AND THERE THE JEWS!
from A PROPHET AT HOME, Chapter 5
by Douglas Reed. 1941
Editor‚¬â„¢s Preface: It was my intention to have this chapter from Douglas Reed‚¬â„¢s 1941 book, A Prophet At Home typed up and published online for November 11th to coincide with Remembrance Day. It didn‚¬â„¢t happen but readers will still benefit from what the author has to say about conditions in Britain in 1939-40 as they relate to those of today in Canada and the USA as well as elsewhere in Europe, etc.
Reed returned to England in 1939 from the Continent after spending a number of years in Berlin, Vienna and Prague working as Chief correspondent for the London Times. In that capacity he was privy to a panoramic view of the political landscape in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia leading up to the resumption of the World War in 1939.
This particular chapter from his final book of a three-part series that began in 1938 with Insanity Fair followed in ’39 by Disgrace Abounding is extremely relevant to our own times and bears close reading. Seventy years have passed yet the information contained in this chapter appears to be in a time-warp as if the conditions which precipitated it somehow were frozen in time. As such it now stands as a striking historical record, clearly illustrating the degree of power and influence which the Zionist Jews of his day wielded over the British parliament and the British press.
Concomitant with this fact and more important in terms of today is the evidence which Reed provides that shows how the Jews of the 1930s were already consummate masters of the immigration game.
It has been a contention of mine for a number of years that the Zionist Jews who control Canada‚¬â„¢s PM, House of Parliament and Judiciary are using their illegitimate influence over government to manipulate and control immigration policies; ones which have been having a detrimental effect upon Canadian society for decades and which also dovetail fully with the Zionist agenda of destroying all nation states in the world in order to facilitate the implementation of their Zionist one world government.
Immigration, like the control of the media, banking, pharmaceutical conglomerates, major corporations including oil and gas and water and cultural and educational institutions, is a vital part of the program to destroy the democratic framework upon which sovereign nations are built and the Zionist Jews have been working this tool here in Canada and elsewhere with deftness and surgical precision for many, many decades. This thesis that immigration policies are being exploited for partisan Zionist purposes should become obvious to any reader who takes the time to study what Reed has to say about the invasion of England by the Jews of Eastern Europe, or as the Jewish media of the day was wont to call them, ‚¬Ëœfriendly aliens‚¬â„¢; an endearing term to describe the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who flooded into Great Britain during the years leading up to the second act of the World War to take advantage of the precarious political conditions then existing in the British Isles.
There is much more though in this chapter that helps to explain some of the current behaviour on the part of today‚¬â„¢s extremist Zionist Jews who are going to great lengths to deflect the growing criticism of their doctrine of supremacist discrimination and racism that is now becoming almost rampant on the one venue for free information still not entirely controlled by their excessive and pervasive power ‚ the Internet.
Reed explains how the Jews of his day used their ‚¬Å”anti-Semitism‚¬Â card to full effect whenever anyone challenged the government’s and the media‚¬â„¢s blatant discrimination aimed at the English and the Arabs while all the while consistently favouring the ‚¬Ëœfriendly alien.
Given the fact that today, seven decades later, Canadians in the majority still haven‚¬â„¢t grasped the fact that their ‚¬Å”mainstream‚¬Â media and their government are absolutely controlled and manipulated to suit this extremist Zionist Jew agenda, Reed‚¬â„¢s prophetic warning of 1941 stands forth in even greater relief as a hallmark to be heeded by anyone concerned with knowing the truth about who is really pulling the strings of our Members of Parliament in Ottawa.
The parallels between Reed‚¬â„¢s description of the behaviour of the Members of the British Parliament respecting the ‚¬Ëœfriendly aliens‚¬â„¢ during a period of critical danger to the nation as a whole and that of our own parliament today is as uncanny as it is frightening to contemplate. It begs the question as to whether the term ‚¬Å”change‚¬Â is in fact a reality or merely a ruse to soothe the ignorant citizenry who still are brainwashed by the Zionist Jew tube.
Read Reed and you will discover why censorship and draconian legislation like sec. 13 today are of such paramount importance to the Zionist Jews and why the extremist Zionist Jew must continually re-create this false illusion now being coined as the ‚¬Å”new anti-Semitism‚¬Â by such Zionist Jew zealots as our former federal Liberal Attorney-General Mr. Irwin Cotler and being flogged upon an unsuspecting public by the likes of B‚¬â„¢nai Brith Canada and the Canadian Jewish Congress and even committees formed from our Members of Parliament.
Anyone wishing to access what remains of Reed‚¬â„¢s works is encouraged to go to abebooks.com where you will still find a few of his works available. His most highly recommended work of course is the 1956 edition of The Controversy of Zion which readers will find online at RadicalPress.com.
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AND THERE THE JEWS!
from A PROPHET AT HOME, Chapter 5
by Douglas Reed. 1941
DOUGLAS REED
A provoking thought: if Rupert Brooke, whose poetry, as Lord Halifax said in his ‘This is a conflict of youth against youth’ speech, so inspired the generation of 1914, if this Rupert Brooke had not died, with about a million other Britishers, in the 1914-1918 section of the war which has now been resumed, he would have needed to revise the poem he wrote in the Cafe des Westens, in the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, in 1912. He wrote that poem sitting at the same table with a friend of mine, Rothay Reynolds, who in the years between the two sections of the World War struggled hard to fulfill the difficult task of being Berlin Correspondent of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, and when Rupert Brooke had finished he turned to Rothay Reynolds and said, ‘I have made this cafe famous’, which was true.
I well remember how that song of England wrung an Englishman’s heart, that is, the heart of a very young and fervent Englishman, who took on trust nearly everything he was told about his native country, of which he had seen but little, in the 1914-1918 war. But if Rupert Brooke had lived in 1939, or thereabouts, he would have found himself out of touch with the taste of the times. For his poem, ‘Grantchester,’ begins:
Du lieber Gott!
Here am I, sweating, sick and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German jews
Drink beer around ‚ and there the dews…
Well, well, well. How times have changed. Rupert Brooke is dead; the war-to-end-war has gone and the war-to-continue-war is simmering nicely; but the relative position of Jews and dews seems to have been reversed, or have we now both? Rupert Brooke, the singer of the generation of 1914, seemed to find the Jews in Berlin a thought unsympathetic and none took it amiss of him that he said so; indeed, the thought of those temperamental beer-drinking Jews in Berlin helped to fortify the faith of the young Englishman of 1914 in ‘the things he was fighting for’. Now we, he thought, have dews, and we are going to keep them.
But if Rupert Brooke had written twenty-five years later he would have known that those two lines must come out, or else he would have had to find a fresh rhyme for dews, for by the time the World War in which he died was resumed no Englishman of his class and kind would have thought of writing anything which would set the critics yelping the dread name ‘anti-Semite’.
, , , , , , , , , , , , RUPERT BROOKE – BRITISH POET
By the time the World War was resumed, indeed, the general understanding had come to be that the Jews of Berlin were the most valuable citizens of that town and that we were very lucky indeed to have them, because they were so much cleverer than ourselves. By some further process of reasoning which was a little outside my comprehension, the general understanding seemed also to be that we should fight Germany to enable these people, whom we had been fortunate enough to obtain, to return there as soon as possible; this, as far as I could gather, was among ‘the things’ we were about to fight for.
When I returned to England, on the eve of the new war which had become almost inevitable, I brought back with me a particular interest in this question, because for many years, since 1933, I had noticed, with growing misgiving, that, chiefly through the very great influence which the Jews in all countries exercised in the interest of their co-religionists, this relatively small aspect of an enormous problem was being set out of all proportion to the whole, that the entire wood was disappearing behind one tree.
It was patent that the number of Jews who would suffer from Hitlerism would never be more than a very small fraction of the entire number of sufferers; Czechs, Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Hollanders, Belgians, Frenchmen and Britishers, I knew, would suffer and die in thousands, in not millions, because of Hitler and yet the sufferings of the Jews, through the power wielded by other Jews over the press, the films and the stage, were presented as the greatest and most terrible thing in all this stupendous tragedy.
The film, ‘The Great Dictator’, produced by Charles Chaplin in peaceful Hollywood is a case in point. The ignorant and credulous seeing this astute production, which is half first-class humour and half very subtle propaganda, would gain the impression, similarly conveyed by many other films sent out from the same source, that the only people who suffered ill-treatment in Germany were the Jews, and that the Nazi Storm Troopers spent their entire time beating them up. Yet the number of Jews who suffered ill-treatment in Germany, save for the one violent outbreak in November 1938 when a Nazi diplomat was murdered in Paris by a young Jew, was never more than a small fraction of the whole; the great bulk of victims and martyrs was composed of German non-Jews and of non-Jews in the countries overrun by Hitler.
Further, I seemed to see, as I watched the great movement of Jews from Germany to Britain and the British Dominions (many of them Jews who had come from Eastern Europe to Germany during the last war), that the mass of compassion mobilized by the great publicity machine at their disposal was being exploited to gain them employment, in large numbers, in countries whose men would soon be going off to war, and, with the picture of Berlin after the war of 1914-18 in my mind, I greatly feared this development.
For the Jews as I had seen them in many European countries in those between-wars years of full Jewish emancipation and freedom in no way resembled the Ghetto-community of benevolent, mankind-loving people who only wished to be left in peace and poverty that was shown in the Chaplin film (incidentally, there were no ghettoes in Germany). Rather had I found them, when all the gates of opportunity were opened wide to them, to practise that very doctrine which they so reviled and detested when it was turned against them by Hitler ‚ discrimination. Discrimination against Gentiles.
In the trades and industries and professions to which they penetrated, and ultimately controlled through the power of finance, they were most resolute in the progressive exclusion of Gentiles by methods of extremely ruthless inter-collaboration. The figures are available and are irrefutable; such a state of affairs could not have come about by accident.
Moreover, this seemed to me quite natural, for it accorded with the teaching of the Jewish faith. And this seemed to me to be at once the weakest and the crucial point in the Jewish case, and one which all their champions and apologists implacably ignored, merely yelping in answer to it, ‘Anti-Semite’; that their religion was one of discrimination. The anti-Jewish teaching of National Socialism was but the direct inversion of the anti-Gentile teaching of the Hebrew religion, and this statement of the case cannot be refuted; it never is refuted, but is always ignored.
The Jews did not put their doctrines into practice through the medium of the concentration camp ‚ they could not, because they were always numerically too weak in any particular country physically to subdue the majority. They used another medium ‚ money and the power it gives, which can be enormously powerful in the hands even of a small minority if that minority is compact enough and if all of its members understand the great idea.
So much for the brief background to the Jewish question which an Englishman brought back with him to England after many years in Germany and in other parts of Europe. Before I tell you what I saw in this country I want to kill some of the more meaningless phrases which are in current use, even by persons reputed to be of the highest education and intellect, in this controversy.
The first is ‘anti-Semitism’. The word is used every day by millions of people who have read or heard it somewhere and have no notion what it means. On such a basis of ignorance do great debates proceed. The power, so strangely wielded, of the Press and film today is so great that you need only to shout this word long and loud enough at the credulous masses for them to think that it is something akin to rabies or leprosy; that is probably why it was coined and thrown into the the discussion.
As far as I know ‘Semite’ is a word describing a member of any one of a number of Mediterranean or Near Eastern races, for instance, the Turks, Moors, Arabs and Abyssinians, among others. I have nothing whatever against Abyssinians, Arabs, Moors and Turks, because they are never likely to harm me, though I should have been strongly opposed to the Turks at the time when they sought to impose their religion of discrimination against the Gentile peoples they had conquered in Europe. I should probably have joined a Crusade against them, which means, as I believe, a campaign, waged under the sign of the cross, against a religion of discrimination. For the same reason I am ready to join a crusade of words against any other religion of discrimination which, as I think, pursues ends of discrimination while seeking always to conceal this fact. I see no difference in this respect between National Socialism and Judaism save that National Socialism has eighty million bayonets and Judaism has a lot of money.
So that of ‘anti-Semitism’, a word uttered so many millions of times in recent years, you may say that there ain’t no such a thing, and you have been fooled, for want of examining the words you use. There is anti-Gentilism; and there is its reaction, anti-Judaism. I have several interesting letters from Jews who endorse this statement of the position.
The other lunatic phrase which parties to this discussion, and allegedly learned parties at that, are wont to throw into it is ‘racial discrimination’. In a debate in Parliament about new regulations issued by the British Government to restrict sales of land by Arabs to Jews in Palestine (an extremely important debate this, of which I shall speak again) one of the stoutest parliamentary champions of the Jewish cause, a Mr. Noel-Baker, fiercely attacked this ‘discrimination on racial grounds’.
The Jews and the Arabs are of the same race; both are Semitic. If debates in Parliament about the Jewish question are carried on at this level, they are of little value, and the representatives of English constituencies where a deal needs putting right would do better to begin at home.
When I returned to England my eyes told me, as I wandered about London, that the number of Jews who had come to this country was very great. I knew that before, because I had seen many of them depart, from various countries, but how many were there?
This is a question to which not even the most diligent research gives more than an approximate answer. As the untutored African negro said, there are one, two, three, a great many. The number of aliens ‘registered with the police’ in October 1939, according to Sir John Anderson, was 238,074, and of these some 150,000 were nominally of German, Australian, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Polish and Russian nationality, which means that the great majority of them were Jews. The bulk of these, again, were new-comers.
But the number of these people ‘registered with the police’ gives little clue to the number who are actually here, for, from the very meagre records of recent proceedings in our police courts, I have kept notes of:
An Austrian Jew who, when he was detected by the police, was ‘making a profit of 16 pounds a week from a greengrocery business at Leeds and had been in England since 1937, when he landed from a Belgian fishing-boat’;
A Russian Jew who was charged at Old Street with failing ‘in or about 1916’ to report a change of address to the police. From 1916 to 1840 he had been in England unknown to the authorities! Asked where he had been since 1916 he said, ‘I have been out of work and could not come to report as I had no money’!
A German Jew, who was supposed to have come to England in 1933 and left again in in 1934, but in 1940 was discovered to be living here under the name of a British soldier killed in 1917 whose name appeared on a war memorial in a Sussex village; counsel for this man said he had obtained a copy of the dead soldier’s birth certificate ‘thinking it was probably himself’!
A Polish Jew who came to England in 1931 and was warned to leave in 1932; discovered in 1939, he had been living in this country for seven years unknown to the authorities!
Two Polish Jewish rabbis who were convicted of harbouring ten German Jews, nine Austrian Jews and nine stateless Jews without registering them with the police!
And so on.
The number of these newcomers to England, therefore, is a thing to guess about. What happens to them? The poorer ones, as I have shown, ‘open a greengrocery business in Leeds’, or go to staff those secret workshops of lowly-paid garment workers, in Bethnal Green, Hendon, Golders Green and Willesden which have sometimes received casual mention in the London Press, which defy discovery by the inspectors sent out under the Factory Acts (designed to protect workers), and supply cheap refugee labour to the price-cutting tailors.
This group of hidden refugees represents a threat to native labour.
But what happens to the thousands ‘registered with the police’? In respect of these the promise was ‘repeatedly given’ before the present war (to quote a reminder to Sir John Anderson from Mr. Raikes) ‘that they would be admitted for temporary refuge pending re-emigration’. After the outbreak of the war, which was not not difficult to foresee, Sir John Anderson stated that in fact they would not, save possibly in ‘individual cases’, re-emigrate, but would stay in this country, where their services would be ‘utilized in ways which will be advantageous to the national effort and will not conflict with the interests of British subjects’.
Thus was the principle established that these thousands of newcomers, who had come to England as transmigrants, should remain here and be allowed to take employment, always under the provision that this should not ‘conflict with the interests of British subjects’ ‚ a provision I shall subsequently discuss. But what of their maintenance in England?
No charge under this head was to have fallen on the British taxpayer. This was another of the oft-proclaimed safeguards, like those about re-emigration and non-employment, under which their original admission to this country had been allowed. In each case some ‘individual’ had guaranteed to be responsible for their maintenance, but by October 1939 Sir John Anderson announced that these guarantees had been given, not to the Government, but to ‘certain voluntary organizations’ (in practice, this meant almost entirely Jewish organizations). Only these voluntary organizations, said Sir John Anderson, could enforce the guarantees, and these organizations were satisfied that ‘in some cases the guarantor ought to be released of his obligation’. In those cases the voluntary organizations would undertake the whole responsibility for the care of the refugee from their own funds.
By February of 1940, however, the Government had decided that the ‘voluntary organizations’ could not bear the burden which private guarantors had originally pledged themselves to bear and asked the approval of Parliament for a grant of ,£100,000 to these organizations, to cover the period from September to December of 1939, and of ,£1 for every ,£1 spent by these organizations thereafter, up to a total of ,£27,000 a month.
Time then marched on, and by November of 1940 the Government announced that the ‘voluntary organizations’ had actually received ,£430,000 up to the end of September 1940, that a further ,£375,000 was required to carry them over until April 1940, and that the Government would in future pay ‘100 per cent’ (which means all) of the amounts expended on the maintenance of refugees, as well as 75 per cent of the administration expenses.
Thus, by this time both the original ‘private guarantors’ and the ‘voluntary organizations’ had been relieved of financial responsibility for the refugees, which devolved upon the British taxpayer; the number of refugees, as is shown by the cases I have quoted, was problematical; and they were entitled, with the permission of the Minister of Labour, to take employment at a time when the entire young manhood of the country had been called up for military service.
I have given this brief sketch so that a few people, at least, may gain some idea of the position of the Jewish immigrants to this country. There are a very large number of them. Very few of them, now, will ever leave again. The British taxpayer cares for them. In practice they seem to enjoy greater privileges than the native inhabitants, since they are ineligible for military service and will therefore presumably survive the war, while they are eligible for employment, which is easy to obtain when all the young men of this country have been called away, and when they take this it is called ‘helping the national war effort’, whereas if John Smith gets a job that is just called getting a job.
To have achieved so fair a deal as this, they must quite clearly have had the support of very powerful forces indeed.
I have shown that the several safeguards attached to their entry to the country have all proved illusory, and the solid-sounding promise that they would only be allowed to take employment if this ‘does not conflict with the interests of British citizens’ subsequently proved just as illusory. for one thing, the British citizens, in large numbers, are away at the war and cannot look after their interests. To take the job of a Britisher who is called up may, debatably, count as ‘helping the national war effort’, but what of the Britisher when he returns, and his peace effort?
The position may be alleviated a little, if they do not return, by the fact that some of the more influential of these people, after staying just long enough in England to proclaim that they were a hundred per cent British, found means when war broke out to transmigrate further, and became for the nonce a hundred per cent American. Such was the case with a much-publicized writer who saw the light of day in Rumania, then spent some years in Germany as a hundred per cent German, came to England after the advent of Hitler and announced simultaneously that he still loved Germany but was a hundred per cent British, and then moved on to confer the boon of his citizenship upon the United States.
Such cases as are known do not suggest that the provisions about ‘the interest of British citizens’ actually operates, in the granting of employment to these newcomers.
For instance, in the early days of the resumed war (I am forestalling my narrative a little, for the sake of coherency) the Ministry of Information decided to make a film called ’49th Parallel’. The 49th parallel is the boundary separating Canada from the United States, an attractive location for film-making when war is being waged all over Europe.
This film was to have been the most stupendous contribution to our war effort, and Miss Elizabeth Bergner, who was born, I believe, within the limits of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, who say the heyday of her fame in pre-Hitler Germany, who then came to England and who at some function for Austrian patriots paid the last Austrian Minister, Sir George Franckenstein, the eloquent tribute, in her delightful English, that he was ‘a passionate Austrian’, Miss Gergner was chosen to play the lead ‚ and crossed the Atlantic.
The Ministry of Information advanced the sum of ,£22,086 13s. 7d., towards this film, which has not yet been completed; whether it will be completed in time to give that enormous impetus to our war effort which was confidently expected from it seems doubtful. A large number of other people, including Miss Bergner’s husband, were given for the purpose of going to Canada to make this film those coveted exit permits which a British subject, having no particular contribution to offer to the country’s ware effort, might vainly seek to obtain for his children. I believe one or two of them have returned.
Why the film was so long delayed is a thing not yet explained. Miss Gergner, in a radio-telephonic interview from pleasant Hollywood (she seemingly did not penetrate farther towards the frozen north than Winnipeg), intimated to a London newspaper that she felt she had a grievance about the whole business. I do not know what part she was intended to play, but having the most pleasant memories of her personality, and of her charmingly squirming manner of expressing herself, I wonder whether she was better suited than any British actress of the day for the part of some hardy Anglo-Saxon woman pioneer.
However, in this case the Ministry of Labour was apparently satisfied that there was no conflict of interests of any British player; the Ministry of Information thought that the good which would accrue to the country’s cause was worth ,£22,000; and the Passport and Permit Department of the Foreign Office considered the undertaking of sufficient ‘national importance’ for the hardy and one hundred per cent British pioneers, to be allowed to cross the Atlantic.
I have quoted only this one case. There are many others, great and small, which might make a sane patriot wonder sadly if all was well.
Not one member of Parliament has ever risen to protest against this kind of thing, which in its patent unfairness is in such shrieking contrast to the clean white faith and spirit of the millions of Britishers, and of their allies, who are fighting all over the world, on land, at sea and in the air, to retrieve the world.
But the attitude of the British Parliament in the question of the Jews is curious. When great problems of the British Empire are under discussion the House is sometimes almost empty; speakers address twenty, forty, sixty of their fellow-members, in a House containing 615. The Colonial Empire, with its 50,000,000 inhabitants, is discussed but once a year in this House, and at the last such debate there were never more than a hundred members present. On one famous occasion Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, as Dominions Minister, tried hard to awaken interest in important colonial problems. ‘We are combating sleeping sickness,’ he said ‚ and the few members present roared with laughter, for one of the Government whips was sleeping quietly beside Mr. MacDonald on the Front Bench. The noise of their mirth even awoke him.
A marvelous picture of England in wartime, of front-line life ‚ for are we not ‘all in the front line’ this time, even those on the Front Bench?
Yet this House, with its 600 odd (and I mean, odd) members earning a minimum of ,£600 a year, with its indifference to the domestic scandals of England ‚ for if you explore the wastes of Hansard you will find that the party elected to represent the working-class seemingly has as little interest as the Tory Party in the derelict areas and the slums ‚ this House can at any moment be stung to impassioned activity by the mere mention of the word ‘Jews’!
This was the most curious and most perturbing result of my study of the Parliamentary debates between the resumption of the World War, in 1939, and the end of 1940. As I have said, such great Imperial problems as that of the colonies received only the briefest and most transient attention and aroused but the most languid interest in a sparsely attended House.
The matter of the ‘friendly aliens’ was given four full debates; the Palestine debate, in which it cropped up in another form, was in reality a fifth; and at Question Time hundreds upon hundreds of questions were put on behalf of this group of people. I think, if a close analysis of the debates were made, it might be found that this subject occupied more parliamentary time, in the the British House of Commons, than any other single question, during the period I have mentioned!
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , THE ‘FRIENDLY ALIEN’
A perusal of the Parliamentary Reports for this period will show anyone who may be interested that there is a number of Members in the House who seemingly devote their entire attention to this matter. Elected by British voters and paid by the British taxpayer, their constituents seem in effect to be practically without representation in the British Parliament; while the group of immigrants in whose interests they expend so much energy is represented out of all proportion to its size and value to this country.
This state of affairs led to the most absurd extravagances, especially during the summer months of 1940, when Britain passed through her greatest ordeal for many centuries. A patriotic Englishman, reading the Parliamentary Reports of the period, might clutch his head to find that the sufferings of his fellow-countrypeople were of small account compared with those of a group of alien immigrants.
Scores of thousands of British soldiers, cast into the enemy’s hands by the collapse of the French and Belgians on their flanks, were prisoners in Germany. Thousands of Britishers from the Channel Islands lost everything they had and found themselves, overnight, homeless and destitute refugees in England. Thousands more who had been earning their livelihoods in Germany, in France, in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, were in like plight.
In Nice, reported The Times, ‘several hundred British subjects, mostly elderly retired people, have been sleeping on borrowed mattresses in the streets and are for the most part penniless and starving’. The lot of ‘the British refugees’ [subsequently alleviated] was even mentioned, once, in The Times, which said that letters reaching it referred ‘with some bitterness, to the lack of assistance; according to one correspondent British subjects who followed the British Ambassador’s advice and left Germany when war appeared inevitable regret bitterly their action, and say that, at least, the Nazis would have fed them’.
Not only that, but this country awaited, day and night, an invasion which, if it had succeeded, would have meant the submergence of the British nation for centuries, and Britons of all classes, armed with shotguns or unarmed, lay on the coasts and in the hedgerows after their working hours to defend their native land, if they could. Not only that, but the moment was approaching for London and the other great cities to be mercilessly bombed, and as this was plain to foresee the urgent need of the hour was to prepare deep shelters, health services and food distribution, and the removal of women and children to safe places.
Yet, if you wade through the columns of Hansard for those days, you will find but meagre reference to these things, but you will find pages of protest and expostulation on behalf of ‘the friendly aliens’. In terms of despairing incomprehension (‘How can anybody be so stupid?’) speaker after speaker asked why the services of these ‘friendly aliens’ were not immediately used to promote our ‘war effort’.
Yet at this time more than a million friendly Britons languished in unemployment; hardly a Member thought of them, or troubled to ask why their services were not used to promote this same ‘war effort’., That ‘friendly aliens’ were denied employment was proclaimed to be disgusting and even anti-patriotic; the denial of employment to native citizens of the country was seemingly thought to be natural. The internment of ‘friendly aliens’ was declared to be inhumane, intolerable, incompatible with all British tradition, and ‘incalculably harmful to us in American eyes’. The internment without charges or trial, of British subjects was generally accepted to be a necessary measure in war-time and, during all this windy, ignorant and prejudiced debate, hardly a voice challenged it.
The discussion reached its peak of insincerity in the debate of July 10th, 1940. At that time the plight of Britain was desperate. France had collapsed, Britain stood alone, and Britain was unready. The months, July, August and September of 1940, were the most dreadful in British history since 1066, and hardly anybody in this country knows, as I know, because I know what the Germans had in mind, what Britain was spared through the fact, or miracle, that the remnant of the Royal Air Force was still strong enough to inflict such damage on Goring’s fighters and bombers that the invasion had repeatedly to be postponed and now cannot succeed if it is attempted.
On that day in July the issue was not yet decided, and the threat of an indescribable fate hung heavily in the sultry sky. In such a crisis the debate about the ‘friendly aliens’ was resumed, with all the extravagant arguments and statements which I have already summarized. The voice of England was hardly heard in this debate, which might have been held upon another planet for all the relation it had with the dire realities in this country at that time.
Only Mrs. Tate, of Frome, came forward to say:
While we sympathize with some of these people, our first consideration should be for our own people and the cause for which they are fighting. You have no right to risk, by one hour, the fight against the awful power which is enveloping the world… In the case of certain Members in this House, one has, only to say the word ‘Jew’ and they lose all sense of reason….
and Mr. Logan, of the Scotland Division of Liverpool, to say:
I have heard tonight much commiseration with alien refugees, but I have heard very little about the danger to our own country and the protection that is necessary for our own people… In my home today we are suffering from the fact that two members of the family have had to go away again… I am beginning to think that the strong arm of Britain and the loyalty of our sons here and abroad are the only things we can count as solid. Moral values are of little account. Why should we trouble if one or two, or a thousand, suspects are interned if this land of ours is safe? We have had no knowledge of an invasion in our day. Only the history books record a conqueror coming here. But we know our men who returned from Dunkirk, and we know of the wonderful work of our airmen. That ought to teach the House the value of courage and teach it to be self-confident and to look after Number One first, giving protection to those who come to our shores only when we know they deserve it… We have in this country sentimentalists concerned about every country except their own, and always pleading for some poor creature in one part of the world or another; but I reckon that I, too, have something to complain of. I represent a particular section who, according to some people, are disloyal; but they are not. There are people in my streets who were in the Dunkirk business. The streets in which I live are the poorest in Liverpool, but some of those streets were decorated with flags and festoons and ‘God Save The King’ ‚ a thing unheard of in the Irish parts of Liverpool. Do not let us have so much sentimentality. I have heard of women without children talking about how to keep families together. [This seemed to have been a thrust at certain other speakers in the debate] We are having too much of this kind of sentimentality in this House. Let those who know something of the subject speak on it. When your sons are going out and your neighbours are going out, it is time to look into what the Government are doing… I hope the Government will be loyal to the country first and generous to their friends afterwards.
This was the reply to the debate of Sir Edward Grigg, Joint Under-Secretary of State for War:
I have listened to the greater part of this debate and am bound to say that I have never been more greatly struck by one of the great qualities of the House of Commons, and that is its power of detachment. There has been going on this afternoon, I suppose, one of the greatest air battles of the war. At this moment ‚ I do not know whether it is so ‚ bombers may be over many of our towns. Tonight thousands of our forces will be on the alert waiting for an attack which may come in several places at dawn. That army, after all, with the Navy and the Air Force, stands between this country and destruction and between all that this House of Commons represents and destruction, and yet we have been discussing this afternoon as though, when this Army is asked to help in providing security for this country, and when we are being asked to have this, or that possible handicap removed, we are pursuing a ridiculous form of militarism which this House ought to condemn. That is the point of many of the speeches to which I have listened this afternoon, and I am bound to say that when the honourable Member for the Scotland Division of Liverpool [Mr. Logan] got up, I felt that a breath of fresh air had been blown into this House, and I was deeply grateful. In the approach of many Members of this House to this problem there was an atmosphere of unreality which to me was positively terrifying… I was also grateful to my honourable Friend the Member for Frome [Mrs. Tate] when she intervened, because she stated, with great courage, and I thought force, the view which the soldiers have. They are a very considerable part of this country at this present time, and they are carrying a greater responsibility than any Member of this House, except those who wear uniform. That is the situation at the present time. This country has always been a great asylum for the distressed refugees from other countries, but it would be foolish not to recognize that, in the opinion of its own people, it is beginning to be a great asylum in another sense… After all, we have destroyed the French Navy, against the heart of every sailor in this country, and it is not very much to ask friends of this country among these aliens to meet hardship and inconvenience if in the end the victory on which they depend as much as we do be made in any way more certain. Honourable Members say that the reputation of this country is at stake. It is. There is only one thing that will save the reputation of this country and that it stands for, and is victory in the war.
WHILE LONDON’S CORE BURNED PARLIAMENT’S FOCUS REMAINED ON THE ‘FRIENDLY ALIENS’ AND PALESTINE
These voices which spoke for England, however, did not avail, as I shall show. The view that the feeling of the men who were fighting, of the young manhood of Britain, should count, was a rare one in the strange assembly which was the British House of Commons in 1939 and 1940.
There was another debate in which those Members who, as Mrs. Tate put it, ‘lose all reason when the world “Jew” is mentioned’ had much to say, and I must mention it here, because it was more illuminating than any other of the way in which they present the case of the Jews as an unanswerable one, which no humane or reasonable man would challenge, and dispose of all reasoned arguments raised against it by yapping, ‘Anti-Semite’!
In this debate they were bitter about the anti-Semitism of the Arabs, who, as I have explained, are also Semites, and this was fairly typical of its level. But the most instructive thing was the manner in which they all completely ignored, when it was raised and proved against the Jews, the charge of ‘discrimination’ which they repeatedly brought against those who criticized the Jewish method. And this is the very root and core of the problem.
This debate turned on new regulations which the British Government had introduced in Palestine to check the sales of Arab land to Jews. The spokesman for the Jews came mainly from those who are supposed to represent the British working class, and they accused the Government, among other things, of imitating Dr. Goebbels in trying ‘to keep Palestine clean of Jews’, of repudiating moral contracts and promises made to the Jews, even of ‘striking a grievous blow at our national unity and our national cause’, of ‘throwing Palestine into turmoil again’, of ‘practising racial discrimination against the Jews’, of ‘introducing restrictions on racial grounds’, of ‘betraying the cause of freedom’, of ‘inflicting fresh wrong on the tortured, humiliated, suffering Jewish people’, and much more.
(Almost the only intelligent and intelligible speech by a private member in this debate, I must interpolate, came from a British Jew, Mr. Lipson, who described himself as ‘one to whom his religion has always meant a great deal and who as a member of this House has tried to do his own thinking’. The second part of this remark may not have been meant as a rebuke to those who had in such meaningless and ill-informed phrases championed the cause of co-religionists, but it fits. Mr. Lipson, almost the only speaker to understand what he was talking about, and, seemingly apprehensive lest the Jewish case should be damaged by so much extravagant exaggeration, said that Great Britain was fighting for the freedom of the human spirit, and that included freedom of speech, freedom of thought, the right of free people to their own existence, and the right of minorities to be different. If these things were lost, all would be lost. The survival of the Jews depended on the continuance of these things. Great Britain in this war had been said to be fighting for her existence. That was true, but if ‚ which God forbid ‚ Great Britain were to lose the war, she would live to fight again. If the Allies were to lose, however, the Jews might well very well be finished forever… Therefore to the Jew the war must be the overriding issue whenever any question arose during those anxious and difficult days. What would happen to the Jews if the Nazis were to prevail?)
Now let me point to the real crux of this debate, which all speakers ignored. Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, defending the Government’s action as Secretary of State for the Colonies, said that the protest against it of the Jewish Agency had spoken about the rights of weak peoples, and the Government fully recognized the rights of the Jews in Palestine, but there was another small people in Palestine ‚ the Arabs, who had rights equal to the rights of the Jews. He then revealed that land bought from the Arabs in Palestine for Jewish settlement, by the Jewish National Fund, was, under the conditions of that Fund:
not allowed at any time in the future, under any circumstance whatsoever, to be alienated to anyone who is not a Jew. If the Jewish authorities consider that condition necessary in order to protect the interests of their own people, I do not know why they quarrel with us when we say that a similar condition, and, perhaps, a far less permanent condition, is required to protect the interests of the Arab population. . . .
This passage, as I say, was the crux of the debate. In it the Jewish doctrine of discrimination against non-Jews is clearly revealed. I can see no difference between this anti-Semitism (for the Arabs, if I may repeat myself, are also Semites) and the anti-Semitism of National Socialism. It is discrimination in exactly the same form which the Jews are wont to practise, in European and other countries, in those trades and professions in which they become predominant.
Yet, after this disclosure of Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, a Member was found (Colonel Wedgwood) to say, of the regulations issued by the British Government to counteract this anti-Arab discrimination:
American publicists and columnists have now seen that we here, fighting Hitler with our mouths, are copying his practise. This is precisely Hitler’s policy of soil and blood, a policy of ultra-nationalism, preserving Palestine for one definite race. When shall we get away from the idea that this world is composed of a lot of different incompatible races? … We are importing that spirit into British legislation, importing it in the worst place, setting up in Palestine exactly the same anti-Jewish legislation that Hitler has forced upon Germany. Discrimination between two sorts of citizens on account of their ancestry is new to this country and has been imported by the right honourable Gentleman in imitation of the doctrines preached in Germany today. If there could be a worse blow at our prosecution of the war than this I should like to know what it is. All over the world this will be held up against us. . . .
I think the passages I have quoted show where discrimination begins, and I hope their perusal may lead some people to study statements made in Parliament with a critical eye. But in the name of unreason, why cannot the gentle Gentile champions of the Jews, for once, give an answer to this plain question: Why do they find discrimination natural, liberal, democratic and proper, when practised by Jews, but detestable, foul, illiberal and undemocratic when practised in retaliation by non-Jews? [Editor’s emphasis]
I must quote one other statement in this debate, in which the anti-Semitism of the Jews in Palestine was so conspicuously ignored, a statement made by Mr. Noel-Baker: ‘There is one indispensable solution ‚ the Jewish National Home in Palestine ‚ and whatever else there may be, there must be that as well’.
Mr. Noel-Baker was among the foremost advocates in Parliament of the opening of employment in this country to the ‘friendly aliens’. Does he believe that the Jews should be helped to a Jewish ruled, exclusive, discriminatory Jewish State in Palestine, and simultaneously hold the full rights of citizenship in this and other countries? That is something no non-Jew ever presumed to demand for himself. One thing or the other.
For what, then, are the Jews and what do they want? The subtle argument of the propagandist films sent out of Hollywood and of their wordier champions in this country is that they are persecuted people who wish nothing more than to be left in peace, and who desire, all of them, above all things, to fight for us.
It is much more difficult to define them. Dispersed throughout the world, they may themselves best be compared to a sphere of which the steel core is the body of fiercely intolerant, anti-Gentile Jews, while these qualities diminish as you work outward toward the softer peel. J. B. Priestly, in an article fiercely attacking ‘the dirty old game of Jew-baiting’ ‚ would those Jewish regulations in Palestine, be called Arab-baiting, or the disinheritance clause of a Jewish will Gentile-baiting? ‚ undercut his own argument by saying: ‘Nobody can deny that there is… a real Jewish problem in the modern world. Their present position is unsatisfactory to everybody. They are neither definitely separating themselves from other races, nor merging themselves with them. They are uneasily hanging in mid-air… When we Gentiles dislike a Jew it is because we feel that he wants to be one of us and at the same time not to be one of us, to enjoy all our holidays and then quietly take a Jewish one on his own. The problem will never be settled until the Jew decides either to move further away or to come nearer. That is all that really needs to be said.’
That comes nearer to the truth, with a few exceptions. First, the problem is not one ‘of our modern world’, but goes back to the beginning of recorded time, for the reasons Mr. Priestly stated. Secondly, it will never be settled, because by all that long experience the Jew never will decide ‘to move farther away or come nearer’; he wants to have his Jewish cake and eat Gentile cake too. And thirdly, that is not ‘all that needs to be said’; a great deal more needs to said, in the interest of the non-Jews.
For what are the Jews? They are the most complex people in the world and to claim to know their inmost souls and their uttermost motives, as do some of those Westminster-bound Members, is fatuous. Trebitsch Lincoln was a Jew, who was born in Hungary and became an Anglican clergyman in Canada and a Member of Parliament (yes, the same Parliament whose members now, twenty-five years later, are so sure about their Jew), in England, and turned out to be a German agent in the last war and after it was press-chief to the first anti-Semitic Putschists in Germany, the friends of Hitler (yes, Hitler too had availed himself of the services of Jews, among them the lady who, in collaboration with an English peer, did that spadework ‘which made the Munich Agreement possible’) and is now a Buddhist monk in far Tibet. Napoleon’s press chief, for that matter, was a Portuguese Jew, Lewis Goldschmidt, who, with all the fire of a Goebbels or a Gayda, in his Argus described the British Navy, three months before Trafalgar, as dilapidated, dispersed, incompetent and on the verge of mutiny, and England as decadent, degenerate and defeated. And did not the good Lewis Goldschmidt, after Waterloo, enter into the employ of the British Embassy in Paris, and even marry his daughter to an English peer?
Loyalties are, not so easy to discover. In Prague, just before Hitler marched into that city, was a rabbi, of whom a Jew told me, who instructed his people that Hitler was the Jewish Messiah, because the result of his work would be to open to the Jews all those countries, throughout the world, which were still closed to them. In Swansea, when the present war had been resumed, was a 67-year-old Russian Jew who had been in this country since he was a boy; he was sent to prison for saying: ‘Hitler is a friend of mine ‚ he is a good man. The English took Palestine from the Jews and Hitler is going to take England. Hitler is doing right.’
In West Hamstead was an 18-year-old German Jew who, like so many others, landed in this country surreptitiously and therefore did not appear in the official figures of ‘aliens registered with the police’; he told the Thames magistrate that he wished to return to fight for Germany. In Stepney was a 25-year-old Austrian Jew who, when he appeared before an ‘enemy alien’ tribunal to prove that he was a ‘friendly alien’, picked up an inkwell and threw it at the judge; what may his loyalty have been?
Yet the spokesmen in our Parliament of these people will admit of no arguments against them; they are all ‘friendly’, all highly talented, and all desperately anxious to fight for England.
What is sense of ignoring things which everybody knows? There was, for instance, the case of the ten East End Jews, most of them of Polish origin, who conspired to evade military service by sending up an unfit man, in their respective names, for medical examination; he received from ,£20 to ,£200 for his services. These men were detected and convicted. One of them, who was quick enough to escape the police by decamping to the Channel Islands, was there when the Germans arrived, when he decided to return to England and was arrested and sentenced.
The loyalties of the Jews are far more difficult to determine that their advocates in this country would admit. When Poland was fighting Germany, for instance, and Russia jumped on Poland’s back, taking half Poland for herself, the Jews in that part of Poland ‘hailed the Russian troops as deliverers’. The scene was described by the Correspondent of the News Chronicle, William Forrest. What Englishman would not understand that this left a feeling of bitterness in the minds of the Poles, who subsequently organized a magnificent army in this country? Yet as soon as the existence of this feeling became known those newspapers which make the cause of the Jews their own, before all others, began violently to attack the Poles, to cry that they were not worthy to fight in the ranks of ‘democracy’, that they were as bad as the Nazis, and the like.
I remember Jews in the trenches, in the air force, and in hospital in the last war, and know how well they fought. They were neither braver nor less brave than the rest; they just fitted in. But these were British Jews, who had been long in this country. They were not ‘Englishmen’; it is almost impossible for a Jew to be that, because he will not, save in rare cases, allow himself to be assimilated, he is too much aware of the differences in his blood, his religion, his upbringing, his fellow-Jews. These British Jews of long domicile will understand, probably better than most Gentile readers, many of the things I have written in this book; they know that where the Jew from Eastern Europe suddenly appears in large numbers, the old trouble starts all over again, and they fear it. They are said, and I believe this, from their very understanding of the problem to have formed private ‘tribunals of self-discipline’ to check those who may bring them into discredit.
But they have an extremely difficult task before them. The campaign to squeeze the newcomers into English life has as yet been carried on with a ruthless and relentless disregard for any point of view but theirs which bodes ill for the future.
I assume that many Jews are, must be, serving the British armed forces during the war which has now been resumed, though no man could go about London at this time without remarking how seldom a typically Jewish face is seen beneath a uniform cap, how often such faces are seen above while collars in the hotels and restaurants.
When the air raids on London began, and Londoners were having a very bad time indeed, the New Statesman published a letter urging that refugees interned in the Isle of Man should be released ‘before the rains come’, lest their health suffer from confinement ‘in the dining-rooms of their 34 houses’. This was at a time when hundreds of thousands of Londoners were sleeping on the platforms of tube stations, in unheated cellars, beneath railway arches, and the like, and it drew the following comment from one of the native citizens, a London ‘Shelter Marshal’:
May I inquire (1) how the health of these internees will stand up to numerous daylight raids and to nightly dusk-to-dawn confinement in packed shelters under heavy bombardment? (2) how the health of the other crowded users of these shelters will stand up to a yet bigger incursion of panic-stricken aliens into their midst?
Apart from the space problem (and I must reluctantly admit that the average ‘friendly’ alien seems to need a lot more shelter ‘Lebensraum’ than the average Londoner), one of the major difficulties of some London public shelters is the throng of neurotic foreign refugees who spend their lives, apparently, in an hysterical quest for 100 per cent safety at night.
LONDONERS SLEEPING IN SUBWAY PASSAGES DURING THE BOMBING
Another thing that troubled me when I returned to England and began to study at close quarters a problem of which I had seen the other end, was the suspicion that the foreign Jews were tending to receive preferential treatment even from British justice! Now this is a very serious thing, if it is true, for in no other country that I know is justice so implacably rigorous as in this. True, it seemed to me, like everything else in England, to have its first, second and third-class compartments, and I once raised a violently protesting eyebrow at my loudspeaker when I heard Sir William Jowitt, K.C., say, ‘The law is the same for rich and poor alike’.
Some newspapers grant the most unrestricted freedom for the publication of views with which they are in agreement; and in the sense that the millionaire and pauper who stole a loaf of bread would probably be treated alike I was prepared to believe him. But further than that I did not feel that I could go with this great King’s Counsel.
I had an uneasy feeling, for instance, that murder was not murder if committed at Oxford University, but was apt to be attributed invariably to a foreign crook called Schizophrenia. I had also remarked that members of ducal families found the most benevolent understanding of their quite honourable motives for committing what looked like criminal offences when they appeared before a local bench manned, or womanned, by members of local country families. I further remarked that a financier who died owing ,£80,000 to the Income Tax authorities, which he had been owing for several years, was generally held to have been a most estimable and successful man, but that people who owed a few pounds received summonses to appear at the Guildhall and were sometimes promptly committed to the cells.
But the severity of the British law in punishing small offences of theft by poor people far surpassed anything I had ever encountered on the Continent, in any country. I mentioned in a previous book the cases of a van boy and a shopboy who, for stealing Is. and 10s. respectively, were sent to prison for one and six months. I have records of many other such cases: for instance, the 66-year-old unemployed labourer of Bolton who received a month for stealing sixpennyworth of coal; the 18-year-old girl who, having been bound over on a charge of theft in the first place on condition that she ceased to take slimming tablets, later appeared on a charge of breaking this promise and was sent to gaol for six months! This last case seems to me to deserve inclusion in any calendar of judicial curiosities. The 18-year-old girl in question, incidentally, was not without wits or wit; she asked, before she went to the cells, ‘if it was against the law to take these tablets, why were they manufactured and sold?’
These very rigours of our judicial system, in its dealings with the lower orders, seems to me in strange contrast with the exceptionally easygoing treatment which was often given to ‘friendly aliens’. Nearly all the Metropolitan magistrates have, at one time or another, expressed grave misgivings about the size of the trade in smuggling aliens into this country; the late Mr. Herbert Metcalfe’s ‘These people are simply pouring into the country wholesale’ was typical. But on that occasion the aliens officer in court explained that it was ‘known in Antwerp that people could come to the United Kingdom irregularly and be dealt with lightly’.
No amount of research can discover what happens to the innumerable persons whose deportation these magistrates daily recommend, but all the signs suggest that when they have served their sentence, if any ‚ and some of them are very bad characters, as my notes show ‚ they either resume life in England somehow or contrive to return.
But what particularly attracted my notice ‚ and I invite the attention of others to it ‚ is that at one time the plea, ‘I am a refugee from Hitlerist persecution’ seemed to be regarded as an extenuating circumstance, almost to the point of annulling the offence, even in cases completely removed from the necessity to escape from Hitler.
I have a collection of quite extraordinary examples. For instance, a lady who was summoned for dangerously driving a borrowed motor-car pleaded that she was ‘a refugee from Hitlerist persecution’ and practically penniless, whereupon she was fined sixpence, ‘in view of your sad circumstances’. Any who have experienced, as I have experienced, the normally rigorous treatment of offending drivers by British benches will appreciate this case. A young lady who stole twelve pairs of stockings was fined 5s.; she was a refugee. A Polish rabbi who was convicted of harbouring a large number of foreign Jews without informing the police was fined ,£50 ‚ but the fine was later reduced to ,£5. Two men who were convicted of assisting a ‘friendly alien’ to evade registration were fined ,£5 each ‚ but the fine was later reduced to a farthing.
The state of affairs which I found in England, when I returned to it, was being reproduced in the Dominions. None knew South Africa better than the late Sir Abe Bailey, and none was less likely than he to be accused of unfriendliness towards the Jews. I wish therefore to invite particular consideration to this letter which he wrote to The Times a few days before the World War broke out again in September 1939. I have italicized the passages which are of especial importance:
The proceedings at the international conference of Jews in Geneva and letters and articles appearing in the Press are unfortunately creating an impression that many Jews are committing the mistake of their Nazi persecutors (exterminators and destroyers of religion) and looking at their present and future problems entirely as if nobody else in the world mattered but themselves.
At a time when Great Britain, the best friend of the Jews, is harassed and embarrassed and ringed round with envious and desperate enemies and when the Middle East is only one of many arenas where our whole Imperial position is at stake, far too many Jews, in voicing their grievances, make no allowance for the appalling difficulties and dangers which confront the British Government all over the world. To listen to the recital of these grievances one would think the only problem which Mr. Malcolm MacDonald has to face in Palestine (as a result of the British Government making it their national home) was the distribution of land among Jews and Arabs, with an open door to Jewish immigrants, whereas the Jews ought to know that the Government of which he is a member has to deal with strategic considerations which affect the whole of the Middle East, and at a time when the clouds of war are threatening British dominion in all the seven seas. The British Government’s positive policy is fair play to Jew and Arab alike, realizing the fact that economically they are interlocked.
The almost contemptuous disregard for other interests except those of their own is illustrated by a letter which appeared in your own columns recently from Professor Namier and in a remarkable article in a recent issue of the Economist, which, dealing with the problem of refugees in Britain, says:
Obviously not all refugees are capable of making an equal contribution to British prosperity. There may be some who are undesirable on other than economic grounds. But on the average they are more helpful to the community than the average Englishman, whether the standard is monetary, capital, industrial skill or intellectual attainments.
It is true that the Economist in a subsequent issue expressed its regret that this passage should have lent itself to misunderstanding but the whole tenor of the article unfortunately illustrated only too clearly the arrogance with which the claims of Jewish extremists are being advocated.
The supreme aim of Jewish statesmanship today is to see to it that the persecution of Jewry in Central Europe does not lead to world persecution and that the policy of fear and oppression which began in Germany does not spread to other countries. I speak with some experience in these matters, for I have seen the rise in South Africa of a wave of anti-Semitism which the Nazis confidently hope will one day redound to their benefit. When I was trading as a youth and used to cross South Africa from one end to the other, I found nearly all the stores, inns, and hotels on the roadside, in villages and towns, run by Britishers, mainly Scotsmen, but now they are mostly in the hands of Jews and Indians. Jews are steadily working their way into many of the profession, particularly the law and medicine, and are locking up these professions for themselves. Recently they have made attempts to secure a strong foothold in the Press of South Africa and in various cultural organizations.
It is almost a truism that a community can absorb only a certain proportion of Jews. When that proportion is exceeded, as it is in South Africa, anti-Semitism follows and is further fanned by too exclusive an expression of Jewish aspirations and ambitions.
All decent-minded people deplore the cruel persecutions practised on Jews in Nazi Germany. Jews must play their part in doing all they can to to put bounds to an infection which may one day poison the whole world.
The passages I have italicized are of especial value, coming from such an authority with side a circle of Jewish friends. In particular the quotation from the Economist is of the greatest interest.
Audacity is notoriously a very powerful weapon, and one the Jews particularly love, because it has served them well. Their argument, that they should oust the native-born Gentiles because they are in all respects better than these was never more openly and audaciously expressed. That it could be printed in the British press, at a time when sober arguments against the Jewish case, however well founded, could nowhere find a place in it, unless they carried such a signature as that of Sir Abe Bailey, when they might appear in an obscure correspondence column, is the best possible illustration of the measure of ‘freedom’ which has prevailed in the press of this country in this particular respect.
This argument, that the foreign Jews, the ‘friendly aliens’, are much cleverer and in every way more suitable than ourselves and should therefore be given preference in employment is that implicitly taken over by the innumerable spokesmen of these people in the British press and parliament.
It is the argument I have repeatedly heard myself from the lips of Jews, who did not realize that I was well versed in their methods in many foreign countries. This was the reason, they would have had me believe, that their newspapers in Berlin and Vienna, Prague and Budapest, were entirely staffed by Jews; that the local non-Jews were simply not equal to the work. They were of course not up to the standard of British journalists, these would-be wily ones would add, with a quick sideways glance at myself.
It is the method of discrimination, impure but simple. In this country it has already, in some cases, reached absurd lengths. I have before me a long press ‘puff’ about a young Jew from Hungary who was chosen to play the part of a British schoolboy in a British film ‘because he looked so English’. That is to say, no English schoolboys were available who looked so English as he! The public of a country must have reached a sad state of stupidity when such tricks can be played on it.
The second passage which I have italicized in Sir Abe Bailey’s letter shows the consequences to which these methods lead ‚ as they led in the European countries I knew, as they will lead in this country unless they are checked.
In the other British Dominions the same thing is happening, while the men are away at war.
‘Assisted passages’ to Australia, which might have replenished that continent with British blood, were suspended by the British Government from 1930 to 1938, when they were resumed until August 1939. Who was ‘assisted’ to go to Australia during this year when the assistance was resumed? ‚ 10,992 persons, of whom 881 were British! The bulk of the others were foreign Jews; indeed of the 10,111 non-Britons no less than 5,321 were of German nationality, which means that they were nearly all Jews from Germany.
‘The Government’s policy in this very important matter has produced disastrous results where Australia is concerned,’ wrote Sir Henry Galway, a former Governor of South Australia, to The Times on March 10th, 1940. ‘If this policy is persisted in, it will not take more than a couple of generations before Australia’s proud boast of a population with 95 per cent British stock is silenced. One of the many evils resulting from the substitution of alien for British stock is that the industries are by degrees falling under foreign control. For instance, the sugar and peanut industries are already fairly well in the hands of the alien, while the fruit industry is going that way. In spite of there being a war on, unemployment in Britain is still at an abnormally high figure. Crowds of boy s are unable to get employment even under the Derby and other schemes. Why should they not be permitted to go to Australia, where they are wanted, if they wish to? . . . The average Member of Parliament is woefully ignorant on the subject of migration, though I willingly allow that there are many bright exceptions . . . I humbly contend that it is up to the Government to do all in their power to save Australia from being swamped by people of alien race.’
To conclude the picture I have given I have to add that by January 1941 the last safeguards in this problem had been abandoned in Britain.
It was officially announced that the Ministry of Labour felt that it should pursue ‘a more positive policy of welcoming the 250,000 long-term foreign residents and refugees alongside our own workers’. Both employers and trade unions were in agreement with this policy. (The only opposition to it, as The Times along remarked, came from the workshops, that is to say, from the native workers, who had so little to say in these matters.)
These aliens were to have ‘the same wages and conditions of work as British subjects’, and they were also to have ‘the benefits of the health and unemployment insurance schemes’, into which the British workers had for many years been paying weekly contributions.
With this announcement the last barriers fell, and the British public, if any member of it happened to be watching, which I doubt, would have seen that it had once again picked quite a different card from that which it thought to have chosen. That which it had obtained was quite different from that which it had been promised.
These people had come, not to stay, oh no, only as transmigrants; they would be no charge on the British taxpayer, oh no, ‘private individuals’ and ‘voluntary organizations’ had guaranteed their maintenance; they would not swamp the home labour market, oh no, they would not be allowed to take employment.
But now they were come to stay! The cost of their maintenance fell on the British taxpayer, and when they were out of work, they would draw the dole by the contributions of British workers! They would be eligible for all employment!
And I foresee, if I am not mistaken, that when this war is over British citizenship may be granted to them because they came to us and ‘helped our war effort’. John Hammer, who worked in a foundry during the war, Jack Pickaxe, who worked down a mine, and Tommy Rifle, who served in the infantry will not find that they are entitled to any especial consideration after the war because they ‘helped the national war effort’.
May they be spared the cold and bitter struggle to find any kind of work which their forerunners had when they came back from the first World War, in 1918.
I think it is a regrettable thing that the last barriers were leveled by a Socialist Minister of Labour, a man of working-class origins himself.
It is a grave state of affairs that I have described. I saw it coming, from the Continent, and said so in the second book I wrote in this series of three. The greatest single factor in Hitler’s rise to power was the embitterment and desperation of the German war generation ‚ I mean, the 1914-1918 war. Those men, when they came back, found every road to advancement and useful employment closed to them, and they found many trades and professions locked-up by foreign Jews who had come to their country from Poland and elsewhere while they were away.
Before very long the Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and Irishmen of this generation will be coming home from the war they are fighting to retrieve that civilization of which we last saw some traces in the Dark Ages. The Australians, with fresh laurels, will be returning to Australia, the South Africans to South Africa, the Canadians to Canada and the New Zealanders to New Zealand.
In Britain and in the Dominions a great mass of alien immigrants has been allowed to settle and take employment. Will they yield this employment when the soldiers, the sailors, and the airmen come home, or are these latter to traipse and trail idly about the streets, as they did after the last war; or in the better event, are they to find the higher posts occupied by, people, many of them of alien blood, who have barnacled-in while they were away under the motto of ‘helping the national war effort’?
These aliens number, as far as one can judge, some hundreds of thousands. That is a very large mass to throw upon the labour market, to inject into the trades and professions, and it has been repeatedly proved that, once in, they exert their influence to help others in and to exclude non-Jews. Since the 1914-1918 war there have seldom been less than a million ‘friendly’ Britons unemployed in this country, and in some years their number has risen to several millions. The derelict areas and the slums still offer grim and spectral proof of the misrule of England in those between-war years. The new burden that has been put upon the British back is a very heavy one.
A bad day’s work has been done in this last year or so. I came back from abroad in 1939, after many years, fearing this only less than the war I knew was coming. I saw the things the same influx let to in other countries. If I am not a Boetian, they will come in England; the lowering of the levels of taste and talent, the swamping of the last native standards and customs and traditions, the introduction of a meretricious and alien way of life, the squeezing-out of youth and enthusiasm. Experience ‚ and this is the tragic thing ‚ teaches no lessons.
But the arguments I have raised are sober ones, that cannot be shouted down by cries of ‘anti-Semite’ or any other meaningless word. The policy that has been pursued is just as false in its field as was the policy of Munich ‚ and the result of that policy was not peace, but war.
And Rupert Brooke, if he lived today, would need to write:
‘And there the Jews!’
Arthur Topham is the Publisher and Editor of RadicalPress.com. He is currently involved in a free speech battle with the League for Human Rights of B‚¬â„¢nai Brith Canada.
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