received book on The Problems of Genocide, identifies the narrative structure of the Holocaust Mythos as “the archetypical genocide” in international law. He observes that both law and popular culture present “the image of the largely agentless and innocent—that is unpolitical—Jewish victim [as] the ‘ideal’ or ‘exemplary’ victim.” Orthodox Jews typically “emphasize…the traditional religiosity of Jewish victims” and “[t]his theological interpretation has permeated general commemoration, which thereby constitutes a political theology.”  The officially-prescribed, global “memory culture” adopts that particularistic political theology whenever it associates Jews with “the archetypical and universal form of victimhood”.

There is no denying the particularistic, ethno-religious significance of the Holocaust Mythos.  This was evident, for example, when a cross-party trio of Jewish MPs rose in the House of Commons to offer their fulsome support during the second-reading of Tory M.P. Kevin Waugh’s now redundant private member’s bill to criminalize “Holocaust denial” in Canada.  The Trudeau regime, of course, has a broader agenda, aiming to burnish its self-proclaimed credentials as the first post-national state.  The government, therefore, will probably “deny” or “downplay” the ethno-religious favouritism inherent in its decision to sanctify Jewish political theology by force of law.

Whatever the consequences of that decision in Canada however, Anglo-Protestants throughout the Anglosphere now have a rare opportunity to consider how their ethno-religious interests might be adversely affected by the criminalization of public dissent from the officially-prescribed Holocaust narrative.  We should pray that the opportunity to reflect upon who “we” are, where “we” came from, and perhaps even where “we” are going will not be missed.  Sadly, however, Anglo-Protestants, especially Anglicans, have embraced a liberal humanitarianism that now makes it all but impossible to distinguish between “us” and “them.”