24.THE COMING OF ZIONISM...192

25.THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION...198

26.THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL...202

27.THE "PROTOCOLS"...209

28.THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR...224

29.THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE...231

30.THE DECISIVE BATTLE...244

31.THE WEB OF INTRIGUE...261

32.THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN...272

33.THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE...283

34.THE END OF LORD NORTHCLIFFE...291
 

            
Page 192

            
Chapter 24


         
THE COMING OF ZIONISM

In the second half of the last century when Communism and Zionism began their simultaneous assault on the West, Europe was a place of strong and confident states well able to withstand the effects of inner troubles and foreign wars. The revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 had been overcome without great exertion. Austria-Hungary and France were not much weakened by their Prussian defeats in 1866 and 1871; they resumed their national existences, as defeated countries for centuries had done, side by side with yesterday's victor, and soon were tranquil again. The Balkan people, emerging from five centuries of Turkish rule also were moving towards prosperity, in the kindlier air of national freedom. On the eastern borders of Europe Russia, under the flag of Christendom, appeared to be joining in this process of national and individual improvement.

The appearance was deceptive, for the two maggots were in the apple, and today's scene shows the result. The eighteen Christian centuries which, despite ups and downs showed a total sum of human betterment greater than that of any earlier time known to man, were coming either to an end or an interregnum; which, we still do not know, though believers have no doubt about the good resumption, somewhen. However, one eminent man of that period, from whom confidence in the outcome might have been expected, foresaw what was to come in our century and thought it would be the end, not a transient Dark Age.

This was Henry Edward Manning, the English clergyman who was converted to Rome, became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and, had he accepted nomination by his fellow cardinals, might have become Pope. Edmund Burke, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had all perceived the worldwide aims of the revolution and foretold its spreading eruptions. Disraeli, Bakunin and others, a half-century later, had testified to, and warned against, the Jewish usurpation of the revolutionary leadership. Manning joined in these warnings but also foresaw the coming of Zionism and the part it would play in the dual process.

Of the revolution he said, "The secret societies of the world, the existence of which men laugh at and deny in the plenitude of their self-confidence; the secret societies are forcing their existence and their reality upon the consciousness of those who, until the other day, would not believe that they existed" (1861). He expected the full success of Weishaupt's original plan and thought the time in which he lived was "the prelude of the anti-Christian period of the final dethronement of Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the world". Today the anti-Christian revolution holds temporal power in half of Europe, the Christian cross has been expunged from the flags of all great European nations save the British and from those of many small ones, and a "society without God" has been set up as a potential world-government, so that these words of ninety years ago are seen as an impressive forecast part-fulfilled.

Then (and in this he rose above the other seers) he depicted the part which Zionism would play in this process: "Those who have lost faith in the Incarnation, such as humanitarians, rationalists and pantheists, may well be deceived by any person of great political power and success, who should restore the Jews to their own land. . . and there is nothing in the political aspect of the world which renders such a combination impossible".

Finally, he said that he expected the personal coming of Antichrist in the form of a Jew. (In these words he moved from the ground of political calculation, where as events have shown he was expert, to that of interpreting prophecy; he related Saint Paul's message to the Thessalonians, 2.1.iii-xi, to the coming time, saying, "It is a law of Holy Scripture that when persons are prophesied of, persons appear".)

Thus, while Europe outwardly appeared to be slowly moving towards an improving future on the path which for eighteen centuries had served it well, in the Talmudic areas of Russia Zionism joined Communism as the second of the two forces which were to intercept that process. Communism was designed to subvert the masses; it was the "great popular movement" foreseen by Disraeli, by means of which "the secret societies" were to work in unison for the disruption of Europe. Zionism set out to subvert rulers at the top. Neither force could have moved forward without the other, for rulers of unimpaired authority would have checked the revolution as it had been checked in 1848.

Zionism was essentially the rejoinder of the Talmudic centre in Russia to the emancipation of Jews in the West. It was the intimation that they must not involve themselves in mankind but must remain apart.

Never since Babylon had the ruling sect ventured to play this card. It can never be played again, if the present attempt ultimately ends in fiasco. For that reason the Talmudists ever refrained from playing it, and only did this when emancipation confronted them with a vital emergency, the loss of their power over Jewry. Indeed, they had always denounced as "false Messiahs" those who clamoured that the day of fulfilment was come. 'Had Sabbatai Zevi, or for that matter Cromwell or Napoleon, been able to deliver Palestine to them, they might have proclaimed one of these to be the Messiah. On this occasion they proclaimed themselves to be the Messiah, and that bold enterprise can hardly be repeated. Historically therefore, we are probably moving towards the end of the destructive plan, because it obviously cannot be fulfilled, but the present generation, and possibly some generations to come, by all the signs have yet a heavy price to pay for having encouraged the attempt.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann's book is the best single fount of information about the twin roots of Communism and Zionism and their convergent purpose. He was present at the birth of Zionism, he became its roving plenipotentiary, he was for forty years the darling of Western courts, presidential offices and cabinet rooms, he became the first president of the Zionist state, and he told the entire tale with astonishing candour. He shows how, in those remote Talmudic communities nearly a hundred years ago, the strategy took shape which in its consequences was to catch up, as in a vortex, all peoples of the West. Americans and Britons, Germans and Frenchmen, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Balts, the Balkanic peoples and all others were to be implicated. The lifeblood and treasure of the West were to be spent on the promotion of these two complementary purposes like water from a running tap.

Millions, living and dead, were during two wars involved in their furtherance. Men now being born inherit a share in the final upheavals to which they must inexorably lead. The Jews shared in all that tribulation, in their small proportion to the masses affected. Dr. Weizmann's account enables today's student to see the beginnings of all this; and now this narrative reaches our own time, which receives daily shape from what then occurred.

He explains that the Jews in Russia were divided into three groups. The first group was that of the Jews who, seeking "the peace of the city", simply wanted to become peaceable Russian citizens, as the Jews of the West, in the majority, at that time were loyal German, French or other citizens. Emancipation was for this group the final aim, and it chiefly contained those Jews who, by talent, diligence and fear of Talmudic rule, had escaped from the ghettoes.

Dr. Weizmann dismisses it as small, unrepresentative and "renegade", and as it was swept away it must also disappear from this narrative, which belongs to the two other groups. By the edict of the Talmudists it has "disappeared from the face of the earth", or been excommunicated.

The remaining mass of Jews in Russia, (that is, those that lived in the ghettoes under Talmudic rule) were divided into two groups by a vertical line which split households and families, including Dr. Weizmann's own house and family. Both groups were revolutionary; that is to say, they agreed in working for the destruction of Russia. The dissension was solely on the point of Zionism. The "Communist-revolutionary" group held that full "emancipation" would be achieved when the world-revolution supplanted the nation-states everywhere. The "Zionist-revolutionary" group, while agreeing that the world-revolution was indispensable to the process, held that full "emancipation" would only be achieved when a Jewish nation was established in a Jewish state.

Of these two groups, the Zionist one was clearly the superior in Talmudic orthodoxy, as destruction, under the Law is but a means to the end of domination, and the dominant nation is that ordained to be set up in Jerusalem. In the households, dispute was fierce. The Communists maintained that Zionism would weaken the revolution, which professed to deny "race and creed"; the Zionists contended that revolution must lead to the restoration of the chosen people, of whom race was the creed. Individual members of these households probably believed that the point in dispute was valid, but in fact it was not.

Neither of these groups could have taken shape, in those sternly ruled communities, against the will of the rabbinate. If the rabbis had given out the word that Communism was "transgression" and Zionism "observance" of "the statutes and judgments", there would have been no Communists in the ghettoes, only Zionists.

The ruling sect, looking into the future above the heads of the regimented mass, evidently saw that both groups were essential to the end in view; and Disraeli, in one of the passages earlier quoted, named the motive. From the middle of the last century the story of the revolution is that of Communism and Zionism, directed from one source and working to a convergent aim.

Dr. Weizmann gives an illuminating glimpse of this apparent dissension among the members of a conspiratorial, but divided, Jewish household where the ultimate shape of the high strategy was not seen and the issue between "revolutionary-Communism" and "revolutionary-Zionism" was fiercely argued. He quotes his mother, the Jewish matriarch, as saying contentedly that if the Communist-revolutionary son were proved right she would be happy in Russia, and if the Zionist-revolutionary one were correct, then she would be happy in Palestine. In the outcome both were by their lights proved right; after spending some years in Bolshevized Moscow she went to end her days in Zionized Palestine. That was after the two conspiracies, having grown in secrecy side by side, triumphed in the same week of 1917.

Communism was already an organized, though still a secret and conspiratorial party in the ghettoes when Zionism first took organized (though equally secret) form in the Chibath Zion (Love of Zion) movement. This was founded at Pinsk, where Dr. Weizmann went to school, so that as a boy his path led him into the Zionist-revolutionary wing of the anti-Russian conspiracy. In his childhood (1881) something happened which threatened to destroy the entire legend of "persecution in Russia" on which Talmudic propaganda in the outer world was based.

In 1861 Czar Alexander II, the famous Liberator, had liberated 23,000,000 Russian serfs. From that moment the prospect of liberty and improvement on the Western model opened out for Russian citizens of all nationalities (Russia contained about 160 nationalities and the Jews formed about 4 percent of the total population). Then, during the twenty years following the liberation of the serfs, the Jews began, under Talmudic direction, to offer "bitter passive resistance to all 'attempts at improvements' " (Dr. Kastein). In March 1881, Alexander II moved to complete his life's work by proclaiming a parliamentary constitution. Dr. Kastein's comment speaks for itself: "It is not surprising to find a Jewess taking part in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of Alexander II" .

This event, the first of a simi1ar series, was the first major success of the revolutionaries in preventing emancipation. It restored the ideal condition depicted by Moses Hess (one of the earliest Zionist propagandists) in the year following the liberation of the serfs: "We Jews shall always remain strangers among the nations; these, it is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice, but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank and accept as our first principle, 'Where I flourish, there is my country' ".

During this period Leon Pinsker, another herald of Zionism, published his book Auto-Emancipation. The title was a threat (to the initiated); it meant, "We will not accept any kind of emancipation bestowed on us by others; we will emancipate ourselves and will give 'emancipation' our own interpretation". He said, "There is an inexorable and inescapable conflict between humans known as Jews and other humans", and he described the master-method to be used to bring about this "self-emancipation" and to "restore the Jewish nation": the struggle to achieve "these ends, he said, "must be entered upon in such a spirit as to exert an irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present ".

These words of 1882 are some of the most significant in this entire story. They show foreknowledge of the highest order, as the reader may discern if he try to picture, say, some Polish or Ukrainian patriot-in-exile talking, then or now, of "exerting irresistible pressure upon international politics". The political emitter is a sad man of hope deferred, an habitué of the Café des Exiles who is usually thankful if the second secretary of an Under Secretary of State deigns to spare him half an hour. Pinsker was an obscure Jewish emigré in Berlin, little known outside revolutionary circles, when he wrote these words, which would seem to be of the most foolish pretension if the events of the next seventy years had not proved that he knew exactly what he meant. He knew how Zionism would prevail. Clearly the conspiracy, long before its nature was even suspected in the outer world, had powerful support far outside Russia and this unknown Pinsker was aware of the methods by which the affairs of the world were to be rearranged.

Such was the state of the two-headed conspiracy in Russia when Dr. Weizmann grew to manhood and began to play his part. The word "conspiracy", frequently used here, is not the author's; Dr. Weizmann candidly employs it. Loathing Russia, he went (without hindrance) to Germany. The sight of "emancipated" Jews there so repelled him that he longed for the ghettoes of Russia and returned to them during his holidays, then resuming his part in "the conspiracy", as he says. Then, at various universities in the emancipated West he continued his "open fight" to de-emancipate the Jews of Europe. They recognized the danger and turned faces of fear and enmity to these Ostjuden.

Thus in Germany Gabriel Rieser told the Zionist-revolutionaries from Russia "We did not immigrate here, we were born here, and because we were born here, we lay no claim to a home anywhere else; we are either Germans or else we are homeless". Similarly, the rabbis of Reform Judaism resolved that "the idea of the Messiah deserves every consideration in our prayers, but all requests that we may be led back to the land of our fathers and the Jewish State be restored must be dropped out of them".

These Jews struggled to keep faith with the Sanhedrin's pledges. They had made peace with mankind, and it appeared impossible that the Talmudists could ever lead them back into a new Nehemiahan captivity. Dr. Kastein records with horror that towards the end of the 19th century "one Jew in five married a Gentile" and, with greater horror, that in war "on all fronts Jew stood opposed to Jew; this was a tragedy . . . which will be repeated . . . as long as Jews are compelled to fulfil their duties as citizens of the lands of their adoption".

The shadow of the new Talmudic captivity was much nearer to the Jews of the West than even they could suspect. The elders in Russia had been organizing during all these decades and as the end of the century approached were ready to "exert irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present". The most successful specialist in this exertion of pressure; a roving Zionist prime minister, was young Chaim Weizmann, who during the last years of Monk's life moved about the European cities and universities, from Darmstadt to Berlin, and later from Berlin to Geneva, planting therein the time-bombs of the future and preparing for his 20th Century task.

As the century closed came a sudden acceleration in this process, as if a machine long in construction were completed and began to run at high power, and its throbbing pulsations were at once felt throughout all Jewry, though the Gentile masses, less sensitive to such vibrations, remarked them not at all. In the succession to Moses Hess another Jew from Russia, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am) proclaimed that the Jews not only formed a nation but must have a Jewish state in Palestine. However, this was but one more voice from remote Russia, and the weakness of the Jews in the West was that they did not realize the power and strength of the compact, organized mass in the Eastern ghettoes, or at any rate, they could not see how it could make itself felt in Europe.

The warning to them came in 1896, the year of Prophet Monk's death, when Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State. With that, the cat was in their dovecot, and not very long afterwards the doves were in the cat. Their ranks were split, for this Theodor Herzl was not one of the Eastern Jews, not a Jew from Russia. He was one of themselves, or at all events they held him to be one. He appeared to be the very model of an emancipated Western Jew, yet he was on the side of the Zionists. A premonitory tremor ran through Jewry. Christendom, which had as much cause to be perturbed, remained blissfully unaware for another sixty years.
 

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Chapter 25


THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

If mere chance, ever and again, produces men like Karl Marx and Dr. Theodor Herzl at moments when their acts can 1ead to destructive consequences out of proportion to their own importance, then chance in the past century has been enlisted in the conspiracy against the West. The likelier explanation is that a higher command was already in charge of these events and that it chose, or at all events used Herzl for the part he played. The brevity of his course across the firmament (like that of a shooting star), the disdainful way in which when his task was done he was cast aside, and his unhappy end would all support that explanation.

Those who have known Vienna and its atmosphere in our century will understand Herzl and his effect. A declining monarchy and a tottering nobility: a class of Jews rising suddenly and swiftly to the highest places; these things made great impression among the Jewish masses. Dr. Herzl, rather than the Neue Freie Presse, now told them how went the world and instructed politicians what to do. Obsequious Obers in the chattering cafés hastened to serve "Herr Doktor!" It was all new, exciting. Self-importance filled the Herzl's and de Blowitz's of that time and when Dr. Herzl emerged as the self-proclaimed herald of Zion the Western Jews were left awed and uncertain. If Dr. Herzl could talk like this to the Great Powers, perhaps he was right and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had been wrong!

Could it be true that policy was made in Dr. Herzl's office, not in the Ballhausplatz? Had a Jew from Russia written The Jewish State, or attempted to set up a World Zionist Organization, the Western Jews would have ignored him, for they feared the conspiracy from the East and at least suspected its implications. But if Dr. Herzl, a fully emancipated Western Jew, thought that Jews must re-segregate themselves, the matter was becoming serious.

Herzl asserted that the Dreyfus case had convinced him of the reality of "anti-semitism". The term was then of fairly recent coinage, though Dr. Kastein seeks to show that the state of mind denoted by it is immemorial by saying "it has existed from the time that Judaism came into contact with other peoples in something more than neighbourly hostility". (By this definition resistance in war is "anti-semitism", and the "neighbours" in the tribal warfare of antique times, to which he refers, were themselves Semites. However, the words "contact exceeding neighbourly hostility" offer a good example of Zionist populism.)

Anyway, Dr. Herzl stated that "the Dreyfus process made me a Zionist", and the words are as empty as Mr. Lloyd George's later ones, "Acetone converted me to Zionism" (which were demonstrably untrue). The Dreyfus case gave the Jews complete proof of the validity of emancipation and of the impartiality of justice under it. Never was one man defended so publicly by so many or so fully vindicated. Today whole nations, east of Berlin, have no right to any process of law and the West, which signed the deed of their outlawry, is indifferent to their plight; they may be imprisoned or killed without charge or trial. Yet in the West today the Dreyfus case, the classic example of justice, continues to be cited by the propagandists as the horrid example of injustice. If the case for or against Zionism stood or fell by the Dreyfus case, the word should have disappeared from history at that point.

Nevertheless Dr. Herzl demanded that "the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation" (he specified no particular territory and did not especially lean towards Palestine). For the first time the idea of resurrecting a Jewish state came under lively discussion among Western Jews.* The London Jewish Chronicle described the book as "one of the most astounding pronouncements which have ever been put forward". Herzl, thus encouraged, went to London, then the focus of power, to canvass his idea. After successful meetings in London's East End he decided to call a Congress of Jews in support of it.

Consequently, in March 1897, Jews "all over the world" were invited to send delegates to a "Zionist congress", a counter-Sanhedrin, at Munich in August. The Western Jews were adamantly opposed. The rabbis of Germany, and then the Jews of Munich, protested, and the place of meeting was changed to Basel, in Switzerland. The Reform Jews of America two years earlier had announced that they expected "neither a return to Palestine. . . nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". (Most curious to relate today, when Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1899 suggested a book about Zionism to the Jewish Publication Society of America its secretary replied, "The Society cannot risk a book on Zionism").

When Herzl's congress met most of the 197 delegates came from Eastern Europe. This group of men then set up a "World Zionist Organization", which proclaimed Jewish nationhood and "a publicly secured, legally assured home" to be its aims, and Herzl declared "The Jewish State exists". In fact, a few Jews, claiming to speak for all Jews but vehemently repudiated by many representative bodies of Western Jewry, had held a meeting in Basel, and that was all.

Nevertheless, the proposal, for what it was worth in those circumstances, was at last on the table of international affairs. The congress was in fact a Sanhedrin summoned to cancel the avowals made by the Napoleonic Sanhedrin eighty years before. That Sanhedrin repudiated separate nationhood and any ambition to form a Jewish state; this one proclaimed separate nationhood and the ambition of statehood. Looking back fifty years later, Rabbi Elmer Berger observed, "Here was the wedge of Jewish nationalism, to be driven between Jews and other human beings. Here was the permanent mould of ghettoism into which Jewish life in the unemancipated nations was to remain compressed so that the self-generating processes of emancipation and integration could not come into play".

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* At that time it hardly reached the mind of the Gentile multitude. In 1841 a Colonel Churchill, English Consul at Smyrna, at the conference of Central European States called to determine the future of Syria had put forward a proposal to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, but apparently it was dismissed with little or no consideration.
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The Napoleonic Sanhedrin had a basic flaw, now revealed, of which Napoleon may well have been unaware. It represented the Western Jews, and Napoleon cannot reasonably be expected to have known of the strength of the compact, Talmudic-ruled mass of Jews in Russia, for Dr. Herzl, who surely should have known of this, was ignorant of it! He made the discovery at that first World Zionist Congress, called by him in such confident expectation of mass-support: "and then. . . there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected. Seventy of our delegates came from Russia, and it was patent to all of us that they represented the views and sentiments of the five million Jews of that country. What a humiliation for us, who had taken our superiority for granted! "

Dr. Herzl found himself face to face with his masters and with the conspiracy, which through him was about to enter the West. He had declared war on emancipation and, like many successors, was unaware of the nature of the force he had released. He was soon left behind, a bugler whose task was done, while the real "managers" took over.

He had forged the instrument which they were to use in their onslaught on the West. Dr. Weizmann, who became the real leader, clearly sees that: "It was Dr. Herzl's enduring contribution to Zionism to have created one central parliamentary authority for Zionism . . . This was the first time in the exilic history of Jewry that a great government had officially negotiated with the elected representatives of the Jewish people. The identity, the legal personality of the Jewish people, had been re-established".

Dr. Weizmann presumably smiled to himself when he included the words "parliamentary" and "elected". The middle sentence contains the great fact. The Jews who met at Basel, shunned by the majority of Western Jews, and its declarations, could only be lent authority by one event, which at that time seemed unimaginable; namely, their recognition by a Great Power. This inconceivable thing happened a few years later when the British Government offered Dr. Herzl Uganda, and that is the event to which Dr. Weizmann refers. From that moment all the Great Powers of the West in effect accepted the Talmudists from Russia as representing all Jews, and from that moment the Zionist-revolution also entered the West.

Thus ended the century of emancipation, which began with such bright prospect of common involvement, and the prescient words of Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (written just before Dr. Herzl's congress met at Basel) at once became truth and living reality. Looking back on Gottfried von Herder's words of a hundred years before, "The ruder nations of Europe are willing slaves of Jewish usury", Chamberlain wrote that during the 19th Century "a great change has taken place. . . today Herder could say the same of by far the greatest part of our civilized world . . . The direct influence of Judaism on the 19th Century thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day. We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present, but also the future of the world".

With the formation of the World Zionist Organization, which the great governments of the West were to treat, in effect, as an authority superior to themselves, the burning subject began to mould the entire shape of events. That it affected "the future of the world" is plainly seen in 1956, when this book is conc1uded; from the start of that year the political leaders of the remaining great powers of the West, Britain and America, observed in tones of sad surprise that the next world war might at any time break out in the place where they had set up "the Jewish State", and they hastened to and fro across the ocean in the effort to concert some way of preventing that consummation.
 

Page 202

Chapter 26


THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL

For the six years from 1897 to 1903 Dr. Theodor Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse was a world figure of an entirely new kind. He had created Zionism as an organized political force (and it was to be the death of him, as of some others who followed him on that path). He had launched it among the affairs of the West like a Chinese cracker. Yet he was an insubstantial shadow, the product of the cafés, of Sacher Torte and Kaffee mit Schlagsahne. He was like a man used for his "connections" by an astute company promoter and discarded when the flotation was well launched. He was never truly the leader and began to realize that, with a shock of alarm, at his first congress of 1897, when "there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected"; by 1904 the full realization of his captivity had killed him.

He once wrote that at Basel in 1897 "I founded the Jewish state . . . I hounded the people into the state sentiment and conveyed to them the emotion that they were the national assembly". The next six years showed, in actual events, what Leon Pinsker had meant in 1882 by "exerting irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present".

Herzl, the Budapest-born Viennese journalist, began a triumphal tour of the great capitals; he was launched on a glittering flight, as from trapeze to trapeze, through the haut monde. Emperors, potentates and statesmen received him as the spokesman of all the Jews and the contrast between what they thought and what he must have known is impressive for, as his first lieutenant, Max Nordau, said after his death,: "Our people had a Herzl but Herzl never had a people"; the Ta1mudic rabbinate in the East, which scorned this false Messiah, stood between him and any mass following.

The world in which he moved seemed firm and well founded. The Widow at Windsor and the Old Gentleman at Schoenbrunn were beloved by their peoples; the Young Man in Berlin was growing older and mellowing; the Czar was still the father of his people; men's right to process of law was everywhere being asserted; gradually industrial serfdom was giving way to better conditions. But everywhere the rulers and politicians knew and feared the danger that this process, calculably good if given time, would be arrested and destroyed by the world-revolution, for by this time Weishaupt's secret society had grown, through Disraeli's "network of secret societies", into the Communist party organized in all countries.

Herzl's method was to exploit this general fear for his particular end, the Jewish State. He offered domestic peace if it were supported and revolution if it were not and he claimed to speak in the name of all the Jews. It is, of course, implicit in this that he knew the revolutionary leadership to be Jewish, and he thus confirmed, several decades later, what Disraeli and Bakunin had said. His belief in the method he used is expressed in his famous phrase, "When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat; when we rise there rises the terrible power of our purse".

Thus he told a Grand Duke of Baden that he would diminish revolutionary propaganda in Europe in proportion to the support that his territorial ambition received from high authority. Then he was received by the behelmeted Kaiser, mounted on a charger, at the very gates of Jerusalem, and the emperor agreed to present to the Sultan Herzl's proposal for a Zionist chartered company in Palestine under German protection. When nothing came of this Herzl threatened the Kaiser, too, with revolution: "If our work miscarries, hundreds of thousands of our supporters will at a single bound join the revolutionary parties".

Then in Russia he was received by the Czar himself, to whom he spoke in similar terms. About this time the third Word Zionist Congress was held and the decision was taken that every Jew who became a member acknowledged the sovereignty of the still mythical Jewish State. Rabbi Elmer Berger says despondently that therewith "ghettoized, corporate Jewish existence became a reality again and now existed upon a greater scale that it had ever before achieved" .

Next Herzl saw another potentate, the Sultan of Turkey. Nothing tangible came of all these journeys, but the great coup was at hand, for Herzl then transferred his activities to England. There, too, he evidently had access to the highest places, for one of the decisive actions of world history was prepared, British folk who were then in their cradles, and their children and grandchildren were to be caught up in the consequences of those unrecorded interviews.

Who enabled Dr. Herzl from Vienna to command reception by the great in all countries, and who ensured that they should listen to demands that were imperious, and intimidatory as well? Obviously "kingly portals" (his own phrase) would not have opened to him merely because he had called a meeting of 197 men at Basel and this had passed a resolution. Others, more powerful than he, must have interceded to set aside porters, doormen, footmen, secretaries, chamberlains and all those whose task it is to keep importuners from their masters.

At this point the present narrative enters the most secret and jealously guarded field of all. The origins of the world-revolution, its aims and the Jewish assumption of its leadership may now be shown from the mass of documentary evidence which has accumulated; the existence of Disraeli's "network", spreading over the superficies of the earth, is known to all; the nature of the "revolutionary proletarist" is clear. But there is also that second network, of influential men at the higher level where "the power of the purse" may be used to exert "irresistible pressure on the international politics of the present" through rulers and politicians. This network of men, working in all countries to a common end, is the one which must have enabled Herzl to penetrate, with his demands, to the highest places.

All experienced observers know of the existence of this force at the highest level of international affairs. The Zionist propagandists pretend that Jewish opposition to Zionism came only from "Jewish notables", "Jewish magnates" and "rich Jews" (these phrases repeatedly recur, for instance in Dr. Weizmann's book). In fact the division in Judaism was vertical, among rich and poor alike, and though the majority of Western Jews were at that time violently opposed to Zionism the minority contained rich and notable Jews. Only these can have enabled the spectre of Zionism, in the person of Dr. Herzl, to make its sudden, Nijinski-like leap into courts and cabinet-rooms, where he began to go in and out as if he were born to privilege. Those who helped him were plainly in alliance with the one compact, organized body of Zionists: the Talmudic communities in Russia.

Dr. Kastein says that the "executive" set up by the 197 men at Basel "was the first embodiment of a real Jewish international". In other words, something that already existed received a visible expression. A "Jewish international" was already in being and this was powerful enough to command royal, princely and ministerial audiences for Dr. Herzl everywhere.

Of this international "network" of like-thinking men at the highest level, in Dr. Herzl's day, the student may only make a picture by carefully piecing together significant glimpses and fragments (its existence and concerted actions in our time are plainly demonstrable, as this book in its later chapters will show, from the growing mass of literature). For instance, Dr. Weizmann says he told Dr. Herzl that Sir Francis Montefiore (a leading Jew in England) was "a fool", whereon Herzl answered, "He opens kingly portals to me". Again, one Baron de Hirsch was Herzl's chief financial backer and supporter. Of this Baron de Hirsch Count Carl Lonyay (quoting from documents in the secret archives of the Imperial Court at Vienna) says that Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, wishing to make provision for a woman friend before his suicide at Mayerling, obtained 100,000 gulden "from the banker, Baron Hirsch, in return for an act of friendliness he had performed in December, when he invited the banker to meet the Prince of Wales" (the future Kind Edward VII).

Baron de Hirsch, in the sequence to this introduction, became an intimate of the Prince of Wales, and private banker and financial adviser to the future King of England. He was also brother-in-law of a Mr. Bischoffsheim of the Jewish financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt in London, of which a very rich German-born Jew, Sir Ernest Cassel, was a member. Sir Ernest, as Mr. Brian Connell says in a biographical study, fell heir to Baron de Hirsch's friendship with the future king: "where Hirsch had been an intimate, Cassel was to become Edward VII's closest personal friend". He was indeed the last of the king's intimates to see him alive, the king, on the day of his death, insisting on keeping an appointment with Sir Edward and rising to dress himself for the purpose.

In the sequence to this account Mr. Connell says: "The small international fraternity of which he" (Sir Ernest Cassel) "became perhaps the leading member were all men with backgrounds similar to his own, people whom he approached in the course of his extensive travels. There was Max Warburg, head of the great private banking house in Hamburg; Edouard Noetzlin, honorary president of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, in Paris; Franz Philippson in Brussels; Wertheim and Gompertz in Amsterdam and, above all, Jacob Schiff of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in New York. Ties of race and interest bound these men together. The web of their communications quivered at the slightest touch. They maintained between them an incredibly accurate network of economic, political and financial intelligence at the highest level. They could withdraw support here, provide additional funds there, move immense sums of money with lightning rapidity and secrecy from one corner to another of their financial empires, and influence the political decisions of a score of countries".

"Ties of race and interest . . . web . . . network . . . intelligence at the highest level. . . move immense sums of money . . . influence political decisions . . .": there can be no reasonable doubt that this was the "Jewish international" of which Dr. Kastein wrote and the mechanism which operated, across all national boundaries, to support Dr. Herzl. Nothing less could explain the action which the British Government took and if there was doubt earlier, about the concerted action of this force, above and distinct from nations, the events of our mid-century have removed it. With such a power behind him Dr. Herzl was in a position to make demands and utter menaces. The powerful men who formed this international directorate (the term is not too large) at that time may not, as individuals, have believed in Zionism, and may even have been privately opposed to it. In the present writer's belief even they were not powerful enough to oppose, or to deny support to, a policy laid down by the elders of Jewry.

While the consequences of Dr. Herzl's journeys were secretly taking shape, he continued his travels. He took an innocent pride in his sudden elevation and liked the elegance of society, the tailcoats and white gloves, the chandeliers and receptions. The Talmudic elders in Russia, who had grown up to the kaftan and earlocks and were preparing to overthrow him, disdained but made use of this typical figure of "Western emancipation".

In 1903 he had astonishing experiences, resembling those of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666. He went to Russia and on his progress through Jewish cities was the object of Messianic ovations from the unenlightened masses. On this occasion he sought to persuade de Russia to bring pressure on the Sultan, in the matter of his proposal for a chartered company in Palestine. He made some impression on the Russian Minister of the Interior, von Plehve, to whom he said that he spoke for "all the Jews of Russia".

If he believed that he was soon undeceived. He did something that shows him either to have been recklessly brave or else quite unaware of what truly went on around him (this happens sometimes with such men). Presumably in order to strengthen his case with von Plehve, with whom he must have used the "Zionism or revolution" argument, he urged the Jews in Russia to abstain from revolutionary activities and discussed their "emancipation" with the Russian authorities!

Thus he wrote his own political death warrant, and indeed he soon died. To the Talmudic elders this was heresy; he had entered the forbidden room. They had been working to prevent Jewish emancipation in Russia, because they saw in it the loss of their power over Jewry. If his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, pacification in Russia would follow, and that would mean the end of the propagandist legend of "Jewish persecution" in Russia.

When he returned to address the Sixth Congress of his World Zionist Organization his fate rose to meet him in the form of a compact mass of Russian Jews no longer merely "humiliating" to him, but menacing. At this moment of his fiasco he thought he had the ace of trumps in his pocket and he produced it. As a result of those interviews in London and of the "irresistible pressure" which supported him, the British Government had offered Dr. Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse a territory in Africa, Uganda!

If history records a stranger thing, I have not discovered it. Yet the trump card proved to be a deuce. 295 delegates voted to accept the offer, but 175 rejected it; clearly Dr. Herzl did not speak for "all Jews". The great majority of the 175 Noes came from the Jews of Russia. The huddled Jewish throngs there had hailed Herzl as the Messiah; these 175 emissaries of the Eastern rabbinate imprecated him, for Uganda meant the ruin of their plan. They cast themselves on the floor in the traditional attitude of mourning for the dead or for the destruction of the temple. One of them, a woman, called the world-famous Dr. Herzl "a traitor" and when he was gone tore down the map of Uganda from behind the speakers' dais.

If what he said and wrote was fully candid, Dr. Herzl never understood why the Jewish emissaries from Russia refused to consider any other place than Palestine, and if that is so he must have been most guileless. He had built up his entire movement on the c1aim that "a place of refuge" was directly needed for "persecuted Jews", and these were the Jews of Russia; Jews were fully emancipated elsewhere. If that was true, then any good place would do, and he had now procured one for them; moreover, if any of them preferred to stay in Russia, and his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, they could have all they wanted in Russia too!

From the point of view of the Talmudic rabbinate in Russia the matter was entirely different. They, too, had built up the legend of "persecution in Russia", while they worked against emancipation there, but this was for the purpose of fulfilling the ancient Law, which meant possession of Palestine and all subsequent things that the Law ordained. Acceptance of Uganda would have meant Doomsday for Talmudic Judaism.

Dr. Weizmann describes Dr. Herzl's final humiliation. After the vote Herzl went to see the Jews from Russia, who had turned their backs on him and walked out, in their committee room. "He came in, looking haggard and exhausted. He was received in dead silence. Nobody rose from his seat to greet him, nobody applauded him when he ended. . . It was probably the first time that Herzl was thus received at any Zionist gathering: he, the idol of all Zionists".

It was also the last time. Within the year Dr. Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. No conclusion can be offered about his death. Judaist writers refer to it in cryptic terms. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says it was the result of what he endured and other authorities make similarly obscure, though significant, allusions. Those who during the centuries have been the object of anathema or excommunication by the ruling sect often have died soon and wretchedly. The student comes to feel that in this matter he approaches mysterious things, closed to all ordinary research.

The curious thing is that Herzl's intimate, right-hand man and leading orator saw the shape of things, at that time and to come, with complete clarity. He displayed a foreknowledge as great as that of Leon Pinsker when he depicted the series of events to which Pinsker's "irresistible pressure on international politics" would lead. At the very congress where Herzl suffered his humiliation Max Nordau (an alias or pseudonym; his name was Suedfeld) gave this exact prognosis:

"Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created" (1903). Here spoke the initiate, the illuminate, the man who knew the strength and purpose of "the international". (Max Nordau helped the process, the course of which he foretold, by writing such best-sellers of the 1890's as Degeneration, in which he told the West that it was irredeemably corrupt). Even Max Nordau did not spell out his conclusion to its logical end. Another delegate did that, Dr. Nahum Sokoloff, who said: "Jerusalem will one day become the capital of world peace". That the ambition is to make it the capital of the world is clear in 1956, when the Western governments stand in daily fear of its annexation to the Zionist state; whether mankind would find it to be the capital of peace remains to be seen.

After Dr. Herzl died Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the later Zionist leader, led the attack on the Uganda offer and at the Seventh Congress, of 1905, the acceptance, at his instigation, was revoked. From that moment Zionism was the instrument of the Talmudic rabbinate in the East.

The story of the Uganda offer and its scornful rejection shows the indifference of the ruling sect to the welfare and the wishes of the Jewish masses, for whom they pretended to speak; indeed, when the matter is carefully considered "hostility" suggests itself as a truer word than "indifference". This is seen by examining, in turn, the feeling expressed towards the offer by the three main groups of Jews: those of the West, those of Russia, and (a section of Jewry never even mentioned in all these loud exchanges) the Jews already in Palestine.

The Jews of the West at that time were strongly opposed to Zionism as such, whether it led to Uganda, Pa1estine or anywhere else; they just wanted to stay where they were. The Jews of Russia were depicted as needing simply "a place of refuge" from "persecution", and if that was true, Uganda might have appealed to them; anyway, the frenzied ovations with which they received Dr. Herzl suggest that they would have followed any lead he gave, had the rabbinate allowed them. That leaves the Jews who were already in Palestine.

This one community of original Jews was ardently in favour of removal to Uganda, as research discovers, and for this reason they were denounced as "traitors" by the Judaized Chazars from Russia who had taken over Zionism! This is what the Zionist Organization at Tel Aviv still was saying about them in 1945:

"It was a degrading and distressing sight to see all these people who . . . had been the first to build up the Jewish Palestine of that day, public1y denying and repudiating their own past. . . The passion for Uganda became associated with a deadly hatred for Palestine. . . In the community centres of the first Jewish colonies young men educated in the Alliance Israelite schools denounced Palestine as 'a land of corpses and graves', a land of malaria and eye-diseases, a land which destroys its inhabitants. Nor was this the expression of a few individuals. Indeed, it was only a few individuals here and there . . . who remained loyal. . . The whole of Palestine was in a state of ferment. . . All opposition to Uganda came from outside of Palestine. In Zion itself all were against Zion".

What the masses of people wanted, Jewish or Gentile, was from 1903 of no account. Acceptance or refusal made no difference; the offer had been made, and by it the West and its future were involved in an enterprise foreseeably disastrous. As Dr. Weizmann says, a British government by this act committed itself to recognize the Talmudists from Russia as the government of all Jews; thereby it also committed future generations of its people, and the similar commitment of the American people was to follow a decade later, when the path had been prepared.

Out of that act of 1903 came the beginning of this century's tribulations. The story of Zion thereafter became that of Western politicians who, under "irresistible pressure", did the bidding of a powerful sect. 1903 was the conspiracy's triumphant year, and for the West it was to prove as ominous as 1914 and 1939, which years both took their shape under its shadow.
 

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Chapter 27


THE "PROTOCOLS"

While Zionism thus took shape in the Eastern ghettoes during the last century and at the start of this one emerged as a new force in international affairs (when the British Government offered it Uganda), the world-revolution, in those same Talmudic areas, prepared its third "eruption". The two forces moved forward together in synchronization (for Zionism, as has been shown, used the threat of Communism in Europe to gain the ear of European rulers for its territorial demand outside Europe). It was as if twin turbines began to revolve, generating what was in effect one force, from which the new century was to receive galvanic shocks.

According to Disraeli and Bakunin the world-revolution had come under Jewish leadership around the middle of the century, and its aims then changed. Bakunin's followers, who sought to abolish the State as such because they foresaw that the revolutionary State might become more despotic than any earlier despotism, were ousted and forgotten. The world-revolution therewith took the shape of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, which aimed at the super-State founded in slave-labour and in "the confiscation of human liberty" (as de Tocqueville wrote in 1848).

This change in leadership and aims determined the course of the 20th Century. However, the methods by which the existing order was to be destroyed did not change; they continued to be those revealed by Weishaupt's papers published in 1787. Many publications of the 19th Century showed that the original Illuminist plan continued through the generations to be the textbook of the revolutionaries of all camps, as to method.

These works propagated or exposed the destructive plan in various ways, sometimes allegorical, but always recognizable if compared with the original, Weishaupt's documents. In 1859 Crétineau Joly assailed Jewish Leadership of "the secret societies". His book reproduced documents (communicated to him by Pope Gregory XVI) of the Italian secret society, the Haute Vente Romaine; their authenticity is beyond question. The Haute Vente Romaine was headed by an Italian prince who had been initiated by one of Weishaupt's own intimates (Knigge) and was a reincarnation of the Illuminati. The outer circle of initiates, the dupes, were persuaded that "the object of the association is something high and noble, that it is the Order of those who desire a purer morality and a stronger piety, the independence and unity of their country". Those who graduated into the inner degrees progressively learned the real aims and swore to destroy all religion and legitimate government; then they received the secrets of assassination, poison and perjury first disclosed by Weishaupt's documents.

In 1862 Karl Marx (whose Communist Manifesto is recognizably Illuminist) founded his First International, and Bakunin formed his Alliance Sociale Democratique (the programme of which, as Mrs. Nesta Webster has shown by quoting correlative passages, was Illuminism undiluted). In the same year Maurice Joly published an attack on Napoleon III, to whom he attributed the identical methods of corrupting and ruining the social system (this book was written in al1egorical form). In 1868 the German Goedsche reproduced the same ideas in the form of an attack on Jewish leadership of the revolution, and in 1869 the French Catholic and Royalist Gougenot Des Mousseaux took up the same theme. In that year Bakunin also published his Polemic Against The Jews..

In all these works, in one form or another, the continuity of the basic idea first revealed by Weishaupt's documents appears: namely, that of destroying all legitimate government, religion and nationhood and setting up a universal despotism to rule the enslaved masses by terror and violence. Some of them assailed the Jewish. usurpation of, or succession to the leadership of the revolution.

After that came a pause in the published literature of the conspiracy first disclosed in 1787, until in 1905 one Professor Sergyei Nilus, an official of the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, published a book, of which the British Museum in London has a copy bearing its date-stamp, August 10, 1906. Great interest would attach to anything that could be elicited about Nilus and his book, which has never been translated; the mystery with which he and it have been surrounded impedes research. One chapter was translated into English in 1920. This calls for mention here because the original publication occurred in 1905, although the violent uproar only began when it appeared in English in 1920.

This one chapter was published in England and America as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"; I cannot learn whether this was the original chapter heading or whether it was provided during translation. No proof is given that the document is what it purports to be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish "Elders". In that respect, therefore, it is valueless."

In every other respect it is of inestimable importance, for it is shown by the conclusive test (that of subsequent events) to be an authentic document of the world-conspiracy first disclosed by Weishaupt's papers. Many other documents in the same series had followed that first revelation, as I have shown, but this one transcends all of them. The others were fragmentary and gave glimpses; this one gives the entire picture of the conspiracy, motive, method and objective. It adds nothing new to what had been revealed in parts (save for the unproven, attribution to Jewish elders themselves), but it puts all the parts in place and exposes the whole. It accurately depicts all that has come about in the fifty years since it was published, and what clearly will follow in the next fifty years unless in that time the force which the conspiracy has generated produces the counter-force.

It is informed by a mass of knowledge (particularly of human weaknesses) which can only have sprung from the accumulated experience and continuing study of centuries, or of ages. It is written in a tone of lofty superiority, as by beings perched on some Olympian pinnacle of sardonic and ancient wisdom, and of mocking scorn for the writhing masses far below ("the mob" . . . "alcoholized animals" . . . "cattle" . . . "bloodthirsty beasts") who vainly struggle to elude the "nippers" which are closing on them; these nippers are "the power of gold" and the brute force of the mob, incited to destroy its only protectors and consequently itself.

The destructive idea is presented in the form of a scientific theory, almost of an exact science, argued with gusto and eloquence. In studying the Protocols I am constantly reminded of something that caught my eye in Disraeli's dictum, earlier quoted. Disraeli, who was careful in the choice of words, spoke of "the destructive principle" (not idea, scheme, notion, plan, plot or the like), and the Protocols elevate the theory of destruction to this status of "a fundamental truth, a primary or basic law, a governing law of conduct" (to quote various dictionary definitions of "principle"). In many passages the Protocols appear, at first sight, to recommend destruction as a thing virtuous in itself, and consequently justifying all the methods explicitly recommended to promote it (bribery, blackmail, corruption, subversion, sedition, mob-incitement, terror and violence), which thus become virtuous too.

But careful scrutiny shows that this is not the case. In fact the argument presented begins at the end, world power, and goes backward through the means, which are advocated simply as the best ones to that end. The end is that first revealed in Weishaupt's documents, and it is apparent that both spring from a much earlier source, although the Protocols, in time, stand to the Weishaupt papers as grandson to grandsire. The final aim is the destruction of all religion and nationhood and the establishment of the super State, ruling the world by ruthless terror.

When the Protocols appeared in English the minor point, who was the author of this particular document, was given a false semblance of major importance by the enraged Jewish attack on the document itself. The asseveration of Jewish leadership of the revolutionary conspiracy was not new at all; the reader has seen that Disraeli, Bakunin and many others earlier affirmed it. In this case the allegation about a specific meeting of Jewish leaders of the conspiracy was unsupported and could have been ignored (in 1913 a somewhat similar publication accused the Jesuits of instigating a world-conspiracy resembling that depicted alike in the Protocols and in Weishaupt's papers; the Jesuits quietly remarked that this was false and the matter was forgotten).

The response of official Jewry in 1920 and afterwards was different. It was aimed, with fury, at the entire substance of the Protocols; it did not stop at denying a Jewish plot, but denied that there was any plot, which was demonstrably untrue. The existence of the conspiracy had been recognized and affirmed by a long chain of high authorities, from Edmund Burke, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Disraeli, Bakunin and the many others mentioned in an earlier chapter. Moreover, when the Protocols appeared in English conclusive proof had been given by the event in Russia. Thus the nature of the Jewish attack could only strengthen public doubts; it protested much too much.

This attack was the repetition of the one which silenced those earlier leaders of the public demand for investigation and remedy, Robison, Barruel and Morse, but on this occasion it was a Jewish attack. Those three men made no imputation of Jewish leadership, and they were defamed solely because they drew public attention to the continuing nature of the conspiracy and to the fact that the French revolution was clearly but its first "eruption". The attack on the Protocols in the 1920's proved above all else the truth of their contention; it showed that the standing organization for suppressing public discussion of the conspiracy had been perfected in the intervening 120 years. Probably so much money and energy were never before in history expended on the effort to suppress a single document.

It was brought to England by one of the two leading British correspondents of that day in Moscow, Victor Marsden of the Morning Post (the significant story of the other correspondent belongs to a later chapter). Marsden was an authority on Russia and was much under the enduring effect of the Terror. He was in effect its victim, for he died soon after completing what he evidently felt to be a duty, the translation of the Protocols at the British Museum.

Publication in English aroused worldwide interest. That period (1920 and onward) marks the end of the time when Jewish questions could be impartially discussed in public. The initial debate was free and vigorous, but in following years the attack succeeded in imposing the law of lese majesty in this matter and today hardly any public man or print ventures to mention the Protocols unless to declare them "forged" or "infamous" (an act of submission also foretold in them).

The first reaction was the natural one. The Protocols were received as formidable evidence of an international conspiracy against religion, nationhood, legitimate government and property. All agreed that the attribution to Jewish authorship was unsupported, but that the subject matter was so grave, and so strongly supported by events subsequent to the original publication, that full enquiry was needed. This remedy, "investigation", was the one advocated by many leading men 120 years earlier. In this instance the attack was in effect again on the demand for investigation, not simply on the allegation against "the Elders of Zion".

The Times (of London) on May 8, 1920 in a long article said, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . Are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?" The Morning Post (then the oldest and soberest British newspaper) published twenty-three articles, also calling for investigation.

In The Spectator on August 27, 1921, Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, also urged investigation: "The main point is, of course, the source from which Nilus obtained the Protocols. The Russians who knew Nilus and his writings cannot all have been exterminated by the Bolsheviks. His book . . . has not been translated, though it would give some idea of the man. . . What is the most striking characteristic of the Protocols? The answer is knowledge of a rare kind, embracing the widest field. The solution of this 'mystery', if it is one, is to be found where this uncanny knowledge, on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based, can be shown to reside". In America Mr. Henry Ford, declaring that "the Protocols have fitted the world situation up to this time; they fit it now", caused his Dearborn Independent to publish a series of articles of which a million and a half reprints were sold.

Within two years the proprietor of The Times was certified insane (by an unnamed doctor in a foreign land; a later chapter will describe this episode) and forcibly removed from control of his publications, and The Times published an article dismissing the Protocols as a plagiarism of Maurice Joly's book. The proprietor of the Morning Post became the object of sustained vituperation until he sold the newspaper, which then ceased publication. In 1927 Mr. Henry Ford published an apology addressed to a well-known Jew of America; when I was in the United States in later years I was told by credible informants that he was persuaded to do this, at a moment when a new-model Ford automobile was about to be marketed, by hostile threats from dealers on whom the fortunes of his concern depended.

The campaign against the Protocols has never ceased since then. In communized Russia all copies discoverable had been destroyed at the revolution and possession of the book became a capital crime under the law against "anti-semitism". In the direct sequence to that, though twenty-five years later, the American and British authorities in occupied Germany after the Second World War constrained the Western German government to enact laws against "anti-semitism" on the Bolshevik model; and in 1955 a Munich printer who reproduced the Protocols had his business confiscated. In England at the time of publication the sale of the book was temporarily stopped by authority, under the pressure described, and in the course of the years the attack on it continued so violent that publishers feared it and only small local firms ever ventured to print it. In Switzerland, between the wars, a Jewish suit was brought against the book as "improper literature"; the case was won, but the verdict was set aside by a higher court.

The state of affairs thus brought about after 1920, and continuing today, was foretold by the Protocols in 1905: "Through the press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade . . . The principal factor of success in the political" (field) " is the secrecy of its undertaking; the word should not agree with the deeds of the diplomat. . . We must compel the governments . . . to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan, already approaching the desired consummation, by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands. . . We shall deal with the press in the following way: . . . we shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb; we shall do the same also with all productions of the printing-press, for where would be the sense of getting rid of the attacks of the press if we remain targets for pamphlets and books? . . . No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification . . . We shall have a sure triumph over our opponents since they will not have at their disposition organs of the press in which they can give full and final expression to their views owing to the aforesaid methods of dealing with the press . . ."

Such is the history of the Protocols thus far. Their attribution to Jewish "Elders" is unsupported and should be rejected, without prejudice to any other evidence about Jewish leadership of the world-revolution as such. The Jewish attack on them was bent, not on exculpating Jewry, but on stopping the publication on the plea that it was "agitating the public mind without occasion or justification". The arguments advanced were bogus; they were that the Protocols closely resembled several earlier publications and thus were "plagiaries" or "forgeries", whereas what this in truth showed was the obvious thing: that they were part of the continuing literature of the conspiracy. They might equally well be the product of non-Jewish or of anti-Jewish revolutionaries, and that is of secondary importance. What they proved is that the organization first revealed by Weishaupt's documents was in existence 120 years later, and was still using the methods and pursuing the aim then exposed; and when they were published in English the Bolshevik revolution had given the proof.

In my opinion the Protocols provide the essential handbook for students of the time and subject. If Lord Sydenham, in 1921, was arrested by the "uncanny knowledge" they displayed, "on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based", how much more would he be impressed today, in 1956, when much more of them has been as literally fulfilled. Through this book any man can see how the upheavals of the past 150 years were, and how those of the next fifty years will be brought about; he will know in advance just how "the deeds" of his elected representatives will differ from their "word".

In one point I am able from my own experience to test Lord Sydenham's dictum about fulfilled prophecies. The Protocols, speaking of control of published information, say: "Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies, in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them". That was not the situation in 1905, or in Lord Sydenham's day, or in 1926, when I became a journalist, but it was developing and today is the situation. The stream of "news" which pours into the public mind through the newspapers comes from a few agencies, as if from half a dozen taps. Any hand that can control those valves can control "the news", and the reader may observe for himself the filtered form in which the news reaches him. As to the editorial views, based on this supply of news, the transformation that has been brought about may be comprehended by referring to the impartially critical articles published in The Times, Morning Post, Spectator, Dearborn Independent and thousands of other journals some twenty-five years ago. This could not happen today. The subjugation of the press has been accomplished as the Protocols foretold, and by the accident of my generation and calling I saw it come about.

Comparative study of the Protocols and of the Weishaupt papers leads to the strong deduction that both derive from a common and much older source. They cannot have been the product of any one man or one group of men in the period when they were published; the "uncanny knowledge" displayed in them obviously rests on the cumulative experience of eras. In particular, this applies (in Weishaupt's papers and the Protocols alike) to the knowledge of human weaknesses, which are singled out with analytical exactitude, the method of exploiting each of them being described with disdainful glee.

The instrument to be used for the destruction of the Christian nation-states and their religion is "the mob". The word is used throughout with searing contempt to denote the masses, (who in public are flattered by being called "the people"). "Men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization . . . The might of a mob is blind, senseless and unreasoning force ever at the mercy of a suggestion from any side". From this the argument is developed that "an absolute despotism" is necessary to govern "the mob", which is "a savage", and that "our State" will employ "the terror which tends to produce blind submission". The "literal fulfilment" of these precepts in communized Russia must be obvious to all today).

This "absolute despotism" is to be vested in the international super-State at the end of the road. In the meanwhile regional puppet-despots are depicted as essential to the process of breaking down the structure of states and the defences of peoples: "From the premier-dictators of the present day the peoples suffer patiently and bear such abuses as for the least of them they would have beheaded twenty kings. What is the explanation . . .? It is explained by the fact that these dictators whisper to the peoples through their agents that through these abuses the are inflicting injury on the States with the highest purpose - to secure the welfare of the peoples, the international brotherhood of them all, their solidarity and equality of rights. Naturally they do not tell the peoples that this unification must be accomplished only under our sovereign rule".

This passage is of especial interest. The term "premier-dictator" would not generally have been understood in 1905, when the peoples of the West believed their elected representatives to express and depend on their approval. However, it became applicable during the First and Second World Wars, when American presidents and British prime ministers made themselves, in fact, "premier-dictators" and used emergency powers in the name of "the welfare of peoples. . . international brotherhood . . . equality of rights". Moreover, these premier-dictators, in both wars, did tell the peoples that the ultimate end of all this would be "unification" under a world government of some kind. The question, who would govern this world government, was one which never received straightforward answer; so much else of the Protocols has been fulfilled that their assertion that it would be the instrument of the conspiracy for governing the world "by violence and terrorization" deserves much thought.

The especial characteristic of the two 20th Century wars is the disappointment which each brought to the peoples who appeared to be victorious. "Uncanny knowledge", therefore, again seems to have inspired the statement, made in 1905 or earlier, "Ever since that time" (the French Revolution) "we have been leading the peoples from one disenchantment to another", followed later by this: "By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but. we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness". The words, written before 1905, seem accurately to depict the course of the 20th Century.

Again, the document says "it is indispensable for our purpose that wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains". This very phrase, of 1905 or earlier, was made the chief slogan, or apparent moral principle, proclaimed by the political leaders of America and Britain in both world wars, and in this case the difference between "the word" and "the deed" of "the diplomat" has been shown by results. The chief result of the First War was to establish revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism as new forces in international affairs, the first with a promised "homeland" and the second with a resident State. The chief result of the Second War was that further "territorial gains" accrued to, and only to, Zionism and Communism; Zionism received its resident State and Communism received half of Europe. The "deadly accuracy" (Lord Sydenham's words) of the Protocol's forecasts seems apparent in this case, where a specious phrase used in the Protocols of 1905 became the daily language of American presidents and British prime ministers in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.

The reason why the authors of the Protocols held this slogan to be so important, in beguiling the peoples, is also explained. If the nations embroiled in wars are denied "territorial gains", the only victors will then be "our international agentur. . . our international rights will then wipe out national rights, in the proper sense of right, and will rule the nations precisely as the civil law of States rules the relations of their subjects among themselves". To bring about this state of affairs compliant politicians are needed, and of them the Protocols say: "The administrators whom we shall choose from among the public, with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience, will not be persons trained in the arts of government, and will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of men of learning and genius who will be their advisers, specialists bred and reared from early childhood to rule the affairs of the whole world".

The reader may judge for himself whether this description fits some of "the administrators" of the West in the last five decades; the test is their attitude towards Zionism, the world-revolution and world-government, and subsequent chapters will offer information in these three respects. But "deadly accuracy" appears to reside even more in the allusion to "advisers".

Here again is "uncanny knowledge", displayed more than fifty years ago. In 1905 the non-elected but powerful "adviser" was publicly unknown. True, the enlightened few, men like Disraeli, knew that "the world is governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes", but to the general public the passage would have been meaningless.

In the First and Second World Wars, however, the non-elected, unofficial but imperious "adviser" became a familiar public figure. He emerged into the open (under "emergency powers") and became known to and was passively accepted by the public masses; possibly the contempt which the Protocols display for "the mob" was justified by this submission to behind-the-scenes rule even when it was openly exercized. In the United States, for instance, "advisers on Jewish affairs" became resident at the White House and at the headquarters of American armies of occupation. One financier (who publicly recommended drastic measures for "ruling the affairs of the world") was adviser to so many presidents that he was permanently dubbed "Elder Statesman" by the press, and visiting prime ministers from England also repaired to him as if to a supreme seat of authority.

The Protocols foretold this regime of the "advisers" when none understood what was meant and few would have credited that they would openly appear in the high places.

The Protocols repeatedly affirm that the first objective is the destruction of the existing ruling class ("the aristocracy", the term employed, was still applicable in 1905) and the seizure of property through the incitement of the insensate, brutish "mob". Once again, subsequent events give the "forecast" its "deadly accuracy":

"In politics one must know how to seize the property of others without hesitation if by it we secure submission and sovereignty. . . The words, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms boring into the wellbeing of the people, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the States. . . This helped us to our greatest triumph; it gave us the possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands the master card, the destruction of privileges, or in other words the very existence of the aristocracy . . . that class which was the only defence peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy . . . we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money. The qualifications of this aristocracy we have established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in knowledge. . . It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment …. . We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces; Socialists, Anarchists, Communists . . . By want and the envy and hatred which it engenders we shall move the mobs and with their hands we shall wipe out all those who hinder us on our way . . . The people, blindly believing things in print, cherishes . . . a blind hatred towards all conditions which it considers above itself, for it has no understanding of the meaning of class and condition. . . These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. 'Ours' they will not touch, because the moment of attack will be known to us and we shall take measures to protect our own. . . The word 'freedom' brings out the communities of men to fight against every kind of force, against every kind of authority, even against God and the laws of nature. For this reason we, when we come into our kingdom, shall have to erase this word from the lexicon of life as implying a principle of brute force which turns mobs into bloodthirsty beasts. . . But even freedom might be harmless and have its place in the State economy without injury to the wellbeing of the peoples if it rested upon the foundation of faith in God. . . This is the reason why it is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the minds of the masses the very principle of Godhead and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs . . ."

". . . We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the peoples, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. This is the reason why there is not one State which would anywhere receive support if it were to raise its arm, for every one of them must bear in mind that any agreement against us would be unprofitable to itself. We are too strong, there is no evading our power. The nations cannot come to even an inconsiderable private agreement without our secretly having a hand in it . . . In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the peoples lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret. The second secret requisite for the success of our government is comprised in the following: to multiply to such an extent national failings, habits, passions, conditions of civil life, that it will be impossible for anyone to know where he is in the resulting chaos, so that the people in consequence will fail to understand one another . . . By all these means we shall so wear down the peoples that they will be compelled to offer us international power of a nature that by its possession will enable us without any violence gradually to absorb all the State forces of the world and to form a Super-Government. In place of the rulers of today we shall set up a bogey which will be called the Super-Government administration. Its hands will reach out in all directions like nippers and its organization will be of such colossal dimensions that it cannot fail to subdue all the nations of the world".

That the Protocols reveal the common source of inspiration of Zionism and Communism is shown by significant parallels that can be drawn between the two chief methods laid down in them and the chief methods pursued by Dr. Herzl and Karl Marx: The Protocols repeatedly lay emphasis on the incitement of "the mob" against the ruling class as the most effective means of destroying States and nations and achieving world dominion. Dr. Herzl, as was shown in the preceding chapter, used precisely this method to gain the ear of European rulers.

Next, Karl Marx. The Protocols say, "The aristocracy of the peoples, as a political force, is dead. . . but as landed proprietors they can still be harmful to us from the fact that they are self-sufficing in the resources upon which they live. It is essential therefore for us at whatever cost to deprive them of their land. . . At the same time we must intensively patronize trade and industry . . . what we want is that industry should drain off from the land both labour and capital and by means of speculation transfer into our hands all the money of the world.. ..."

Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto exactly followed this formula. True he declared that Communism might be summed up in one sentence, "abolition of private property", but subsequently he qualified this dictum by restricting actual confiscation to land and implying that other types of private property were to remain intact. (In the later Marxist event, of course, all private property was confiscated, but I speak here of the strict parallel between the strategy laid down before the event alike by the Protocols and Marx).

A passage of particular interest in the present, though it was written before 1905, says, "Nowadays if any States raise a protest against us, it is only proforma at our discretion and by our direction, for their anti-semitism is indispensable to us for the management of our lesser brethren". A distinctive feature of our era is the way the charge of "anti-semitism" is continually transferred from one country to another, the country so accused becoming automatically the specified enemy in the next war. This passage might cause the prudent to turn a sceptical eye on today's periodical reports of sudden "anti-semitic" turns in communized Russia, or elsewhere.

The resemblance to Weishaupt's documents is very strong in the passages which relate to the infiltration of public departments, professions and parties, for instance: "It is from us that the all-engulfing terror proceeds. We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines, restorating monarchists, demagogues, socialists, communists, and utopian dreamers of every kind. We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them on his own account is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established form of order. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness".

The allusions to the permeation of universities in particular, and of education in general, also spring directly from Weishaupt, or from whatever earlier source he received them: ". . . We shall emasculate the universities . . . Their officials and professors will be prepared for their business by detailed secret programmes of action from which they will not with immunity diverge, not by one iota. They will be appointed with especial precaution, and will be so placed as to be wholly dependent upon the Government". This secret permeation of universities (which was successful in the German ones in Weishaupt's day, as his documents show) was very largely effective in our generation. The two British government officials who after their flight to Moscow were paraded before the international press in 1956 to state that they had been captured by Communism at their universities, were typical products of this method, described by the Protocols early in this century and by Weishaupt in 1787.

Weishaupt's documents speak of Freemasonry as the best "cover" to be used by the agents of the conspiracy. The Protocols allot the function of "cover" to "Liberalism": "When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony".

The term "utopian dreamers", used more than once, is applied to Liberals, and its original source probably resides in the Old Testamentary allusion to "dreamers of dreams" with "false prophets", are to be put to death. The end of Liberalism, therefore, would be apparent to the student even if the Protocols did not specify it: "We shall root out liberalism from the important strategic posts of our government on which depends the training of subordinates for our State structure".

The "Big Brother" regimes of our century, are accurately foretold in the passage, "Our government will have the appearance of a patriarchal paternal guardianship on the part of our ruler".

Republicanism, too, is to be a "cover" for the conspiracy. The Protocols are especially contemptuous of republicanism, in which (and in liberalism) they see the weapon of self-destruction forged out of "the mob": ". . . then it was that the era of republics became possible of realization; and then it was that we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government, by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves. This was the foundation of the mine which we have laid under the peoples".

Then the unknown scribes of some time before 1905 describe the position to which American presidents have been reduced in our century. The passage begins, "In the near future we shall establish the responsibility of presidents". This, as the sequence shows, means personal responsibility, as distinct from responsibility curbed by constitutional controls; the president is to become one of the "premier-dictators" earlier foreseen, whose function is to be to break down the constitutional defences of states and thus prepare "unification under our sovereign rule".

During the First and Second World Wars the American presidents did in fact become "premier-dictators" in this sense, claiming that "the emergency" and the need for "victory" dictated this seizure of powers of personal responsibility; powers which would be restored to "the people" when "the emergency" was past. Readers of sufficient years will recall how inconceivable this appeared before it happened and how passively it was accepted in the event. The passage then continues:

"The chamber of deputies will provide cover for, will protect, will elect presidents, but we shall take from it the right to propose new, or make changes in existing laws, for this right will be given by us to the responsible president, a puppet in our hands. . . Independently of this we shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need. . . It is easy to understand that in these conditions the key of the shrine will lie in our hands and that no one outside ourselves will any longer direct the force of legislation. . . The president will, at our discretion, interpret the sense of such of the existing laws as admit of various interpretation; he will further annul them when we indicate to him the necessity to do so, besides this, he will have the right to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements for the supreme welfare of the state. By such measures we shall obtain the power of destroying little by little, step by step, all that at the outset when we enter on our rights, we are compelled to introduce into the constitutions of states to prepare for the transition to an imperceptible abolition of every kind of constitution, and then the time is come to turn every government into our despotism".

This forecast of 1905 or earlier particu1arly deserves Lord Sydenham's tribute of "deadly accuracy". American presidents in the two wars of this century have acted as here shown. They did take the right of declaring and making war, and it has been used at least once (in Korea) since the Second World War ended; any attempt in Congress or outside to deprive them of this power, or curb them in the use of it meets with violently hostile attack.

So the Protoco1s continue. The peoples, on their progress "from one disenchantment to another", will not be allowed "a breathing-space". Any country "which dares to oppose us" must be met with war, and any collective opposition with "universal war". The peoples will not be allowed "to contend with sedition" (here is the key to the furious attacks of the 1790's, 1920 and today on all demands for "investigation", "Witch-hunting", "McCarthyism" and the like). In the Super-State to come the obligation will fall on members of one family to denounce dissidents within the family circle (the Old Testamentary dispensation earlier mentioned). The "complete wrecking of the Christian religion" will not be long delayed. The peoples will be kept distracted by trivial amusements ("people's palaces") from becoming troublesome and asking questions. History will be rewritten for their delusion (another precept since fulfilled in communized Russia), for "we shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those which depict all the errors of the national governments". "All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold".

And the end of it all: "What we have to get at is that there should be in all the States of the world, beside ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers. . . The recognition of our despot. . . will come when the peoples, utterly wearied by the irregularities and incompetence. . . of their rulers, will clamour: 'Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of discords, frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts, who will give us peace and quiet, which we cannot find under our rulers and representatives' ".

In two or three of these passages I have substituted "people" or "masses" for "Goyim ", because the use of that word relates to the unproven assertion contained in the book's title, and I do not want to confuse the issues; evidence about the identity of the authors of the conspiracy must be sought elsewhere than in an unsupported allegation. The authors may have been Jewish, non-Jewish or anti-Jewish. That is immaterial. When it was published this work was the typescript of a drama which had not been performed; today it has been running for fifty years and its title is The Twentieth Century. The characters depicted in it move on our contemporary stage, play the parts foretold and produce the events foreseen.

Only the denouement remains, fiasco or fulfilment. It is a grandiose plan, and in my estimation cannot succeed. But it has existed for at least 180 years and probably for much longer, and the Protocols provided one more proof in a chain of proofs that has since been greatly lengthened. The conspiracy for world dominion through a world slave state exists and cannot at this stage be abruptly checked or broken off; of the momentum which it has acquired it now must go on to fulfilment or failure. Either will be destructive for a time, and hard for those of the time in which the dénouement comes.

Page 224

Chapter 28


THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR

As the first decade of the 20th Century grew older the signs of the coming storms multiplied. In 1903 the British Government had offered Uganda to Zionism and Max Nordau had publicly foretold "the future world war", in the sequence to which England would procure Palestine for Zionism. In 1905 the Protocols prophetically revealed the destructive orgy of Communism. Then in 1906 one Mr. Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister of England, met Dr. Weizmann in a hotel room and was captivated by the notion of presenting Palestine, which was not his to give, to "the Jews".

The shape which "the future world war" would take was then determined. Mr. Balfour stood guard over the new century and yielded the pass. A different man, in his place, might have saved it; or another might have done the same, for by 1906 the hidden mechanism for exerting "irresistible pressure on the international affairs of the present" (Leon Pinsker, 1882) had evidently been perfected. Rabbi Elmer Berger says of that time, "that group of Jews which committed itself to Zionism . . . entered a peripatetic kind of diplomacy which took it into many chancelleries and parliaments, exploring the labyrinthine and devious ways of international politics in a part of the world where political intrigue and secret deals were a byword. Jews began to play the game of 'practical politics'." The era of the malleable "administrators" and compliant "premier-dictators", all furthering the great plan, was beginning. Therefore any other politician, put in Mr. Balfour's place at that time, might have acted similarly. However, his name attaches to the initial misdeed.

His actions are almost unaccountable in a man of such birth, training and type. Research cannot discover evidence of any other motive than an infatuation, of the "liberal" sort, for an enterprise which he did not even examine in the light of duty and wisdom. "Hard-boiled" considerations of "practical politics" (that is, a cold calculation that money or votes might be gained by supporting Zionism) can hardly be suspected in him. He and his colleagues belonged to the oldest families of England, which carried on a long tradition of public service. Statesmanship was in their blood; understanding of government and knowledge of foreign affairs were instinctive in them; they represented the most successful ruling class in recorded history; and they were wealthy.

Why, then, did instinct, tradition and wisdom suddenly desert them in this one question, at the moment when their Conservative Party, in its old form, for the last time governed England, and their families still guided the country's fortunes from great houses in Piccadilly and Mayfair and from country abbeys? Were they alarmed by the menace that "the mob" would be incited against them if they did not comply? They realized that birth and privilege alone would not continue to qualify for the function of governing. The world had changed much in the century before, and they knew that the process would go on. In the British tradition they worked to ensure continuity, unbroken by violence and eased by conciliation. They were too wise to resist change; they aimed at guiding change. Perhaps they were too eager on that account to shake hands with Progress, when it knocked, without examining the emissaries' credentials.

Mr. Balfour, their leader, was a tal1, aloof and scholarly bachelor, impassive and pessimistic; he was of chilly mien but his intimates contend that his heart was warm. His middle-aged love affair with Zionism might be a symptom of unwilling celibacy. In youth he delayed asking his ladylove until she became affianced to another; before they could marry her lover died; and as Mr. Balfour was about to make good his earlier tardiness she died. He then resolved to remain unmarried.

Women may not be good judges of a distinguished bachelor who wears a broken heart on his sleeve, but many of the contemporary comments about him come from women, and I quote the opinions of two of the most beautiful women of that day. Consuelo Vanderbilt (an American, later the Duchess of Marlborough) wrote, 'The opinions he expressed and the doctrines he held seemed to be the products of pure logic. . . he was gifted with a breadth of comprehension I have never seen equalled"; and Lady Cynthia Asquith said, "As for his being devoid of moral indignation, I often saw him white with anger; any personal injustice enraged him".

The italicised words could not more completely misportray Mr. Balfour, if the result of his actions is any test. The one thought-process which cannot have guided him, in pledging his country to Zionism, was logic, for no logical good could come of this for any of the parties concerned, his own country, the native inhabitants of Palestine, or (in my opinion) the mass of Jews, who had no intention of going there. As for injustice (unless Lady Cynthia intended to distinguish between "personal" and mass injustice), the million innocent beings who today have been driven into the Arabian wilderness (in the manner of the Levitical "scapegoat") offer the obvious answer.

Anyway, there he was, Prime Minister of England, having succeeded "dear Uncle Robert" (Lord Salisbury, of the great house of Cecil) in 1902. Clearly he cannot at that instant have conceived, from nowhere, the notion of giving Uganda to the Zionists, so that "irresistible pressure" must have been at work before he took office. What went on in that earlier period is all mystery or, in truth, conspiracy ("labyrinthine intrigue"). When he became prime minister the mine was already laid, and to the end of his days Mr. Balfour apparently never realized that it was the mine of which all are today aware.

Dr. Herzl, despairing of the Czar, the Kaiser and the Sultan (the three potentates had been amiable but prudent and non-committal; they knew, what Mr. Balfour never learned, that Zionism was dynamite*) had declared: "England, great England, free England, England commanding the seas wil1 understand our aims" (the reader will perceive for what purpose, in this view, England had become great, free, and commander of the seas). When the Uganda offer showed the Talmudic directorate in Russia that Dr. Herzl was wrong in thinking that England would "understand" their needs, Dr. Weizmann was sent to London. He was preparing to overthrow Dr. Herzl and now becomes our chief witness to the hidden events of that time.

A young Englishman, with some modest petition, would have great trouble even today in penetrating the janitorial and secretarial defences of a Cabinet minister's private room. Young Dr. Weizmann from Russia, who wanted Palestine, was quickly ushered into that of Lord Percy ("in charge of African affairs").

Lord Percy was another scion of a great ruling family with an ancient tradition of public service and wise administration. According to Dr. Weizmann, he "expressed boundless astonishment that the Jews should ever so much as have considered the Uganda proposal, which he regarded as impractical on the one hand, and, on the other, a denial of the Jewish religion. Himself deeply religious, he was bewildered by the thought that Jews could even entertain the idea of any other country than Palestine as the centre of their revival; and he was delighted to learn from me that there were so many Jews who had emphatically refused. He added, 'If I were a Jew, I would not give a halfpenny for the proposition'."

Presumably Dr. Weizmann did not inform Lord Percy of the unanimous longing of the Jews in Palestine to remove to Uganda. What he had heard, if his record is correct, was virtually an invitation to get rid of Dr. Herzl and a promise to support the claim to Palestine. He went away to prepare Dr. Herzl's discomfiture. He did not go empty-handed.

Possibly, in the fifty years that have elapsed, British ministers have learned that official notepaper should be kept where only those authorized may use it. On leaving Lord Percy's room Dr. Weizmann took some Foreign Office notepaper and on it wrote a report of the conversation, which he sent to Russia (where, under the Romanoffs and the Communist Czars alike, government stationery is not left lying around). In Russia, this document, written on offical Foreign Office paper, must have aroused feelings akin to those which a holy ikon would cause in a moujik. Clearly it meant that the British Government had no further use for Dr. Herzl and would procure Palestine for the Zionists in Russia. Lord Percy, in today's idiom, had started something.

All else followed as if arranged by Greek gods: the triumph of the Zionists from Russia over Dr. Herzl, his collapse and death, the rejection of the Uganda offer. Then Dr. Weizmann moved to England, "the one country which seemed likely to show a genuine sympathy for a movement like ours", and where he could "live and work without let or hindrance, at least theoretically" (any compilation of classical understatements might include this passage in first place).
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* For that matter, the successors of the Czars were of just the same opinion. Lenin in 1903 wrote, "This Zionist idea is entirely false and reactionary in its essence. The idea of a separate Jewish nation, which is utterly untenable scientifically, is reactionary in its political implications . . . The Jewish question is: assimilation or separateness? And the idea of a Jewish people is manifestly reactionary". And in 1913 Stalin reaffirmed this dictum. The destiny of the Jews, he said, was assimilation (in a Communist world, of course, in this opinion).
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Dr. Weizmann chose Manchester for his residence. He says "by chance", but credulity balks. Manchester held Mr. Balfour's constituency; Manchester was the Zionist headquarters in England; the chairman of Mr. Balfour's party in Manchester was a Zionist (today the British Conservative Party is still enmeshed in these toils).

The Greek drama continued. Mr. Balfour's prime-ministership ended in a fiasco for his party when in the 1906 election eight out of nine Manchester seats were lost to it. He then faded temporarily from office. At that moment another personage entered the present narrative. Among the triumphant Liberal candidates was a rising young man with a keen nose for political winds, a Mr. Winston Churchill. He also sought election in Manchester and commended himself to the Zionist headquarters there, first by attacking the Balfour government's Aliens Bill (which set a brake on large-scale immigration from such places as Russia) and next by supporting Zionism. Thereon "the Manchester Jews promptly fell into line behind him as though he were a kind of latterday Moses; one of their leaders got up at an all-Jewish-meeting and announced that 'any Jew who votes against Churchill is a traitor to the common cause' " (Mr. R.C. Taylor). Mr. Churchill, elected, became Under Secretary for the Colonies. His public espousal of Zionism was simply a significant episode at that time; three decades later, when Mr. Balfour was dead, it was to have consequences as fateful as Mr. Balfour's own aberration.

To return to Mr. Balfour: his private thoughts were much with Zionism. At no time, as far as the annals disclose, did he give thought to the native inhabitants of Palestine, whose expulsion into the wilderness he was to cause. By coincidence, the election was being mainly fought around the question of the allegedly cruel treatment of some humble beings far away (this is an instance of the method of stirring up the passions of "the mob", recommended by Dr. Herzl and the Protocols). The electors knew nothing of Zionism and when they later became acquainted with it felt no concern for the menaced Arabs, because that side of the matter was not put before them by a press then "submissive". However, in 1906 their feelings were being inflamed about "Chinese slavery" and (Manchester being Manchester) they were highly indignant about it. At that time Chinese Coolies were being indentured for three years work in the South African gold mines. Those chosen counted themselves fortunate, but for electoral and "rabble-rousing" purposes in Manchester this was "slavery" and the battle was fought and won on that score. The victorious Liberals forgot "Chinese slavery" immediately after the counting of the votes, (and when their turn in office came outdid the Conservatives in their enthusiasm for Zionism).

Thus, while shouts of "Chinese slavery" resounded outside his windows, Mr. Balfour, closeted with a Zionist emissary from Russia, prepared something worse than slavery for the Arabs of Palestine. His captivation was complete before the interview began, as his niece and lifelong confidante (Mrs. Dugdale) shows: "His interest in the subject was whetted. . . by the refusal of the Zionist Jews to accept the Uganda offer. . . The opposition aroused in him a curiosity which he found no means to satisfy . . . He had asked his chairman in Manchester to fathom the reasons for the Zionist attitude. . . Balfour's interest in the Jews and their history. . . originated in the Old Testament training of his mother and in his Scottish upbringing. As he grew up his intellectual admiration and sympathy for certain aspects of the Jews in the modern world seemed to him of immense importance. I remember in childhood imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilization owed to Judaism an immeasurable debt, ill repaid".

Such was Mr. Balfour's frame of mind when he received Dr. Weizmann in a room of the old Queen's Hotel in dank and foggy Manchester in 1906. The proposition before him, if accepted, meant adding Turkey, in 1906, to England's enemies in any "future world war" and, if Turkey were defeated in it, engaging in perpetual warfare thereafter with the Arab world.

But calculations of national interest, moral principle and statesmanship, if the above quotations are the test, had deserted Mr. Balfour's mind.

He was in the grip of a "whetted" interest and an unsatisfied "curiosity"; it sounds like a young girl's romantic feeling about love. He had not been elected to decide what "debt" Christianity owed to Judaism, or if he decided that one was owing, to effect its repayment, from a third party's funds, to some canvasser professing title to collect. If there were any identifiable debt and any rational cause to link his country with it, and he could convince the country of this, he might have had a case. Instead, he decided privately that there was a debt, and that he was entitled to choose between claimants in favour of a caller from Russia, when the mass of Jews in England repudiated any notion of such a debt. History does not tell of a stranger thing.

Dr. Weizmann, forty years later, recorded that the Mr. Balfour whom he met "had only the most naive and rudimentary notion of the movement"; he did not even know Dr. Herzl's name, the nearest he could get to it being "Dr. Herz". Mr. Balfour was already carried away by his enthusiasm for the unknown cause. He posed formal objections, but apparently only for the pleasure of hearing them overborne, as might a girl object to the elopement she secretly desires. He was much impressed (as Dr. Weizmann says) when his visitor said, "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" "But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London", he answered. Dr. Weizmann retorted, "But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh".

Mr. Balfour apparently felt this to be a conclusive reason why the Ashkenazic Jews from Russia should be removed to Palestine. However, the only body of Jews whose interest he had any right to consider, those of England, had been working hard to dissuade him from getting entangled in Zionism, and he made a last feeble objection: "It is curious, Dr. Weizmann, the Jews I meet are quite different". Dr. Weizmann replied, "Mr. Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jew".

Mr. Balfour never again questioned the claim of the Zionists from Russia to be the right kind of Jew. "It was from that talk with Weizmann that I saw that the Jewish form of patriotism was unique. It was Weizmann's absolute refusal even to look at it" (the Uganda proposition) "which impressed me"; to these words Mrs. Dugdale adds the comment, "The more Balfour thought about Zionism, the more his respect for it and his belief in its importance grew. His convictions took shape before the defeat of Turkey in the Great War, transforming the whole future for the Zionists". He also transformed the whole future for the entire West and for two generations of its sons. In this hotel-room meeting of 1906 Max Nordau's prophecy of 1903 about the shape of "the future world war" was given fulfilment.

As that war approached, the number of leading public men who privily espoused Zionism grew apace. They made themselves in fact co-conspirators, for they did not inform the public masses of any intention about Palestine. None outside the inner circle of "labyrinthine intrigue" knew that one was in their minds and would be carried out in the confusion of a great war, when parliamentary and popular scrutiny of acts of State policy was in suspense. The secrecy observed stamps the process as a conspiratorial one, originating in Russia, and it bore fruit in 1917.

The next meeting between Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Balfour was on December 14, 1914*. Then the First World War had just begun. The standing British army had been almost wiped out in France, and France itself faced catastrophe, while only the British Navy stood between England and the gravest dangers. A war, costing Britain and France some three million lives, lay ahead, and the youth of Britain was rushing to join in the battle. The great cause was supposed to be that of overthrowing "Prussian militarism", liberating "small nations", and restoring "freedom and democracy".

Mr. Balfour was soon to be restored to office. His thoughts, when he met Dr. Weizmann again, were apparently far from the great battle in France. His mind was not with his country or his people. It was with Zionism and Palestine. He began his talk with Dr. Weizmann by saying, "I was thinking about that conversation of ours" (in 1906) "and I believe that when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem".
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* An instance of the difficulty of eliciting facts in this matter: Mrs. Dugdale quoted Dr. Weizmann as saying, "did not see him again until 1916", but contradicts this statement by another of her own, "On December 14, 1914, Dr. Weizmann had an appointment to see Balfour". This implicit mention of a second meeting on that date appears to be confirmed by Dr. Weizmann's own statement, that after seeing Mr. Lloyd George on December 3, 1914, he "followed up at once Lloyd George's suggestion about seeing Mr. Balfour".
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People who lived at that time may recall the moment and see how far from anything which they supposed to be at stake were these thoughts of Mr. Balfour. In the person of Mr. Balfour the Prophet Monk reappeared, but this time armed with power to shape the destiny of nations. Obviously "irresistible pressure" behind the scenes had gained great power and was already most effective in 1914.

By that time the American people were equally enmeshed in this web of "labyrinthine intrigue", hidden from the general view, though they did not suspect it. They feared "foreign entanglements"; they wished to keep out of the war and had a president who promised he would keep them out of it. In fact, they were virtually in it, for "irresistible pressure" by that time was working as effectively in Washington as in London.

Page 231

Chapter 29


THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE

While Mr. Balfour and his associates in this still secret enterprise moved towards power in England during the First World War, a similar group of men secretly took shape in the American Republic. The political machine they built produced its full result nearly fifty years later, when President Truman in effect set up the Zionist state in Palestine.

In 1900 Americans still clung to their "American dream", and the essence of it was to avoid "foreign entanglements". In fact the attack on Spain in Cuba in 1898 had already separated them from this secure anchorage, and the mysterious origins of that little war are therefore of continuing interest. The American public was caused to explode in warlike frenzy, in the familiar way, when it was told that the Maine was blown up in Havana harbour by a Spanish mine. When she was raised, many years later, her plates were found to have been blown out by an inner explosion (but by then "the mob" had long lost interest in the matter).

The effect of the Spanish-American war (continuing American "entanglement" in the affairs of others) lent major importance to the question: who was to exercise the ruling power in America, for the nature of any "entanglements" clearly depended on that. The answer to this question, again, was governed by the effect of an earlier war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The chief consequences of it (little comprehended by the contending Northerners and Southerners) was sensibly to change the nature, first of the population, and next of the government of the Republic.

Before the Civil War the American population was predominantly Irish, Scots-Irish, Scottish, British, German and Scandinavian, and from this amalgam a distinctly "American" individual evolved. In the direct sequence to that war the era of unrestricted immigration began, which in a few decades brought to America many millions of new citizens from Eastern and Southern Europe. These included a great mass of Jews from the Talmudic areas of Russia and Russian Poland. In Russia the rabbinate had stood between them and "assimilation" and this continued when they reached America. Thus the 20th Century, at its start, threw up the question, what part would their leaders acquire in the political control of the Republic and of its foreign undertakings. The later events showed that the Eastern conspiracy, in both its forms, entered America through this mass-immigration. The process of acquiring an ever-increasing measure of political power began, behind the scenes, about 1900 and was to become the major issue of American national life in the ensuing fifty years.

The man who first involved America in this process was a Mr. Edward Mandell House (popularly known as Colonel House, but he had no military service), a Southern gentleman, chiefly of Dutch and English descent, who grew up in Texas during the bitter Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War. He is a remarkable character in this tale. As other connoisseurs might exult in the taste of rare brandy, he loved the secret exercise of power through others, and candidly confided this to his diary. He shunned publicity (says his editor, Mr. Charles Seymour) "from a sardonic sense of humour which was tickled by the thought that he, unseen and often unsuspected, without great wealth or office, merely through the power of personality and good sense, was actually deflecting the currents of history". Few men have wielded so much power in complete irresponsibility: "it is easy enough for one without responsibility to sit down over a cigar and a glass of wine and decide what is best to be done", wrote Mr. House.

His editor's choice of words is exact; Mr. House did not guide American State policy, but deflected it towards Zionism, the support of the world-revolution, and the promotion of the world-government ambition. The fact of his exercise of secret power is proven. His motives for exercizing it in those directions are hard to discover, for his thoughts (as revealed by his diary and his novel) appear to have been so confused and contradictory that no clear picture emerges from them.

His immense daily record of his secret reign (the Private Papers) fully exposed how he worked. It leaves unanswered the question of what he ultimately wanted, or if he even knew what he wanted; as to that, his novel shows only a mind full of half-baked demagogic notions, never clearly thought out. The highfalutin apostrophe on the flyleaf is typical: "This book is dedicated to the unhappy many who have lived and died lacking opportunity, because, in the starting, the worldwide social structure was wrongly begun"; apparently this means that Mr. House, who held himself to be a religious man, thought poorly of the work of an earlier authority, described in the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth".

In the search for the origins of Mr. House's political ideas (which at first were akin to Communism; in later life, when the damage was done, he became more moderate) the student is cast on significant clues. His editor finds in his early thought a note "reminiscent of Louis Blanc and the revolutionaries of 1848". With this in mind I earlier directed the readers attention to Louis Blanc, the French revolutionary who for a moment, in 1848, seemed likely to play Lenin's part and summoned the assembly of workers' delegates which was an anticipation of the 1917 Soviets.

Such notions, in a Texan of the late 19th Century, are as unexpected as Buddhism in an Eskimo. Nevertheless, Mr. House in youth acquired these ideas; someone had implanted them in him. His middle name, Mandell, was that of "a Jewish merchant in Houston, who was one of his father's most intimate friends; the fact that the elder House conferred a Jewish name upon his son indicates the family's attitude towards the race" (Mr. Arthur D. Howden, his biographer). In Mr. House's novel the hero refuses all preferment to go and live in a humble East Side room with a Polish Jew, come to America after anti-Jewish disturbances in Warsaw caused by the murder there, by "a young Jew, baited beyond endurance", of the son of a high government official. In later life Mr. House's brother-in-law and counsellor was a Jew, Dr. Sidney Mezes, who was one of the initiators of this century's world-government plan in its earliest form (The League to Enforce Peace).

That is about all that can be elicited about the intellectual atmosphere of Mr. House's mind-formative period. In one of his most revealing passages Mr. House himself comments on the suggestion of ideas to others and shows, apparently without realizing it, how powerless he ultimately was, who thought himself all-powerful: "With the President, as with all other men I sought to influence, it was invariably my intention to make him think that ideas he derived from me were his own. . . Usually, to tell the truth, the idea was not original with me. . . The most difficult thing in the world is to trace any idea to its source . . . We often think an idea to be original with ourselves when, in plain truth, it was subconsciously absorbed from someone else".

He began to learn about politics in Texas when he was only eighteen, then discerning during a presidential election (1876) that "two or three men in the Senate and two or three in the House and the President himself ran the government. The others were merely figureheads . . . Therefore I had no ambition to hold office, nor had I any ambition to speak". (He puts the same idea into the mouth of a politician in his novel of 1912; "In Washington. . . I found that the government was run by a few men; that outside of this little circle no one was of much importance. It was my ambition to break into it if possible and my ambition now leaped so far as to want, not only to be of it, but later, to be IT . . . The President asked me to undertake the direction of his campaign . . . He was overwhelmingly nominated and re-elected . . . and I was now well within the charmed circle and within easy reach of my further desire to have no rivals. . . I tightened a nearly invisible coil around the people, which held them fast. . . ")

In that spirit Mr. House entered Texan politics: "I began at the top rather than at the bottom. . . it has been my habit to put someone else nominally at the head, so that I could do the real work undisturbed by the demands which are made on a chairman . . . Each chairman of the campaigns which I directed received the publicity and the applause of both the press and the people during the campaign . . . they passed out of public notice within a few months . . . and yet when the next campaign came around, the public and the press as eagerly accepted another figurehead".

Mr. House used Texas somewhat as a rising actor may use the provinces. He was so successful as a party-organizer there that at the turn of the century he was the real ruler of the state and sat daily in the office of its governor (appointed by Mr. House and long forgotten) at the State Capitol, where he chose State senators and congressmen and handled the requests of the many office-holders who habitually besiege a State governor. The provincial tour accomplished, he prepared to conquer the capital. By 1900 he was "tired of the position I occupied in Texas" and was "ready to take part in national affairs". After further preparation he began, in 1910 as the First World War approached, "to look about for a proper candidate for the Democratic nomination for President".

Thus Mr. House, aged fifty, was a president-maker. Until I read his Private Papers I was much impressed by the "uncanny knowledge" displayed by a leading American Zionist, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who in 1910 told a New Jersey audience: "On Tuesday Mr. Woodrow Wilson will be elected governor of your State; he will not complete his term of office as governor; in November 1912 he will be elected President of the United States; he will be inaugurated for the second time as president". This was fore-knowledge of the quality shown by the Protocols, Leon Pinsker and Max Nordau, but further research showed that Rabbi Wise had it from Colonel House!

Evidently Mr. Wilson had been closely studied by the group of secret men which then was coalescing, for neither Mr. House nor Rabbi Wise at that moment had met him! But Mr. House "became convinced that he had found his man, although he had never met him . . . 'I turned to Woodrow Wilson . . . as being the only man. . . who in every way measured up to the office' " (Mr. Howden). The standard measurement used is indicated by a later passage: "The trouble with getting a candidate for president is that the man that is best fitted for the place cannot be nominated and, if nominated, could not be elected. The People seldom take the best man fitted for the job; therefore it is necessary to work for the best man who can be nominated and elected, and just now Wilson seems to be that man". (This description, again, is qualified by the allusion in Mr. House's novel to the methods used by a powerful group to elect "its creature" to the presidency).

The Zionist idea coupled itself to the revolutionary idea, among the group of men which was secretly selecting Mr. Woodrow Wilson for the presidency, in the person of this Rabbi Stephen Wise (born in Budapest, like Herzl and Nordau). He was the chief Zionist organizer in America and as such still something of a curiosity among the Jews of America, who at that time repudiated Zionism and distrusted the "Eastern Jews". Unti1 1900, as Rabbi Wise says, Zionism in America was confined to the immigrant Jews from Russia, who brought it with them from the Talmudic ghettoes there; the mass of American Jews were of German origins and would have none of it. Between 1900 and 1910, a million new Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and under Zionist organization began to form an important body of voters; here was the link between Mr. House (whose election-strategy will be described) and Rabbi Wise. Rabbi Wise, who was known chiefly as a militant orator, if not an agitator, in labour questions, was not then a representative Jewish figure, and nevertheless (like Dr. Weizmann in England) he was the man to whom the political potentates secretly gave access and ear.

The strength of this secret group is shown by the fact that in 1910, when Mr. House had privately decided that Mr. Wilson should be the next president, Rabbi
Wise publicly proclaimed that he would be that, and for two terms. This called for a rearrangement of the rabbi's politics, for he had always supported the Republican party; after Mr. House's secret selection of Mr. Wilson, he changed to the Democratic one. Thus Mr. House's confused "revolutionary" ideas and Zionism's perfectly clear ones arrived together on the doorstep of the White House. Agreement between the group was cordial: Mr. Wise states that (after the election) "we received warm and heartening help from Colonel House, close friend of the president. . . House not only made our cause the object of his very special concern but served as liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement". The close parallel between the course of these hidden processes in America and in England is here shown.

The secret of Mr. House's hold over the Democratic Party lay in the strategy which he had devised for winning elections. The Democratic party had been out of office for nearly fifty unbroken years and he had devised a method which made victory almost a mathematical certainty. The Democratic party was in fact to owe its victories in 1912 and 1916, as well as President Roosevelt's and President Truman's victories in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948 to the application of Mr. House's plan. In this electoral plan, which in its field perhaps deserves the name of genius, lies Mr. House's enduring effect on the life of America; his political ideas were never c1early formed and were frequently changed, so that he forged an instrument whereby the ideas of others were put into effect; the instrument itself was brilliantly designed.

In essence, it was a plan to gain the vote of the "foreign-born", the new immigrants, solidly for the Democratic party by making appeal to their racial feelings and especial emotional reflexes. It was worked out in great detail and was the product of a master hand in this particular branch of political science.

The unique, fantastic thing about this plan is that Mr. House published it, anonymously, in the very year, 1912, when Mr. Wilson, secretly "chosen", was publicly nominated and elected. In that busy year Mr. House found time to write, in thirty days, a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator (the unusual word recalls the allusion in the Protocols to "The Administrators whom we shall choose ……"). The chapter entitled "The Making of a President", which is obviously not fiction, makes this almost unreadable novel a historical document of the first importance.

In this chapter of his novel (which Mr. House was prompted to publish by his assiduous mentor, Dr. Sidney Mezes) an American Senator called Selwyn is depicted as setting about to "govern the Nation with an absolute hand, and yet not be known as the directing power". Selwyn is Mr. House. Apparently he could not resist the temptation to give a clue to his identity, and he caused "Selwyn" to invite the man he selected as his puppet-president ("Selwyn seeks a Candidate") to "dine with me in my rooms at the Mandell House".

Before that, Selwyn has devised "a nefarious plan", in concert with one John Thor, "the high priest of finance", whereby "a complete and compact organization", using "the most infamous sort of deception regarding its real opinions and intentions", might "elect its creature to the Presidency". The financing of this secret league was "simple". "Thor's influence throughout commercial America was absolute . . . Thor and Selwyn selected the thousand" (millionaires) "that were to give each ten thousand dollars. . . Thor was to tell each of them that there was a matter, appertaining to the general welfare of the business fraternity, which needed twenty thousand dollars, and that he, Thor, would put up ten and wanted him to put up as much. . . There were but few men of business. . . who did not consider themselves fortunate in being called to New York by Thor and in being asked to join him in a blind pool looking to the safeguarding of wealth". The money of this "great corruption fund" was placed by Thor in different banks, paid at request by Selwyn to other banks, and from them transferred to the private bank of Selwyn's son-in-law; "the result was that the public had no chance of obtaining any knowledge of the fund or how it was spent" .

On this basis of finance Selwyn selects his "creature", one Rockland, (Mr. Wilson), who on dining with Selwyn at "Mandell House" is told, that his responsibility as president will be "diffuse": "while a president has a consitutional right to act alone, he has no moral right to act contrary to the tenets and traditions of his party, or to the advice of the party leaders, for the country accepts the candidate, the party and the party advisers as a whole and not severally" (the resemblance between this passage and the allusions in the Protocols to "the responsibility of presidents" and the ultimate authority of their "advisers" is strong).

Rockland humbly agrees to this. (After the election, "drunk with power and the adulation of sycophants, once or twice Rockland asserted himself, and acted upon important matters without having first conferred with Selwyn. But, after he had been bitterly assailed by Selwyn's papers. . . he made no further attempts at independence. He felt that he was utterly helpless in that strong man's hands, and so, indeed, he was". This passage in Mr. House's novel of 1912, written before Mr. Wilson's inauguration, may be compared with one in Mr. House's Private Papers of 1926, recording his actual relationship with the candidate during the election campaign. It states that Mr. House edited the presidential candidate's speeches and instructed him not to heed any other advice, whereon Mr. Wilson admitted indiscretions and promised "not to act independently in future". In the novel Selwyn is shown as telling Thor of Rockland' s attempt to escape the thrall: "When he told how Rockland had made an effort for freedom, and how he brought him back, squirming under his defeat, they laughed joyously"; this chapter is called "The Exultant Conspirators").

Another chapter shows how the election of the "creature" was achieved. The plan described makes electioneering almost into an exact science and still governs electioneering in America. It is based on Mr. House's fundamental calculation that about 80 percent of the electors would in any circumstance whatever vote for one of the two opposed parties in roughly equal proportions, and that expenditure of money and effort must therefore be concentrated on "the fluctuating 20 percent". Then it analyzes this 20 percent in detail until the small residue is isolated, on which the utmost effort is to be bent. Every ounce or cent of wasteful expenditure is eliminated and a mass of energy released to be directed against the small body of voters who can sway the result. This plan has done so much to "deflect" the course of events in America and the world that it needs to be summarized here at some length.

Selwyn begins the nomination campaign by eliminating all states where either his party or the other was sure to win. In this way he is free to give his entire thought to the twelve doubtful States, upon whose votes the election would turn. He divides these into units of five thousand voters, appointing for each unit a man on the spot and one at national headquarters. He calculated that of the five thousand, four thousand, in equal parts, probably could not be diverted from his own or the other party, and this brought his analysis down to one thousand doubtful voters, in each unit of five thousand in twelve States, on whom to concentrate. The local man was charged to obtain all possible information about their "race, religion, occupation and former party ties", and to forward this to the national man in charge of the particular unit, who was then responsible for reaching each individual by means of "literature, persuasion or perhaps by some more subtle argument". The duty of the two agents for each unit, one in the field and one at headquarters, was between them to "bring in a majority of the one thousand votes within their charge".

Meanwhile the managers of the other party were sending out "tons of printed matter to their State headquarters, which, in turn, distributed it to the country organizations, where it was dumped into a corner and given to visitors when asked for. Selwyn's committee used one-fourth as much printed matter, but it went in a sealed envelope, along with a cordial letter, directed to a voter that had as yet not decided how to vote. The opposition was sending speakers at great expense from one end of the country to the other . . . Selwyn sent men into his units to personally persuade each of the one thousand hesitating voters to support the Rockland ticket".

By means of this most skilful method of analysis, elimination and concentration Rockland, in the novel, (and Mr. Wilson, in fact) was elected in 1912. The concentrated appeal to the "one thousand hesitating voters" in each unit was especially directed to the "race, creed and colour" emotion, and the objects of attention were evidently singled out with that in mind. "Thus Selwyn won and Rockland became the keystone of the arch he had set out to build".

The remainder of the novel is unimportant but contains a few other significant things. Its sub-title is "A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935". The hero, Philip Dru, is a young West Pointer under the influence of Karl Marx, who is elected leader of a mass movement by acclamation at an indignation meeting after Selwyn's and Thor's conspiracy has become known. The manner of this exposure is also interesting; Thor has a microphone concealed in his room (something little known in 1912 but today almost as familiar in politics as the Statesman's Yearbook) and, forgetting to disconnect it, his "exultant" talk with Selwyn after Rockland's election becomes known to his secretary, who gives it to the press; a most implausible episode is that the press published it! Then Dru assembles an army (armed, apparently by magic, with rifles and artillery), defeats the government forces at a single battle, marches on Washington, and proclaims himself "Administrator of the Republic". His first major action (and President Wilson's) is to introduce "a graduated income tax exempting no income whatsoever" (Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto demanded "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax"; the Protocols, "a progressive tax on property"). Dru next attacks Mexico. and the Central American Republics, also defeating them in one battle and thereafter uniting them under the American flag, which in the next chapter becomes also "the undisputed emblem of authority" over Canada and the British, French and other Possessions in the West Indies. Selwyn and Philip Dru are obviously both Mr. House. Selwyn is the superbly efficient party-organizer and secret wielder of Power; Dru is the muddled "utopian dreamer" (the Protocols) who does not know what to do with Power when he gets it. Inevitably, at the end, Mr. House did not know what to do with two characters who were in truth one man, and was compelled to merge them, as it were, by making Selwyn, the original villain of the piece, the confidant and bosom companion of Dru. After that, equally clearly, he did not know what to do with Dru, short of having him chased off by bears. Therefore he put him on a ship bound for an unknown destination with Gloria (a love-hungry girl who for fifty chapters has had to listen to Dru's incoherent plans for remoulding the world), and concludes: "Happy Gloria! Happy Philip! . . . Where were they bound? Would they return? These were the questions asked by all, but to which none could give answer".

In fact hardly anybody can have persisted to the end of this novel, and nobody would have cared where Philip and Gloria went, with one exception. There was one solitary being in the world for whom the story must have held a meaning as terrible and true as Dorian Gray's Portrait for Dorian: Mr. Woodrow Wilson. In that respect Philip Drew: Administrator is a unique work. Two questions haunt the student. Did Mr. Wilson read it? What prompted Mr. House (or his prompter) to publish this exact picture of what was going on at the very moment when "the creature" was being nominated and elected? Considered in that light the book becomes a work of sadistic mockery, and the reader becomes aware that the group of men around Mr. House must have been as malevolent as they are depicted to be in the chapter, "The Exultant Conspirators".

Is it conceivable that Mr. Wilson did not read it? Between his enemies and his friends, during an election campaign, someone must have put it in his hands. The student of history is bound to wonder whether the perusal of it, either then or later, may have caused the mental and physical state into which he soon fell. A few contemporary descriptions of him may be given as illustration (although they anticipate the chronology of the narrative a little). Mr. House later wrote of the man he had "chosen" and had elected ("the only one who in every way measured up to the office"), "I thought at that time" (1914) "and on several occasions afterwards, that the President wanted to die; certainly his attitude and his mental state indicated that he found no zest in life". When Mr. Wilson had not long been president Sir Horace Plunkett, the British Ambassador, wrote to Mr. House, "I paid my respects to the President, and was shocked to see him looking so worn; the change since January last is terribly marked". Six years later Sir William Wiseman, a British governmental emissary, told Mr, House, "I was shocked by his appearance . . . His face was drawn and of a grey colour, and frequently twitching in a pitiful effort to control nerves which had broken down" (1919)*.

Apparently a sure way to unhappiness is to receive high office as the instrument of others who remain unseen. Mr. Wilson inevitably looks wraithlike when contemplated against this record, now unfurled. Mr. House, Rabbi Wise and others around him seem to have gazed on him as collectors might on a specimen transfixed by a pin. In the circumstances, he must have been guided by guesswork, rather than by revelation, when at the age of twenty he decided that he would one day be president. This was known and Rabbi Wise once asked him, "When did you first think or dream of the presidency?" As the rabbi knew so much more than the President of the way in which the dream had been realized, he may have spoken tongue in cheek, and was evidently startled out of his customary deference when Mr. Wilson answered, "There never was a time after my graduation from Davidson College in South Carolina when I did not expect to become president", so that the rabbi asked sardonically, "Even when you were a teacher in a girls' college!" Mr. Wilson, apparently still oblivious, repeated, "There never was a time when I did not expect and prepare myself to become president".

Between Mr. Wilson's secret "choice" by Mr. House in 1910 and his public nomination for president in 1912 he was prompted to make public obeisance to Zionism; at that point the American people became involved, as the British people had in fact been committed by the Uganda offer of 1903. Mr. Wilson, under coaching for the campaign, made a speech on "The rights of the Jews", in which he said, "I am not here to express our sympathy with our Jewish fellow-citizens but to make evident our sense of identity with them. This is not their cause; it is America's".

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* Strong resemblances occur in contemporary descriptions of Mr. Roosevelt, whom Mr. House also believed that he chose as a "figurehead". Mr. Robert E. Sherwood says with emphasis that Mr. Roosevelt was ever haunted "by the ghost of Wilson", When Mr, Roosevelt had been president two years his party manager, Mr. James Farley, wrote, "The President looked bad. . . face drawn and his reactions slow" (1935), and two years later he was "shocked at the President's appearance" (1937). In 1943 Madame Chiang Kai-shek was "shocked by the President's looks"; in 1944, says Mr. Merriman Smith, "he looked older than I have ever seen him and he made an irrelevant speech", and Mr. John T. Flynn says the President's pictures "shocked the nation". In 1945 Miss Frances Perkins, a member of his cabinet, emerged from his office saying, "I can't stand it, the President looks horrible".

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This could only have one meaning; it was a declaration of foreign policy, if Mr. Wilson were elected. No need existed to "make evident the sense of identity" between Americans and Americans, and Jews in America were in every respect free and equal; only a refusal to identify themselves with America could alter that and Mr. Wilson in effect proclaimed this refusal. He was specifically stating that Jewish "identity" was different and separate and that America, under him, would support this self-segregation as a cause.

To the initiates it was a pledge to Zionism. It was also an oblique allusion and threat to Russia, for the implication of Mr. Wilson's words was that he recognized the Jews in Russia (who were then the only organized Zionists) as representing all Jews. Thus he took the Balfourean part in the American production of this drama.

At that time all the Zionist propaganda was directed against Russia. Some thirty years had passed since the assassination of Czar Alexander II, who had incurred the enmity of the revolutionaries by his attempt to introduce a parliamentary constitution (Dr. Kastein remarked that Jewish participation in the assassination was "natural"). His successor, Alexander III, was forced to devote himself to combating the revolution. In Mr. Wilson's time Czar Nicholas II was resuming Alexander the Liberator's attempt to pacify and unify his country by enfranchising the people, and once more was being fiercely opposed by the Talmudic Zionists.

Then, at the very moment when Mr. Wilson made his implicit attack on Russian "intolerance", assassination was again used in Russia to destroy Nicholas II's work. During the revolution of 1906 he had issued an imperial decree making Russia a constitutional monarchy, and in 1907 he introduced universal suffrage. The revolutionaries feared this liberating measure more than they feared any Cossacks and used the People's Assembly, when it first met, for riotous uproar, so that it had to be dissolved. The Czar then chose as his prime minister an enlightened statesman, Count Stolypin, who by decree enacted a land reform followed by new elections. The result was that in the second parliament he received a great ovation and the revolutionaries were routed (some 3,000,000 landless peasants became owners of their land).

The future of Russia at that moment looked brighter than ever before. Stolypin was a national hero and wrote, "Our principal aim is to strengthen the agricultural population. The whole strength of the country rests on it . . . Give this country ten years of inner tranquility and you will not know Russia".

Those ten tranquil years would have changed the course of history for the better; instead, the conspiracy intervened and produced the ten days that shook the world. In 1911 Count Stolypin went to Kieff, where the Czar was to unveil a monument to the murdered Liberator, Alexander II, and was shot at a gala performance in the theatre by a Jewish revolutionary, Bagroff (in 1917 a Jewish commissar, discovering that a girl among some fugitives was Count Stolypin's daughter, promptly shot her).

That happened in September 1911; in December 1911 Mr. Wilson, the candidate, made his speech expressing "a sense of identity" with the Jewish "cause". In November 1911 Mr. Wilson had for the first time met the man, Mr. House, who had "chosen" him in 1910 (and who had then already "lined up all my political friends and following" on Mr. Wilson's behalf). Mr. House reported to his brother-in-law, "Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity" .

Before the election Mr. House drew up a list of cabinet ministers (see Philip Dru) in consultation with a Mr. Bernard Baruch, who now enters this tale. He might be the most important of all the figures who will appear in it during the ensuing fifty years, for he was to become known as "the adviser" to several Presidents and in the 1950's was still advising President Eisenhower and Mr. Winston Churchill: In 1912 he was publicly known only as a highly successful financier. His biographer states that he contributed $50,000 to Mr. Wilson's campaign.

Then during the election campaign Mr. Wilson was made to feel the bit. After initial indiscretions he promised Mr. House (as earlier quoted, and compared with Philip Dru) "not to act independently in future". Immediately after the election he received Rabbi Stephen Wise "in a lengthy session" at which they discussed "Russian affairs with special reference to the treatment of Jews" (Mr. Wise). At the same moment Mr. House lunched with a Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, an eminent jurist and a Jew, and recorded that "his mind and mine are in accord concerning most of the questions that are now to the fore ".

Thus three of the four men around Mr. Wilson were Jews and all three, at one stage or another, played leading parts in promoting the re-segregation of the Jews through Zionism and its Palestinian ambition. At that time Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Wise were the leading Zionists in America, and Mr. Brandeis, at his entrance into the story, deserves a paragraph.

He was distinguished in appearance and in intellect, but neither he nor any other lawyer could have defined what constituted, in him, "a Jew". He did not practise the Judaist religion, either in the Orthodox or Reformed versions, and once wrote, "During most of my life my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight and I gave little thought to their problems". His conversion was of the irrational, romantic kind (recalling Mr. Balfour's): one day in 1897 he read at breakfast a report of Dr. Herzl's speech at the First Zionist Congress and told his wife, "There is a cause to which I could give my life".

Thus the fully assimilated American Jew was transformed in a trice. He displayed the ardour of the convert in his subsequent attacks on "assimilation": "Assimilation cannot be averted unless there be re-established in the Fatherland a centre from which the Jewish spirit may radiate". The Zionists from Russia never trusted this product of assimilation who now wanted to de-assimilate himself. They detested his frequent talk about "Americanism". He said, "My approach to Zionism was through Americanism", and to the Talmudists this was akin to saying that Zionism could be approached through "Russianism", which they were bent on destroying. In fact it was illogical to advocate the fiercest form of racial segregation while professing to admire American assimilationism, and Mr. Brandeis, for all his lawyer's skill, seems never truly to have understood the nature of Zionism. He became the Herzl of American Zionists (Rabbi Stephen Wise was their Weizmann) and was rudely dropped when he had served his turn. However, at the decisive moment, in 1917, he played a decisive part.

Such was the grouping around a captive president as the American Republic moved towards involvement in the First World War, and such was the cause which was to be pursued through him and through his country's involvement. After his election Mr. House took over his correspondence, arranged whom he should see or not receive, told Cabinet officers what they were to say or not to say, and so on. By then he had also found time to write and publish that astonishing novel. He wanted power, and achieved it, but what else he wanted, in the sequence, he never decided. Thus his ambition was purposeless, and in retrospect he now looks like Savrola, the hero of another politician's novel, of whom its author, Mr. Winston Churchill, said "Ambition was the motive force, and Savrola was powerless to resist it". At the end of his life Mr. House, lonely and forgotten, greatly disliked Philip Dru.

But between 1911 and 1919 life was delightful for Mr. House. He loved the feeling of power for its own sake, and withal was too kind to want to hurt Rockland in the White House:

"It was invariably my intention, with the President as with all other men I sought to influence, to make him think that ideas he derived from me were his own. In the nature of things I have thought more on many things than had the President, and I had had opportunities to discuss them more widely than he. But no man honestly likes to have another man steer his conclusions. We are all a little vain on that score. Most human beings are too much guided by personal vanity in what they do. It happens that I am not. It does not matter to me who gets the credit for an idea I have imparted. The main thing is to get the idea to work. Usually, to tell the truth, the idea was not original with me… . . ." (and as previously quoted, from Mr. Howden).

Thus someone "steered" Mr. House, who steered Mr. Wilson, to the conclusion that a body of men in the Talmudic areas of Russia ought to be put in possession of Palestine, with the obvious consequence that a permanent source of world warfare would be established there, and that the Jews of the world ought to be re-segregated from mankind. In this plan the destruction of Russia and the spread of the world-revolution also were foreseeably involved.

At that period (1913) an event occurred which seemed of little importance then but needs recording here because of its later, large consequence. In America was an organization called B'nai B'rith (Hebrew for "Children of the Covenant"). Founded in 1843 as a fraternal lodge exclusively for Jews, it was called "purely an American institution", but it put out branches in many countries and today claims to "represent all Jews throughout the world", so that it appears to be part of the arrangement described by Dr. Kastein as "the Jewish international". In 1913 B'nai B'rith put out a tiny offshoot, the "Anti-Defamation League". It was to grow to great size and power; in it the state-within-states acquired a kind of secret police and it will reappear in this story.

With the accession of Mr. Wilson and the group behind his presidential chair, the stage was set for the war about to begin. The function of America, in promoting the great supernational "design" through that war, was to be auxiliary. In that first stage England was cast for the chief part and the major objective, control of the British government, had not been fully attained when the war began.

Thus the story now recrosses the Atlantic to England, where Mr. Balfour was moving again towards office. The leading men there were still resistant to the hidden purpose and plan and were intent on fighting the war, and winning it as quickly as possible, in the place where it began, Europe. They had to be brought into line if the process foretold by Max Nordau in 1903 was to be accomplished. Therefore the resistant men had to be disciplined or removed.

From 1914 to 1916, then, the story becomes that of the struggle to displace these men in England, and to supplant them by others who, like Mr. Wilson, would fall into line.

Page 244

Chapter 30


THE DECISIVE BATTLE

The 1914-1918 war was the first war of nations, as distinct from armies; the hands that directed it reached into every home in most European, and many non-European countries, This was a new thing in the world, but it was foretold by the conspirators of Communism and Zionism. The Protocols of 1905 said that resistance to the plan therein unfolded would be met by "universal war"; Max Nordau in 1903 said that the Zionist ambition in Palestine would be achieved through "the coming world war".

If such words were to be fulfilled, and thus to acquire the status of "uncanny knowledge" revealed in advance of the event, the conspiracy had to gain control of the governments involved so that their acts of State policy, and in consequence their military operations, might be diverted to serve the ends of the conspiracy, not national interests. The American president was already (i.e., from 1912) the captive of secret "advisers", as has been shown; and if Mr. House's depictment of him (alike in the anonymous novel and the acknowledged Private Papers) is correct, he fits the picture given in the earlier Protocols, ". . . we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves".

However, Mr. Wilson was not required to take much active part in furthering the great "design" in the early stages of the First World War; he fulfilled his function later. At its start the main objective was to gain control of the British Government. The struggle to do this lasted two years and ended in victory for the intriguers, whose activities were unknown to the public masses. This battle, fought in the "labyrinth" of "international politics", was the decisive battle of the First World War. That is to say (as no decision is ever final, and can always be modified by a later decision), it produced the greatest and most enduring effects on the further course of the 20th Century; these effects continued to dominate events between the wars and during the Second World War, and in 1956 may be seen to form the most probable cause of any third "universal war". No clash of arms during the 1914-1918 war produced an effect on the future comparable with that brought about by the capture of the British Government in 1916. This process was hidden from the embroiled masses. From start to finish Britons believed that they had only to do with an impetuous Teutonic warlord, and Americans, that the incorrigible quarrelsomeness of European peoples was the root cause of the upheaval.

In England in 1914 the situation brought about in America by the secret captivity of President Wilson did not prevail. The leading political and military posts were held by men who put every proposal for the political and military conduct of the war to one test: would it help win the war and was it in their country's interest. By that test Zionism failed. The story of the first two years of the four-year war is that of the struggle behind the scenes to dislodge these obstructive men and to supplant them by other, submissive men.

Before 1914 the conspiracy had penetrated-only into antechambers (apart from the Balfour Government's fateful step in 1903). After 1914 a widening circ1e of leading men associated themselves with the diversionary enterprise, Zionism. Today the "practical considerations" (of public popularity or hostility, votes, financial backing and office) which influence politicians in this matter are well known, because they have been revealed by many authentic publications. At that time, a politician in England must have been exceptionally astute or far-sighted to see in the Zionists the holders of the keys to political advancement. Therefore the Balfourean motive of romantic infatuation may have impelled them; the annals are unc1ear at that period and do not explain the unaccountable. Moreover, the English have always tended to give their actions a guise of high moral purpose, and to persuade themselves to believe in it; this led Macaulay to observe that "we know no spectac1e so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality". Possibly, then, some of the men who joined in this intrigue (which it undoubtedly was) thought they were doing right. This process of self-delusion is shown by the one statement, discoverable by me, which clearly identifies a group of pro-Zionists in high English places at that time, and offers a motive of the kind satirized by Lord Macaulay.

This comes from a Mr. Oliver Locker-Lampson, early in this century a Conservative Member of parliament. He played no great part and was notable, if at all, only for his later, fanatical support of Zionism in and outside parliament, but he was a personal friend of the leading men who fathered Zionism on the British people. In 1952, in a London weekly journal, he wrote:

"Winston, Lloyd George, Balfour and I were brought up vigorous Protestants, who believe in the coming of a new Saviour when Palestine returns to Jews". This is the Messianic idea of Cromwell's Millenarians, foisted on the 20th Century. Only the men named could say if the statement is true, and but one of them survives. Whether this is the true basis of Protestantism, vigorous or otherwise, readers may judge for themselves. None will contend that it is a sound basis for the conduct of State policy or military operations in war. Also, of course, it expresses the same impious idea that moved the Prophet Monk and all such men: that God has forgotten his duty and, having defaulted, must have it done for him. Anyway, a group had formed and we may as well use for it the name which this man gave it: the Vigorous Protestants.

The First World War began, with these Vigorous Protestants ambitious to attain power so that they might divert military operations in Europe to the cause of procuring Palestine for the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann, who had not been idle since we last saw him closeted with Mr. Balfour at Manchester in 1906, at once went into action: "now is the time. . . the political considerations will be favourable", he wrote in October 1914. He sought out Mr. C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, which was much addicted (then as now) to any non-native cause. Mr. Scott was enchanted to learn that his visitor was "a Jew who hated Russia" (Russia, England's ally, at that moment was saving the British and French armies in the west by attacking from the east) and at once took him to breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Lloyd George (whom Dr. Weizmann found "extraordinarily flippant" about the war in Europe) was "warm and encouraging" about Zionism and suggested another meeting with Mr. Balfour. This ensued on December 14, 1914. Mr. Balfour, recalling the 1906 conversation, "quite nonchalantly" asked if he could help Dr. Weizmann in any practical way, receiving the answer, "Not while the guns are roaring; when the military situation becomes clearer I will come again" (Mrs. Dugdale, with whose account Dr. Weizmann's agrees: "I did not follow up this opening, the time and place were not propitious". This was the meeting at which Mr. Balfour gratuitously said that "when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem").

Dr. Weizmann did not grasp eagerly at Mr. Balfour's "quite nonchalant" offer for a good reason. The Zionist headquarters at that moment was in Berlin and Dr. Weizmann's colleagues there were convinced that Germany would win the war. Before they put any cards on the table they wished to be sure about that. When, later, they resolved to stake on the Allied card, "the guns" were still "roaring". Dr. Weizmann was not deterred by thought of the carnage in Europe from "following up the opening". As he truly told Mr. Balfour (and Mr. Balfour certainly did not understand just what was in his visitor's mind), "the time. . . was not propitious", and Dr. Weizmann meant to wait "until the military situation becomes c1earer".

Significantly, some of the men concerned in these publicly-unknown interviews seem to have sought to cover up their dates; at the time the fate of England was supposed to be their only preoccupation. I have already given one apparent instance of this: the confusion about the date of Mr. Balfour's second meeting with Dr. Weizmann, the one just described. Mr. Lloyd George, similarly, wrote that his first meeting with Dr. Weizmann occurred in 1917, when he was Prime Minister, and called it a "chance" one. Dr: Weizmann disdainfully corrected this: "actually Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership and we had several meetings in the intervening years".

A third meeting with Mr. Balfour followed, "a tremendous talk which lasted several hours" and went off "extraordinarily well". Dr. Weizmann, once more, expressed his "hatred for Russia", England's hard-pressed ally. Mr. Balfour mildly wondered "how a friend of England could be so anti-Russian when Russia was doing so much to help England win the war". As on the earlier occasion, when he alluded to the anti-Zionist convictions of British Jews, he seems to have had no true intention to remonstrate, and concluded, "It is a great cause you are working for; you must come again and again".

Mr. Lloyd George also warned Dr. Weizmann that "there would undoubtedly be strong opposition from certain Jewish quarters" and Dr. Weizmann made his stock reply, that in fact "rich and powerful Jews were for the most part against us". Strangely, this insinuation seems greatly to have impressed the Vigorous Protestants, who were mostly rich and powerful men, and they soon became as hostile to their fellow-countrymen, the Jews of England, as their importuner, Dr. Weizmann from Russia.

Opposition to Zionism developed from another source. In the highest places still stood men who thought only of national duty and winning the war. They would not condone "hatred" of a military ally or espouse a wasteful "sideshow" in Palestine. These men were Mr. Herbert Asquith (Prime Minister), Lord Kitchener (Secretary for War), Sir Douglas Haig (who became Commander-in-Chief in France), and Sir William Robertson (Chief-of-Staff in France, later Chief of the Imperial General Staff).

Mr. Asquith was the last Liberal leader in England who sought to give "Liberalism" a meaning concordant with national interest and religious belief, as opposed to the meaning which the term has been given in the last four decades (the one attributed to it by the Protocols: "When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change; States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning . . ."). With his later overthrow Liberalism, in the first sense, died in England; and in fact the party itself fell into decline and collapsed, leaving only a name used chiefly as "cover" by Communism and its legion of "utopian dreamers".

Mr. Asquith first learned of the intrigue that was brewing when he received a proposal for a Jewish state in Palestine from a Jewish minister, Mr. Herbert Samuel, who had been present at the Weizmann-Lloyd George breakfast in December 1914; these two were informed of it beforehand. Mr. Asquith wrote, ". . . Samuel's proposal in favour of the British annexation of Palestine, a country of the size of Wales, much of it barren mountain and part of it waterless. He thinks we might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million Jews. . . I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities. . . The only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, and I need not say that he does not care a damn for the Jews or their part of the future. . ."

Mr. Asquith (who correctly summed-up Mr. Lloyd George) remained of the same opinion to the end. Ten years later, when long out of office, he visited Palestine, and wrote, "This talk of making Palestine a Jewish National Home seems to me just as fantastic as it has always been". In 1915, by his adverse response, he made himself, and his removal from office, the object of the intrigue. As long as he could he kept his country out of the Palestinian adventure; he accepted the opinion of the military leaders, that the war could only be won (if at all) on the main battlefield, in Europe.

Lord Kitchener, who held this view, was of immense authority and public popularity. The paramount military objective at that stage, he held, was to keep Russia in the war (the Zionists wanted Russia's destruction and so informed the Vigorous Protestants). Lord Kitchener was sent to Russia by Mr. Asquith in June 1916. The cruiser Hampshire, and Lord Kitchener in it, vanished. Good authorities concur that he was the one man who might have sustained Russia. A formidable obstacle, both to the world-revolution there and to the Zionist enterprise, disappeared. Probably Zionism could not have been foisted on the West, had he lived. I remember that the soldiers on the Western Front, when they heard the news, felt that they had lost a major battle. Their intuition was truer than they knew.

After that only Asquith, Robertson, Haig and the Jews of England stood between Zionism and its goal. The circle of intrigue widened. The Times and Sunday Times joined the Manchester Guardian in its enthusiasm for Zionism, and in or around the Cabinet new men added themselves to Balfour and Lloyd George. Lord Milner (about to join it) announced that "if the Arabs think that Palestine will become an Arab country they are much mistaken"; at that moment Colonel Lawrence was rousing the Arabs to revolt against an enemy of the Allies, the Turk. Mr. Philip Kerr (Later Lord Lothian, at that time Mr. Lloyd George's amanuensis) decided that "a Jewish Palestine" must come out of the chastisement of "the mad dog in Berlin" (as the Kaiser was depicted to "the mob"). Sir Mark Sykes, Chief Secretary of the War Cabinet, was "one of our greatest finds" (Dr. Weizmann), and broadened the idea into "the liberation of the Jews, the Arabs and the Armenians".

By means of such false suggestions is "the multitude" ever and again "persuaded". The Arabs and Armenians were where they always had been and did not aspire to be removed elsewhither. The Jews in Europe were as free or unfree as other men; the Jews of Palestine had demonstrated their eagerness to go to Uganda, the Jews of Europe and America wanted to stay where they were, and only the Judaized Khazars of Russia, under their Talmudic directors, wanted possession of Palestine. Sir Mark's invention of this formula was one more misfortune for posterity, for it implied that the Palestinian adventure was but one of several, all akin. Unlike the other Vigorous Protestants, he was an expert in Middle Eastern affairs and must have known better.

Another recruit, Lord Robert Cecil, also used this deceptive formula, "Arabia for the Arabs, Judea for the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians" (Armenian liberation was quite lost sight of in the later events), and his case also is curious, for statesmanship is inborn in the Cecils. Zionism had strange power to produce aberrations in wise men. Mr. Balfour (a half Cecil) had a Cecilian wisdom in other matters; he produced a paper on the reorganization of Europe after the war which stands today as a model of prudent statesmanship, whereas in the question of Zionism he was as a man drugged.

Lord Cecil's case is similarly unaccountable. I remember a lecture he gave in Berlin (in the 1930's) about the League of Nations. Tall, stooped, hawk-visaged, ancestrally gifted, he uttered warnings about the future as from some mountain-top of revelation, and sepulchrally invoked "the Hebrew prophets". As a young journalist I was much impressed without comprehending what he meant. Today, when I have learned a little, it is still mysterious to me; if Jeremiah, for instance, was anything he was an anti-Zionist.

Yet Dr. Weizmann says specifically of Lord Robert, "To him the re-establishment of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine and the organization of the world in a great federation were complementary features of the next step in the management of human affairs. . . One of the founders of the League of Nations, he considered the Jewish Homeland to be of equal importance with the League itself".

Here the great secret is out; but did Lord Robert discern it? The conquest of Palestine for the Zionists from Russia was but "the next step" in "the management of human affairs" (Lord Acton's dictum about "the design" and "the managers" recurs to mind). The "world federation" is depicted as a concurrent part of the same plan. The basic theory of that league, in its various forms, has proved to be that nations should surrender their sovereignty, so that separate nationhood will disappear (this, of course, is also the basic principle of the Protocols). But if nations are to disappear, why should the process of their obliteration begin with the creation of one new nation, unless it is to be the supreme authority in "the management of human affairs" (this conception of the one supreme nation runs alike through the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Protocols and literal Zionism).

Thus Lord Robert's espousal of Zionism becomes incomprehensible, for his inherited wisdom made him fully aware of the perils of world-despotism and at that very period he wrote to Mr. House in America:

"That we ought to make some real effort to establish a peace machinery when this war is over, I have no doubt. . . One danger seems to me to be that too much will be aimed at . . . . . Nothing did more harm to the cause of peace than the breakdown of the efforts after Waterloo in this direction. It is now generally forgotten that the Holy Alliance was originally started as a League to Enforce Peace. Unfortunately, it allowed its energies to be diverted in such a way that it really became a league to uphold tyranny, with the consequence that it was generally discredited, besides doing infinite harm in other ways . . . The example shows how easily the best intended schemes may come to grief".

The quotation shows that Lord Cecil should have been aware of the danger of "diverting energies"; it also shows that he misunderstood the nature of Zionism, if the opinion attributed to him by Dr. Weizmann is correct. When he wrote these words, a new "'League to Enforce Peace" was being organized in America by Mr. House's own brother-in-law. Dr. Mezes; it was the precursor of the various world-government flotations that have followed, in which the intention of powerful groups to set up "a league to uphold tyranny" in the world has been plainly revealed.

Thus, as the second twelvemonth of the First World War ended, the Vigorous Protestants, who looked toward Palestine, not Europe, were a numerous band of brothers, husking the Russian-Zionist core. Messrs. Leopold Amery, Ormsby-Gore and Ronald Graham joined the "friends" above named. Zionism had its foot in every department of government save the War Office. Whatever the original nature of their enthusiasm for Zionism, material rewards at this stage undeniably beckoned; the intrigue was aimed at dislodging men from office and taking their places.

The obstructive prime minister, Mr. Asquith, was removed at the end of 1916. The pages of yesterday now reveal the way this was done, and the passage of time enables the results to be judged. The motive offered to the public masses was that Mr. Asquith was ineffective in prosecuting the war. The sincerity of the contention may be tested by what followed; the first act of his successors was to divert forces to Palestine and in the sequence to that Mr. Lloyd George nearly lost the war entirely.

On November 25, 1916 Mr. Lloyd George recommended that his chief retire from the chairmanship of the War Council in favour of Mr. Lloyd George. Normally such a demand would have been suicidal, but this was a coalition government and the Liberal Mr. Lloyd George was supported in his demand by the Conservative leaders, Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson, so that it was an ultimatum. (These two presumably had honest faith in Mr. Lloyd George's superior abilities; they cannot be suspected of Tory duplicity deep enough to foresee that he would ultimately destroy the Liberal Party!)

Mr. Lloyd George also required that the incompetent (and Conservative) Mr. Balfour be ousted from the First Lordship of the Admiralty. The Liberal prime minister indignantly refused either to surrender the War Council or to dismiss Mr. Balfour (December 4). He then received Mr. Balfour's resignation, whereon he at once sent Mr. Balfour a copy of his own letter refusing to dismiss Mr. Balfour. Thereon Mr. Balfour, though kept indoors by a bad cold, found strength to send another letter in which he insisted on resigning, as Mr. Lloyd George had demanded, and Mr. Lloyd George also resigned:

Mr. Asquith was left alone. On December 6 Mr. Balfour (resigned at Mr. Lloyd George's dictate) felt well enough to receive Mr. Lloyd George. That afternoon the party leaders met and announced that they would gladly serve under Mr. Balfour. Mr. Balfour declined but offered gladly to serve under Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Lloyd George then became Prime Minister and appointed the incompetent Mr. Balfour Foreign Secretary. Thus the two men privily committed to support Zionism moved into the highest political offices and from that moment the energies of the British Government were directed to the procurement of Palestine for the Zionists above all other purposes. (In 1952 I read a letter in the Jewish journal Commentary, of New York, intimating that the Jews of North Wales had by their votes played the decisive part in effecting Mr. Lloyd George's election. I am credibly informed, also, that in his attorney's practice he received much Zionist business, but cannot myself vouch for that. In his case the explanation of venal motives cannot be discounted, in my judgment; the inaccuracy of his statements about his relations with Zionism, which Dr. Weizmann twice corrects, is suggestive).

Thus the central figures on the stage regrouped themselves. Mr. Lloyd George, a small, smart-lawyer in a cutaway among taller colleagues, many still in the old frock coat, looked like a cocksparrow among crows. Beside him stood Mr. Balfour, tall, limp, ever ready with a wearily cynical answer to an honest question, given to a little gentle tennis; I see him now, strolling dreamily across Saint James's Park to the House. Around these two, the Greek chorus of cabinet ministers, junior ministers and high officials who had discovered their Vigorous Protestantism. Some of these fellow-travellers of Zion may have been honestly deluded, and not have realized in what chariot they rode. Mr. Lloyd George was the first major figure in a long line of others who knew a band-wagon when they saw one; through them the innocent words, "twentieth century politician", gained an ominous meaning and the century owes much of its ordeal to them.

As to the diversion of British military strength to an alien purpose, one stout resistant alone remained after the death of Lord Kitchener and removal of Mr. Asquith. The sturdy figure of Sir William Robertson faced the group around Mr. Lloyd George. Had he joined it, he could have had titles, receptions, freedoms, orders, gilt boxes, and ribbons down to his waistbelt; he could have had fortunes for "the rights" of anything he wrote (or any ghost for him); he could have had boulevards named after him and have paraded through cheering cities in Europe and America; he could have had Congress and the House of Commons rise to him and have entered Jerusalem on a white horse. He did not even receive a peerage, and is rare among British field marshals in this.

He was the only man ever to have risen to that highest rank from private. In England of the small professional army this was a great achievement. He was simple, honest, heavy, rugged in feature; he was of the people and looked like a handsome sergeant-major. His only support, in his struggle, lay in the commander in France, Sir Douglas Haig, who was of the cavalry officer caste, goodlooking and soldierly, the private soldier's ideal of what an officer should bee. Robertson, the gruff old soldier, had (reluctantly) to attend some of the money-raising festivities with which society ladies, in wartime, keep themselves occupied, and at one such saw Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who felt moved to perform dances in the draperies and manner of Isadora Duncan. A general, noticing Robertson's impatience, said, "You must admit she has a very fine leg". "Umph, just like any other damn leg", growled Robertson.

On this last man felt the task of thwarting the diversion of British armies to Palestine, if he could. He considered all proposals exclusively in their military bearing on the war and victory; if it would help win the war, motive was to him indifferent; if it would not, he opposed it without regard for any other consideration. On that basis he decided that the Zionist proposal was for a dangerous "sideshow" which could only delay and imperil victory. He never discussed and may not even have suspected any political implications; these were irrelevant to him.

He had told Mr. Asquith in 1915, "Obviously the most effective method" (of defeating the Central Powers) "is to defeat decisively the main German armies, which are still on the Western Front". Therefore he counselled urgently against, "auxiliary campaigns in minor theatres and the depletion of the forces in France. . . The one touchstone by which all plans and proposals must be tested is their bearing on the object of the war".

Peoples engaged in war, are fortunate if their leaders reason like this, and unfortunate if they deviate from this reasoning. By that conclusive logic the Palestinian enterprise (a political one) was out. When Mr. Lloyd George became prime minister he at once bent all his efforts on diverting strength to a major campaign in Palestine: "When I formed my government I at once raised with the War Office the question of a further campaign into Palestine. Sir William Robertson, who was most anxious to avert the danger of any troops being sent from France to Palestine. . . strongly opposed this and for the time being won his point" .

Sir William Robertson corroborates: "Up to December 1916" (when Mr. Lloyd George became prime minister) "operations beyond the Suez Canal had been essentially defensive in principle, the government and General Staff alike. . . recognizing the paramount importance of the struggle in Europe and the need to give the armies there the utmost support. This unanimity between ministers and soldiers did not obtain after the premiership changed hands. . . The fundamental difference of opinion was particularly obtrusive in the case of Palestine. . . The new War Cabinet had been in existence only a few days when it directed the General Staff to examine the possibility of extending the operations in Palestine. . . The General Staff put the requirements at three additional divisions and these could only be obtained from the armies on the Western Front. . . The General Staff said the project would prove a great source of embarrassment and injure our prospects of success in France. . . These conclusions were disappointing to Ministers, . . . who wished to see Palestine occupied at once, but they could not be refuted . . . In February the War Cabinet again approached the Chief of the General Staff, asking what progress was being made with the preparation of an autumn campaign in Palestine".

These passages show how the course of State policy and of military operations in war may be "deflected" by political pressure behind the scenes. In this case, the issue of the battle between the politicians and the soldier affects the lives of nations at the present time, the 1950's.

Mr. Lloyd George then reinforced himself by a move which once more shows the long thought that must have gone into the preparation of this enterprise, and the careful selection of "administrators", to support it, that must have gone before. He proposed that the War Cabinet "take the Dominions into counsel in a much larger measure than hitherto in the prosecution of the war". Put in that way, the idea appealed greatly to the public masses in England. Fighting-men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were campaigning shoulder to shoulder with their own sons. The immediate response of the overseas countries to the "old country's" danger had touched the native Briton's heart, and he was very happy that their leaders should join more c1osely with his own in "prosecuting the war".

However, "the diplomat's word" (and his intention) differed greatly from his deed; Mr. Lloyd George's proposal was merely a "cover" for bringing to London General Smuts from South Africa, who was regarded by the Zionists as their most valuable "friend" outside Europe and America, and General Smuts was brought across to propose the conquest of Palestine!

The voting-population in South Africa is so equally divided between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans that the "fluctuating 20 percent" was, if anything, more decisive there than in America. The Zionists felt able, and possibly General Smuts believed they were able, to "deliver" an election-winning vote. One of his colleagues, a Mr. B.K. Long (a Smuts Member of Parliament and earlier of the London Times) wrote that "the substantial Jewish vote, which was firmly loyal to Smuts and his party", greatly helped him to such electoral victories. His biography mentions a large legacy from "a rich and powerful Jew" (an example of the falsity of Dr. Weizmann's charge against rich and powerful Jews; apropos, the same Sir Henry Strakosch bequeathed a similar gift to Mr. Winston Churchill) and gifts from some unnamed quarter of a house and car. Thus the party-political considerations which weighed with him were similar to those of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. House and later others, and material factors are reasonably apparent in his case.

However, the religious (or pseudo-religious) motive is frequently invoked in his biographies (as it was sometimes claimed by Mr. Lloyd George). They state that he preferred the Old Testament to the New, and quote him as saying, "The older I get the more of an Hebraist I become". I met him many years later, when I knew how important a part he played in this earlier story. He was then (1948) much troubled about the dec1ining situation in the world, and the explosive part of Palestine in it. He was of fine appearance, fit and erect when nearly eighty, keen-eyed, and wore a little beard. He was ruthless and on occasion could have been depicted in a cruel light (had the mass-newspapers been arrayed against instead of behind him) and his political astuteness equalled Mr. Lloyd George's. Propaganda portrayed him as the great architect of Anglo-Boer reconciliation; when he died at his lonely Transvaal farm the two races were more at variance than ever, so that true reconciliation remained for later generations to effect. In South Africa he was a divisive force and all knew that the real power behind his party was that of the gold and diamond mining group, not of England; Johannesburg was the base of his political strength. In 1948, when the test came, he was the first to support Zionism against a hard-pressed British Government.

On March 17, 1917 General Smuts reached London, amid unprecedented ovations, and the overthrow of Sir William Robertson at last loomed near. General Smuts's triumphant reception was an early example of the now familiar "build-up" of selected public figures by a push-button press. The method, in another form, is known among the primitive peoples of his native Africa, where "M'Bongo", the Praisemaker, stalks before the chief, proclaiming him "Great Elephant, Earth Shaker, Stabber of Heaven" and the like.

General Smuts was presented to the Imperial War Cabinet as "one of the most brilliant generals of the war" (Mr. Lloyd George). General Smuts had in fact conducted a small colonial campaign in South West Africa, and when he was summoned to London was waging an uncompleted one in East Africa against "a small but efficiently bush-trained army of 2,000 German officers and 20,000 native askaris" (his son, Mr. J.C. Smuts). The tribute thus was generous (Mr. Lloyd George's opinion of professional soldiers was low: "There is no profession where experience and training count less in comparison with judgment and flair") .

By that time, the better to seclude themselves from "the generals" (other than General Smuts) Mr. Lloyd George and his small war-waging committee had taken a private house "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians, quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves" (Sir William Robertson). To this cloistered body, in April 1917, General Smuts by invitation presented his recommendations for winning the war. It was couched in this form: "The Palestine campaign presents very interesting military and even political possibilities . . . There remains for consideration the far more important and complicated question of the Western Front. I have always looked on it as a misfortune. . . . that the British forces have become so entirely absorbed by this front". (When this advice was tendered Russia was in collapse, the transfer of German armies to the Western Front was an obvious and imminent event, and the threat to that front had suddenly increased to the size of a deadly peril).

This recommendation gave Mr. Lloyd George the high military support (from East Africa) which he needed, and he at once had the War Cabinet order the military commander in Egypt to attack towards Jerusalem. General Murray objected that his forces were insufficient and was removed. Thereon the command was offered to General Smuts, whom Mr. Lloyd George considered "likely to prosecute a campaign in that quarter with great determination".

Sir William Robertson then won his greatest victory of the war. He had a talk with General Smuts. His visitor's qualities as a general can never be estimated because he never had an opportunity to test them, in the small campaigns in which he served. His qualities as a politician, however, are beyond all doubt; he was the wariest of men, and strongly averse to exchanging the triumphs of London for the risk of a fiasco in the field which might destroy his political future in South Africa. Therefore, after his talk with Sir William Robertson, he declined Mr. Lloyd George's offer. (As events turned out he would have been spared the fiasco, but that was unforeseeable, and thus one more conqueror missed the chance of entering Jerusalem on a charger. As politicians habitually love such moments, despite the comic aspect which time often gives them, he later regretted this: "To have entered Jerusalem! What a memory!"). At the time he told Mr. Lloyd George, "My strong conviction is that our present military situation does not really justify an offensive campaign for the capture of Jerusalem and the occupation of Palestine".

Mr. Lloyd George was not to be deterred even by this volte-face, or by the collapse of Russia and the new danger in the West. In September 1917 he decided that "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine could be spared from the Western Front during the winter of 1917-1918 and could complete the task in Palestine in time to be back in France for the opening of active work in the spring".

Only God can have preserved Mr. Lloyd George's fellow countrymen from the full penalties of this decision. The war could not be won in Palestine; it still could be lost in France, and the danger was grave. But Mr. Lloyd George, failed even by General Smuts, had found military support at last, for at this moment another figure, crying "mud-months", advanced from the wings of the central stage.

This was one Sir Henry Wilson, who thus portrays himself during a wartime mission to Russia in January 1917: "Gala dinner at the Foreign Office. . . I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, also Russian shoulder-straps and grey astrakhan cap, and altogether I was a fine picture of a man. I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards. I was much taller than the Grand Duke Serge and altogether a 'notable', as I was told. Superb!"

To this man, posturing against the tragic Russian background, Mr. Lloyd George and Zionism owed their golden opportunity, arrived at last, and England very nearly a catastrophe. Sir Henry Wilson was very tall, thin, smooth and smiling; one of those dapper, polished-leather-bound, red-tabbed, beribboned and brass-edged elegants of the Staff who discouraged the muddied, trenchweary soldiers in France. He spoke native French (by the chance of a French governess) and on this account "Henri" was beloved by the French generals, who thought him refreshingly free from English stiffness (indeed, he was an Irishman and on Irish questions disagreed with other Irishmen, by two of whom he was shot on his London doorstep in 1922, they being hanged).

Sir Henry earlier had agreed with all other military leaders about the paramountcy of the main front and the madness of wasteful "sideshows" and excelled others in the vigour with which he stated this principle: "The way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks. . . The place where we can kill most Germans is here" (France) "and therefore every pound of ammunition we have in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations except to weaken the forces there engaged" (1915).

No staff graduate, or any fighting private, would dispute that. Sir Henry cannot by 1917 have discovered any military reason to abandon this basic principle of war for its opposite. The explanation of his volt-face can only be the obvious one. He had observed the rise of Zion and the nature of Mr. Lloyd George's dispute with his own chief, Sir William Robertson. Sir Henry saw the way to occupy Sir William's shoes. Hence Dr. Weizmann's account of his "discoveries of friends" at that period include an allusion to the "sympathy" of General Wilson, "a great friend of Lloyd George". On August 23, 1917 Sir Henry reported to Mr. Lloyd George "the strong belief that if a really good scheme was thoroughly well worked out, we could clear the Turks out of Palestine and very likely knock them completely out during the mud-months without in any way interfering with Haig's operations next spring and winter" (in France).

In this report Mr. Lloyd George at long last found the support he needed for his order of September 1917, quoted six paragraphs back. He seized on the alluring phrase "mud-months"; it gave him a military argument! General Wilson explained to him that these "mud-months" in France, which by bogging down the armies would preclude a major German offensive while they continued, comprized "five months of mud and snow from the middle of November to the middle of April" (1918). On this counsel Mr. Lloyd George founded his decision to take from France "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine" and to have them back in France in time for any emergency there. As to that, General Wilson, alone among military leaders, advised Mr. Lloyd George that the big German attack probably would never happen (it came in the middle of March).

Sir William Robertson vainly pointed out that the time-table was illusory; the movement of armies entailed major problems of transport and shipping, and by the time the last divisions landed in Palestine the first ones would be re-embarking! In October he again warned that troops taken from France could not be back there in time for summer fighting: "the right military course to pursue is to act on the defensive in Palestine. . . and continue to seek a decision in the West . . . all reserves should be sent to the Western Front".

At that fateful instant chance, ever the arch-conspirator in this story, struck in favour of the Zionists. Cabinet Ministers in London (who apparently had almost forgotten the Western Front) were badgering Sir William Robertson to "give us Jerusalem as a Christmas box" (the phrase appears to reveal again the "extraordinary flippancy" about the war which Dr. Weizmann earlier attributed to Mr. Lloyd George). In Palestine General Allenby, under similar pressure, made a probing advance, found to his surprise that the Turks offered little opposition, and without much difficulty marched into Jerusalem.

The prize was of no military value, in the total sum of the war, but Mr. Lloyd George thenceforward was not to be restrained. Troops were diverted from France without regard to what impended there. On January 6, 1918 Sir Douglas Haig complained of the weakening of his armies in France on the eve of the greatest battle; he was "114,000 infantry down". On January 10,1918 the War Office was forced to issue orders to reduce all divisions from 12 to 9 battalions of infantry.

A free press might at that period have given Sir William Robertson the backing he needed, in public opinion, to avert all this. He was denied that, too, for at that stage the state of affairs foretold by the Protocols of 1905 was being brought about: "We must compel the governments . . . to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan. . . by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the Press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands". Writers of great repute were ready to inform the public of the imminent danger; they were not allowed to speak.

Colonel Repington, of The Times, was the best-known military writer of that day; his reputation in this field was the highest in the world. He noted in his diary, "This is terrible and will mean the reduction of our infantry in France by a quarter and confusion in all our infantry at the moment of coming crisis. I have never felt so miserable since the war began. . . I can say very little because the editor of The Times often manipulates my criticisms or does not publish them. . .If The Times does not return to its independent line and act as watchdog of the public I shall wash my hands of it".

When the fulfilment of his warnings was at hand, Sir William Robertson was removed. Mr. Lloyd George, resolved to obtain authority for his Palestinian adventure, put his plan to the Supreme War Council of the Allies at Versailles, whose technical advisers, in January 1918, approved it "subject to the Western Front being made secure". Sir William Robertson, at M. Clemenceau's request, restated his warning that it would mortally endanger the Western Front. When the meeting broke up Mr. Lloyd George angrily rebuked him and he was at once supplanted by Sir Henry Wilson.

Before he left his post he used his last moments in it to make a final attempt to avert the coming disaster. He went (also in January) to Paris to ask help from General Pershing, the American commander, in replenishing the depleted front (only four and a half American divisions then had reached France). General Pershing, a soldier true to his duty, made the reply which Sir William expected and would himself have made in General Pershing's place: "He shrewdly observed that it was difficult to reconcile my request for assistance in defence of the Western Front with Mr. George´s desire to act offensively in Palestine. There was, unfortunately, no answer to that argument, except that, so far as I was personally concerned, not a man or gun would be sent to Palestine from anywhere".

After that Sir William Robertson was no longer "concerned". His account differs from the memoirs of Mr. Lloyd George and other politicians in that it shows no rancour; his sole theme is duty. Of his treatment he merely says, "It had frequently been my unpleasant duty during 1917 to object to military enterprises which the Prime Minister wished the army to carry out and this opposition had doubtless determined him to try another Chief of the Imperial General Staff. . . On the point of supersession, therefore, there was nothing to say and I said nothing". Thus an admirable man passes from this story of many lesser men, but his work endured, because, up to the time of his dismissal, he may have saved just enough men and guns for the crumbling line to hold at the last extremity, in March, as a rending hawser may hold by a single thread.

When he was gone two men outside the government and army continued the struggle, and their efforts deserve record because theirs were among the last attempts to preserve the principle of free, independent and vigilant reporting. Colonel Repington was a former cavalry officer, an admirer of pretty women, a lover of good talk, a beau sabreur. His diaries give a lasting picture of the frothy life of the drawing-rooms that went on while armies fought in France and in London intriguers conspired in the political antechambers. He enjoyed it and although he felt its incongruity he realized that gloom alone was no remedy. He was as honest and patriotic as Robertson, and incorruptible; lavish offers (which might have lured him into silence, and possibly were so intended) had no effect on him.

He wrote, "We are feeding over a million men into the sideshow theatres of war and are letting down our strengths in France at a moment when all the Boche forces from Russia may come against us . . . I am unable to get the support from the editor of The Times that I must have to rouse the country and I do not think I will be able to go on with him much longer". (I discovered Colonel Repington's diaries through my work on this book and then realized that his experience was identical with mine, just twenty years later, with the same editor). A month later he wrote, "In a stormy interview I told Mr. Geoffrey Dawson that his subservience to the War Cabinet during this year was largely the cause of the dangerous position of our army . . . I would have nothing more to do with The Times".

This left one man in England who was able and willing to publish the truth. Mr. H.A. Gwynne, of the Morning Post, printed Colonel Repington's article, which exposed the weakening of the French front on the eve of its attack, without submitting it to the censor. He and Colonel Repington then were prosecuted, tried and fined (public opinion was apparently too much on their side for harsher retribution). Sir William Robertson wrote to Colonel Repington, "Like yourself, I did what was best in the general interests of the country and the result has been exactly what I expected . . . But the great thing is to keep on a straight course and then one may be sure that good will eventually come of what may now seem to be evil". *

Thus the two wartime years of Mr. Lloyd George's leadership in England were momentous in their effects on the present time, and I believe I have shown how he achieved office and what paramount purpose he pursued through it. After eighteen months he had overcome all opposition, diverted a mass of men from France to Palestine, and was ready at last for the great venture.

On March 7, 1918 he gave orders for "a decisive campaign" to conquer all Palestine, and sent General Smuts there to instruct General Allenby accordingly.

On March 21, 1918 the long-awaited German attack in France began, embodying all the men, guns and aircraft released from the Russian front.

The "decisive campaign" in Palestine was immediately suspended and every man who could be squeezed out of Palestine was rushed to France. The total number of men employed in Palestine was 1,192,511 up to October 1918 (General Robertson).

On March 27, 1918 Colonel Repington wrote, "This is the worst defeat in the history of the army". By June 6 the Germans claimed 175,000 prisoners and over 2,000 guns.

At that point the truth was shown of the last words above quoted from Sir William Robertson's letter to Colonel Repington, and they are of continuing hopeful augury to men of goodwill today. By keeping on a straight course he had saved enough for the line to hold, at breaking point, until the Americans began to arrive in strength. Therewith the war was virtually at an end. Clearly, if Russia had been sustained, the Palestinian excursion avoided, and strength concentrated in France it could have been concluded earlier, and probably without the "entanglement" of America. However, that would not have furthered the great plan for "the management of human affairs".

At this point in the tale I write with the feelings of a participant, and they probably influence what I have written of the long earlier story, because the effects, as I have seen them in my generation, appear to me to be bad. I recall the great German attack of March 21, 1918; I saw it from the air and on the ground and was in the fighting for the first month, until I was removed by stretcher. I remember Sir Douglas Haig's order, that every man must fight and die where he stood; it was posted on the walls of my squadron's mess. I have no complaints about the experience, and would not delete it from my life if I could. Now that I have come to see by what ulterior means and motives it was all brought about, I think coming generations might be a little better able to keep Sir William Robertson's "straight course", and so to ensure that good will eventually come of what seems to them to be evil, if they know a little more of what went on then and has continued since. This is my reason for writing the present book.

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* In the sequel to all this Sir Edward Carson, who had unwittingly helped Mr. Lloyd George into the premiership, resigned from the government and told the editor of The Times that it was but Mr. Lloyd George's mouthpiece, the Morning Post being the truly independent paper. Mr. Gwynne told Colonel Repington that the government wished to destroy the Morning Post "as it is one of the few independent papers left". Before the Second War came it 'was "destroyed", as already related. After that only one weekly publication survived in England which, in my opinion, for many years sought to uphold the principle of impartial and independent reporting, but in 1953 Truth too, was by a change of ownership brought into line.

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As a result of the victory in Europe the coveted territory in Palestine was at length acquired. But it is one thing to acquire land and another to build something on it. On this land a Zionist "homeland" was to be erected, then a "state" (and last a "commonwealth"?). None of these things could be done by England alone. No precedent existed for the donation of Arabian territory, by a European conqueror, to an Asiatic beneficiary. For such a transaction other nations had to be co-opted, many nations, and a company promoted, so that it might be given the semblance of honest business. In fact, a "league of nations" was required, and America, above all, had to be "entangled". This other part of the plan was also in preparation; while British armies seized the tract of land desired, the smart lawyers had been looking for ways to amend the rightful title deeds to it, float a company and generally promote the undertaking.

Mr. Lloyd George had served his turn and his day was nearly done. The reader may now turn his eyes across the Atlantic and see what Mr. House, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise have been up to. A Mr. Woodrow Wilson plays a shadowy part in these proceedings.

Page 261

Chapter 31


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE

Such words as "conspiracy" and "intrigue", often used in this narrative, are not original with me; they come from authoritative sources. Mr. Arthur D. Howden, who wrote his biography in consultation with the man depicted, supplies the chapter title above; he describes the process of which Mr. House was (in America) the centre during the 1914-1918 war in the words, "a web of intrigue was spun across the Atlantic".

In England the Lloyd George government and in America the president were at first separately enmeshed. Between 1914 and 1917 these "webs" in London and Washington were joined together by the transoceanic threads which Mr. Howden depicts in the spinning. Thereafter the two governments were caught in the same web and have never since freed themselves from it.

In President Wilson's America the real president was Mr. House ("liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement", Rabbi Wise). Mr. Justice Brandeis, who had decided to "give his life" to Zionism, was the president's "adviser on the Jewish question" (Dr. Weizmann); this is the first appearance in the Presidential household of an authority theretofore unknown in it and now apparently permanent. The chief Zionist organizer was Rabbi Wise, constantly in touch with the two other men.

Mr. House (and Mr. Bernard Baruch), chose the president's cabinet officers, so that one of them had to introduce himself to Mr. Wilson thus: "My name is Lane, Mr. President, I believe I am the Secretary of the Interior". The president lived at the White House in Washington but was frequently seen to visit a small apartment in East 35th Street, New York, where a Mr. House lived. In time this led to pointed questions and one party-man was told, "Mr. House is my second personality; he is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one". Mr. House was often in Washington, where he conducted the president's interviews and correspondence, and, stopping cabinet officers outside the cabinet room, instructed them what to say inside it. Even from New York he directed America by means of private telephone lines linking him with Washington: "it is only necessary to lift off the receiver and I reach the Secretary of State's desk immediately".

The president's assent to acts of State policy was not required. Mr. House "did not expect affirmative commendation . . . if the President did not object, I knew that it was safe to go ahead". Thus Mr. Wilson had to express dissent, to delay or amend any action (and immediately after election he had been made to promise "not to act independently in future").

In 1914 Mr. House, who in 1900 had resolved to extend his power from Texan to national politics, prepared to take over international affairs: "he wanted to exercise his energy in a broader field. . . From the beginning of 1914 he gave more and more thought to what he regarded as the highest form of politics and that for which he was peculiarly suited: international affairs". In fact, Texan upbringing did not so qualify Mr. House. In Texas the words "international affairs' had, in the public mind, a sound akin to "skunk", and there, more than anywhere in America, "the traditions of the 19th century still held the public mind; traditions which laid down, as the primary principle of American policy, a complete abstention from the political affairs of Europe" (Mr. Seymour). Mr. House, who somewhere in Texas had absorbed "the ideas of the revolutionaries of 1848" was to destroy that tradition, but this did not prove him "peculiarly suited" to intervene in "international affairs".

Mr. House was of different type from the languid Mr. Balfour, with his background of Scottish hills and mists, and Mr. Lloyd George, the Artful Dodger of Zionism from Wales, but he acted as if he and they had together graduated from some occult academy of political machination. In 1914 he began to appoint American ambassadors (as he says) and made his first calls on European governments as "a personal friend of the President".

Mr. Seymour, his editor, says: "It would be difficult in all history to find another instance of diplomacy so unconventional and so effective. Colonel House, a private citizen, spreads all the cards on the table and concerts with the Ambassador of a foreign power the despatches to be sent to the American Ambassador and Foreign Minister of that power". Mr. Howden, his confidant, expatiates: "Mr. House had the initiative in what was done. . . The State Department was relegated to the status of an intermediary for his ideas, a depository of public records. Much of the more confidential diplomatic correspondence passed directly through the little apartment in East 35th Street. The Ambassadors of the belligerents called on him when they wanted to influence the Administration or sought assistance in the web of intrigue that was being spun across the Atlantic".

Mr. House: "The life I am leading transcends in interest and excitement any romance. . . Information from every quarter of the globe pours into this little, unobtrusive study". Mr. Seymour again: "Cabinet members in search of candidates, candidates in search of positions made of his study a clearing house. Editors and journalists sought his opinion and despatches to the foreign press were framed almost at his dictation. United States Treasury officials, British diplomats. . . and metropolitan financiers came to his study to discuss their plans" .

A rising man across the Atlantic also was interested in "financiers". Mrs. Beatrice Webb says that Mr. Winston Churchill, somewhat earlier, at a dinner party confided to her that "he looks to haute finance to keep the peace and for that reason objects to a self-contained Empire as he thinks it would destroy this cosmopolitan capitalism, the cosmopolitan financier being the professional peacemaker of the modern world and to his mind the acme of civilization". Later events did not support this notion that leading financiers ("metropolitan" or "cosmopolitan") were "professional peacemakers".

Such was the American picture, behind-the-scenes in 1915 and 1916. The purpose of the ruling group whose web now began to span the Atlantic is shown by the events which followed. Mr. Asquith was overthrown in the pretext that his incompetency imperilled victory; Mr. Lloyd George risked total defeat by diverting armies to Palestine. Mr. Wilson was re-elected in the pretext that he, in the old tradition, would "keep America out of the war"; elected, at once involved America in the war. "The diplomat' s word" and his "deed" were different.

Mr. House privately "concluded that war with Germany is inevitable" on May 30, 1915, and in June 1916 devised the election-winning slogan for Mr. Wilson's second campaign: "He kept us out of the war". Rabbi Stephen Wise, before the election, supported Mr. House's efforts: in letters to the President the rabbi "deplored his advocacy of a preparedness programme" and from public platforms he preached against war. All went as planned: "the House strategy worked perfectly" (Mr. Howden), and Mr. Wilson was triumphantly re-elected.

Mr. Wilson seems at that point to have believed the words put into his mouth. Immediately after the election he set up as a peacemaker and drafted a note to the belligerents in which he used the phrase, "the causes and objects of the war are obscure". This was a culpable act of "independence" on the president's part, and Mr. House was furious. The harassed president amended the phrase to "the objects which the statesmen and the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same". This made Mr. House even angrier, and Mr. Wilson's efforts to expose the nature of "the web" in which he was caught thereon expired. He remained in ignorance of what his next act was to be for a little, informing Mr. House on January 4, 1917, "There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in the war. . . It would be a crime against civilization for us to go in ".

The power-group moved to dispel these illusions as soon as Mr. Wilson's second inauguration was safely past (January 20, 1917). Rabbi Stephen Wise informed the president of a change of mind; he was now "convinced that the time had come for the American people to understand that it might be our destiny to have part in the struggle". Mr. House (who during the "no war" election had noted, "We are on the verge of war") confided to his diary on February 12, 1917, "We are drifting into war as rapidly as I expected" (which gave a new meaning to the word "drift").

Then on March 27, 1917 President Wilson asked Mr. House "whether he should ask Congress to declare war or whether he should say that a state of war exists", and Mr. House "advised the latter", so that the American people were informed, on April 2, 1917, that a state of war existed. * Between November 1916 and April 1917, therefore, "the web of intrigue", spanning the ocean, achieved these decisive aims: the overthrow of Mr. Asquith in favour of Mr. Lloyd George, the commitment of British armies to the Palestinian diversion, the re-election of a president who would be constrained to support that enterprise, and the embroilment of America.

The statement of existing war made to Congress said the purpose of the war (which Mr. Wilson, a few weeks before, had declared in his draft to be "obscure") was "to set up a new international order". Thus a new purpose was openly, though cryptically revealed. To the public masses the words meant anything or nothing. To the initiates they carried a commitment to support the plan, of which Zionism and Communism both were instruments, for establishing a "world federation" founded on force and the obliteration of nationhood, with the exception of one "nation" to be recreated.

From this moment the power-groups in America and England worked in perfect synchronization, so that the two stories become one story, or one "web". The apparently powerful men in Washington and London coordinated their actions at the prompting of the inter-communicating Zionists on both sides of the ocean. Foreknowledge of what was to happen had earlier been displayed by Dr. Weizmann in London, who in March 1915 wrote to his ally, Mr. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, that he "understood" the British Government to be willing to support Zionist aspirations at the peace conference to come (the event also foretold by Max Nordau in 1903). This was exactly what Mr. Asquith would not consider, so that Dr. Weizmann, in March 1915, was already describing Mr. Asquith's supplanters of December 1916 as "the British Government".

This "British Government", said Dr. Weizmann, would leave "the organization of the Jewish commonwealth" in Palestine "entirely to the care of the Jews". However, the Zionists could not possibly, even in a Palestine conquered for them, have set up "a commonwealth" against the native inhabitants. They could only do that behind the protection of a great power and its armies. Therefore Dr. Weizmann (foretelling in 1915 exactly what was to happen in 1919 and the following two decades) considered that a British "protectorate" should be set up in Palestine (to protect the Zionist intruders). This would mean, he said, that "the Jews take over the country; the whole burden of organization falls on them, but for the next ten or fifteen years they work under a temporary British protectorate" .
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* Lord Sydenham, when he wrote of the "deadly accuracy" of the forecast in the "Protocols" of about 1900, might have had particularly in mind the passage, ". . . We shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need". The situation here described became established practice during the present century. In 1950 President Truman sent American troops into Korea. "to check Communist aggression", without consulting Congress. Later this was declared to be a "United Nations" war and they were joined by troops of seventeen other countries under an American commander, General MacArthur. This was the first experiment in a "world government"-type war and its course produced Senator Taft's question of 1952. "Do we really mean our anti-Communist policy?" General MacArthur was dismissed after protesting an order forbidding him to pursue Communist aircraft into their Chinese sanctuary and in 1953, under President Eisenhower, the war was broken off, leaving half of Korea in "the aggressor's" hands. General MacArthur and other American commanders later charged that the order forbidding pursuit was made known to the enemy by "a spy ring responsible for the purloining of my top secret reports to Washington" (Life, Feb. 7, 1956), and the Chinese Communist commander confirmed this (New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 1956). In June 1951 two British Foreign Office officials, Burgess and Maclean, disappeared and in September 1955 the British Government, after refusing information for four years, confirmed the general belief that they were in Moscow and "had spied for the Soviet Union over a long period". General MacArthur then charged that these two men had revealed the non-pursuit order to the Communist "aggressor" (Life, above-quoted).
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On April 4, 1956 President Eisenhower was asked by a reporter at his regular news conference whether he would order a United States marine battalion, then recently sent to the Mediterranean, into war "without asking Congress first" (by that time war in the Middle East was an obvious possibility). He answered angrily. "I have announced time and time again I will never be guilty of any kind of action that can be interpreted as war until the Congress, which has the constitutional authority". On January 3, 1957, the first major act of his second term, he sent a draft resolution to Congress designed to invest him with unlimited, standing authority to act militarily in the Middle East "to deter Communist armed aggression".
Dr. Weizmann adds that this was "an anticipation of the mandate system", so that today's student also learns where the notion of "mandates" was born. The idea of ruling conquered territories under a "mandate" bestowed by a self-proclaimed "league of nations" was devised solely with an eye to Palestine. (Events have proved this. All the other "mandates" distributed after the 1914-1918 war, to give the appearance of a procedure generally applicable, have faded away, either by relinquishment of the territory to its inhabitants or by its conversion, in fact, into a possession of the conqueror. The concept of the "mandate" was maintained for just as long as was needed for the Zionists to amass enough arms to take possession of Palestine for themselves).

Thus, after the elevation of Mr. Lloyd George and the second election of Mr. Wilson, the shape of the future, far beyond the war's end, was fully known to Dr. Weizmann at the web's centre, who went into action. In a memorandum to the British Government he demanded that "The Jewish population of Palestine. . . shall be officially recognized by the Suzerain government as the Jewish Nation". The "first full-dress conference leading to the Balfour Declaration" was then held. This committee, met to draft a British governmental document, met in a private Jewish house and consisted of nine Zionist leaders and one representative of the government concerned, Sir Mark Sykes (who attended "in his private capacity"). As a result Mr. Balfour at once arranged to go to America to discuss the matter.

Dr. Weizmann and his associates had to steer a very narrow course between two difficulties at that moment, and might have failed, had not "the web" enabled them to dictate what Mr. Balfour would be told by the men he crossed the ocean to see. The British Government, for all its zeal, took alarm at the prospect of acting as sole protector of the Zionists and wanted America to share the armed occupation of Palestine. The Zionists knew that this would violently upset American opinion, (had it come about America, from bitter experience shared, would have been much harder to win for the deed of 1948) and did not want the question of American co-occupation raised. Dr. Weizmann's misgivings were increased when, in "a long talk" he found Mr. Balfour, before his departure, eager for "an Anglo-American protectorate".

Dr. Weizmann at once wrote to Mr. Justice Brandeis warning him to oppose any such plan, but to assure Mr. Balfour of American support for the proposal of a solely British protectorate, (April 8, 1917), and this letter to Mr. Brandeis "must have reached him about the time of Balfour's arrival". Mr. Brandeis, risen to the United States Supreme Court, had retired from the public leadership of Zionism in America. In the tradition of his office, he should have remained aloof from all political affairs, but in fact, as Mr. Wilson's "adviser on the Jewish question", he informed the president that he was "in favour of a British protectorate and utterly opposed to a condominium" (that is, joint Anglo-American control).

When Mr. Balfour reached America (then in a state of "existing war" for just eighteen days) he apparently never discussed Palestine with the American President at all. Mr. Wilson's part at this stage "was limited to a humble undertaking to Rabbi Wise, "Whenever the time comes and you and Justice Brandeis feel that the time is ripe for me to speak and act, I shall be ready". By that time the rabbi had "briefed" Mr. House: "He is enlisted in our cause. There is no question about it whatever. The thing will go through Washington, I think, without delay" (April 8, 1917, six days after the "existing war" proclamation).

Mr. Balfour saw Mr. Brandeis. Clearly he might as well have stayed at home with Dr. Weizmann, as Mr. Brandeis merely repeated the contents of Dr. Weizmann's letters; Mr. Balfour simply moved from one end of "the web of intrigue" to the other. Mr. Brandeis (as Mrs. Dugdale records) "became' increasingly emphatic about the desire of the Zionists to see a British administration in Palestine". Mr. Balfour, his biographer adds, "pledged his own personal support to Zionism; he had done it before to Dr. Weizmann, but now he was British Foreign Secretary".

A later American comment on the part played by Mr. Brandeis in this affair is here relevant. Professor John O. Beaty of the Southern Methodist University of the United States says that the day when Mr. Brandeis's appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed was "one of the most significant days in American history, for we had for the first time, since the first decade of the 19th Century, an official of the highest status whose heart's interest was in something besides the United States".

Mr. Brandeis "did more than press the idea of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate" (Dr. Weizmann). He and Mr. House issued (over the president's signature) the famous dec1aration repudiating secret treaties). This declaration was popular with the masses, who heard in it the voice of the Brave New World rebuking the bad old one. The words evoked pictures of becloaked diplomats climbing dark backstairs to secret chancelleries; now that America was in the war these feudal machinations would be stopped and all done above the board.

Alas for a pleasant illusion; the noble rebuke was another submission to Zionism. Turkey had still to be defeated so that the French and British governments (whose fighting men were engaged) wished to win over the Arabs and with them had made the "Sykes-Picot agreement", which foresaw an independent confederation of Arab States and, among them, an international administration for Palestine. Dr. Weizmann had learned of this agreement and saw that there could be no Zionist state if Palestine were under international control; exclusive British "protection" was essential. Pressure was applied and President Wilson's ringing denunciation of "secret treaties" was in fact aimed solely at the Arabs of Palestine and their hopes for the future. America insisted that England hold the baby.

Of this secret achievement Mr. Balfour's biographer happily records that it showed "a Jewish national diplomacy was now in being"; the words may be used as an alternative heading to this chapter, if any so desire. The British Foreign Office at last "recognized, with some slight dismay, that the British Government was virtually committed". America, though in the war, was not at war with Turkey, and yet had been secretly committed (by Mr. Brandeis) to support the transfer of Turkish territory to an outside party. Therefore American participation in the intrigue had to remain publicly unknown for the moment, though Mr. Balfour had been informed of it in imperative tones.

The summer of 1917 passed while the Balfour Declaration was prepared, America thus having become secretly involved in the Zionist adventure. The only remaining opposition, apart from that of generals and a few high Foreign Office or State Department officials, came from the Jews of England and America. It was ineffective because the leading politicians, in both countries, were even more hostile to their Jewish fellow-citizens than were the Zionists. (The part played in all this by non-Jews was so great, even if it was the part of puppets, that one is constantly reminded of the need to regard with suspicion the attribution of the Protocols to solely Jewish authorship).

In England in 1915 the Anglo-Jewish Association, through its Conjoint Committee, declared that "the Zionists do not consider civil and political emancipation as a sufficiently important factor for victory over the persecution and oppression of Jews and think that such a victory can only be achieved by establishing a legally secured home for the Jewish people. The Conjoint Committee considers as dangerous and provoking anti-semitism the 'national' postulate of the Zionists, as well as special privileges for Jews in Palestine. The Committee could not discuss the question of a British Protectorate with an international organization which included different, even enemy elements".

In any rational time the British and American governments would have spoken thus, and they would have been supported by Jewish citizens. In 1914, however, Dr. Weizmann had written that such Jews "have to be made to realize that we and not they are the masters of the situation". The Conjoint Committee represented the Jews long established in England, but the British Government accepted the claim of the revolutionaries from Russia to be "the masters" of Jewry.

In 1917, as the irrevocable moment approached, the Conjoint Committee again declared that the Jews were a religious community and nothing more, that they could not claim "a national home", and that Jews in Palestine needed nothing more than "the assurance of religious and civil liberty, reasonable facilities for immigration and the like".

By that time such statements infuriated the embattled Goyim around Dr. Weizmann from Russia. Mr. Wickham Steed of The Times expressed "downright annoyance" after discussing "for a good hour" (with Dr. Weizmann) "the kind of leader which was likely to make the best appeal to the British public", produced "a magnificent presentation of the Zionist case".

In America, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise were equally vigilant against the Jews there. The rabbi (from Hungary) asked President Wilson, "What will you do when their protests reach you?" For one moment only he was silent. Then he pointed to a large wastepaper basket at his desk. "Is not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"

In England Dr. Weizmann was enraged by "outside interference, entirely from Jews". At this point he felt himself to be a member of the Government, or perhaps the member of the Government, and in the power he wielded apparently was that. He did not stop at dismissing the objections of British Jews as "outside interference"; he dictated what the Cabinet should discuss and demanded to sit in Cabinet meetings so that he might attack a Jewish minister! He required that Mr. Lloyd George put the question "on the agenda of the War Cabinet for October 4, 1917" and on October 3, he wrote to the British Foreign Office protesting against objections which he expected to be raised at that meeting "by a prominent Englishman of the Jewish faith".

Mr. Edwin Montagu was a cabinet minister and a Jew. Dr. Weizmann implicitly urged that he be not heard by his colleagues, or that if he were heard, Dr. Weizmann should be called in to reply! On the day of the meeting Dr. Weizmann appeared in the office of the prime minister's secretary, Mr. Philip Kerr (another "friend") and proposed that he remain there in case the Cabinet "decide to ask me some questions before they decide the matter". Mr. Kerr said, "Since the British Government has been a government, no private person has been admitted to one of its sessions", and Dr. Weizmann then went away.

But for that Mr. Lloyd George would have set the precedent, for Dr. Weizmann was scarcely gone when, after hearing Mr. Montagu, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour sent out to ask Dr. Weizmann to come in. Mr. Montagu then succeeded, in the teeth of the Gentiles arrayed against him, in obtaining minor modifications in the draft, and Dr. Weizmann later rebuked Mr. Kerr for this petty compromise: "The Cabinet and even yourself attach undue importance to the opinion held by so-called 'British Jewry'. "Two days later (October 9) Dr. Weizmann cabled triumphantly to Mr. Justice Brandeis that the British Government had formally undertaken to establish a "national home for the Jewish race" in Palestine.

The draft experienced revealing adventures between October 9 and November 2, when it was published. It was sent to America, where it was edited by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. Jacob de Haas and Rabbi Wise before being shown to President Wilson for his "final approval". He simply sent it to Mr. Brandeis (who had already had it from Dr. Weizmann), who passed it to Rabbi Stephen Wise, "to be handed to Colonel House for transmission to the British Cabinet".

In this way one of the most fateful actions ever taken by any British Government was prepared. The draft, incorporated in a letter addressed by Mr. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, became "the Balfour Declaration". The Rothschild family, like many leading Jewish families, was sharply divided about Zionism. The name of a sympathetic Rothschild, as the recipient of the letter, was evidently used to impress Western Jewry in general, and to divert attention from the Eastern Jewish origins of Zionism. The true addressee was Dr. Weizmann. He appears to have become an habitué of the War Cabinet's antechamber and the document was delivered to him, Sir Mark Sykes informing him, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!" (today the shape of the man may be seen).

No rational explanation for the action of leading Western politicians in supporting this alien enterprise has ever been given, and as the undertaking was up to that point secret and conspiratorial no genuine explanation can be given; if an undertaking is good conspiracy is not requisite to it, and secrecy itself indicates motives that cannot be divulged. If any of these men ever gave some public reason, it usually took the form of some vague invocation of the Old Testament. This has a sanctimonious ring, and may be held likely to daunt objectors. Mr. Lloyd George liked to tell Zionist visitors (as Rabbi Wise ironically records), "You shall have Palestine from Dan to Beersheba", and thus to present himself as the instrument of divine will. He once asked Sir Charles and Lady Henry to call anxious Jewish Members of Parliament together at breakfast "so that I may convince them of the rightfulness of my Zionist position". A minyan (Jewish religious quorum of ten) was accordingly assembled in the British Prime Minister's breakfast room, where Mr. Lloyd George read a series of passages which, in his opinion, prescribed the transplantation of Jews in Palestine in 1917: Then he said, "Now, gentlemen, you know What your Bible says; that is the end of the matter".

On other occasions he gave different, and mutually destructive, explanations. He told the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 that he acted to gain "the support of American Jewry" and that he had "a definite promise" from the Zionist leaders "that if the allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause". .

This was brazen untruth at the very bar of history. America was already in the war when Mr. Balfour went there to agree the Balfour Dec1aration, and Mr. Balfour's biographer scouts the notion of any such bargain. Rabbi Elmer Berger, a Jewish commentator, says the alleged promise by Zionist leaders inspires in him, ". . . an irrepressible indignation, for myself, my family, my Jewish friends, all of whom are just ordinary Jews . . . it constitutes one of the most obscene libels in all history. Only callousness and cynicism could imply that Jews in the Allied nations were not already giving their utmost to the prosecution of the war" .

Mr. Lloyd George's third explanation ("Acetone converted me to Zionism") is the best known. According to this version Mr. Lloyd George asked Dr. Weizmann how he could be requited for a useful chemical discovery made during the war (when Dr. Weizmann worked for the government, in any spare time left by his work for Zionism). Dr. Weizmann is quoted as replying, "I want nothing for myself, but everything for my people", whereon Mr. Lloyd George decided to give him Palestine! Dr. Weizmann himself derides this story ("History does not deal in Aladdin's lamps. Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership"). For that matter, it is British practice to make cash awards for such services and Dr. Weizmann, far from wanting nothing for himself, received ten thousand pounds. (If chemical research were customarily rewarded in land he might have c1aimed a minor duchy from Germany in respect of a patent earlier sold to the German Dye Trust, and presumably found useful in war as in peace; he was naturally content with the income he received from it for several years).

The conclusion cannot be escaped: if any honest explanation of his actions in this matter could be found Mr. Lloyd George would have given it. From this period in 1916-1917 the decay of parliamentary and representative government can be traced, both in England and America. If secret men could dictate major acts of American state policy and major operations of British armies, then clearly "e1ection" and "responsible office" were terms devoid of meaning. Party distinctions began to fade in both countries, once this hidden, supreme authority was accepted by leading Western politicians, and the American and British electors began to be deprived of all true choice. Today this condition is general, and now is public. Leaders of all parties, before elections, make obeisance to Zionism, and the voter's se1ection of president, prime minister or party makes no true difference.

In November 1917 the American Republic thus became equally involved with Great Britain in Zionism, which has proved to be a destructive force. However, it was only one agency of "the destructive principle". The reader will recall that in Dr. Weizmann's Russian youth the mass of Jews there, under their Talmudic directors, were united in the revolutionary aim, and only divided between revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism.

In the very week of the Balfour Declaration the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western po1iticians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their po1icies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revo1ution, too, was "anti-semitism". Governments hampered by secret capitulations in any one direction cannot act firmly in any other, and the timidity of London and Washington in their dealings with the world-revolution, during the four decades to follow, evident1y derived from their initial submission to "the web of intrigue" spun across the Atlantic between 1914 and 1917.

After 1917, therefore, the question which the remainder of the 20th Century had to answer was whether the West could yet find in itself the strength to break free, or pry its political leaders loose, from this double thrall. In considering the remainder of this account the reader should bear in mind what British and American politicians were induced to do during the First World War.

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Chapter 32


THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN

The simultaneous triumphs of Bolshevism in Moscow and Zionism in London in the same week of 1917 were only in appearance distinct events, The identity of their original source has been shown in an earlier chapter, and the hidden men who promoted Zionism through the Western governments also supported the world-revolution. The two forces fulfilled correlative tenets of the ancient Law: "Pull down and destroy . . . rule over all nations"; the one destroyed in the East and the other secretly ruled in the West.

1917 gave proof of Disraeli's dictum about the revolution in its 1848 phase, when he said that Jews headed "every one" of the secret societies and aimed to destroy Christianity. The controlling group that emerged in 1917 was so preponderantly Jewish that it may be called Jewish. The nature of the instigating force then became a matter of historical fact, not of further polemical debate. It was further identified by its deeds: the character of its earliest enactments, a symbolic mockery of Christianity, and a special mark of authorship deliberately given to the murder of the monarch. All these bore the traits of a Talmudic vengeance.

In the forty years that have passed great efforts have been made to suppress public knowledge of this fact, which has been conclusively established, by non-sequential rebukes to any who claim to discuss history. For instance, in the 1950's an able (and deservedly respected) Jewish writer in America, Mr. George Sokolsky, in criticizing a book previously cited wrote, "It is impossible to read it without reaching the conclusion that Professor Beaty seeks to prove that Communism is a Jewish movement". In respect of the leadership it was that for a long period before 1917 (as to later and the present situation, subsequent chapters will look at the evidence). It was not a conspiracy of all Jews, but neither were the French revolution, Fascism and National Socialism conspiracies of all Frenchmen, Italians or Germans. The organizing force and the leadership were drawn from the Talmudic-controlled Jewish areas of Russia, and in that sense Communism was demonstrably Eastern Jewish.

As to the purposes revealed when the revolution struck in 1917, these showed that it was not episodic or spontaneous but the third "eruption" of the organization first revealed through Weishaupt. The two main features reappeared: the attack on all legitimate government of any kind whatsoever and on religion. Since 1917 the world-revolution has had to cast aside the earlier pretence of being directed only against "kings" or the political power of priests.

One authority of that period knew and stated this. In the tradition of Edmund Burke and John Robison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and Disraeli, Mr. Winston Churchill wrote:

"It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. . . From the days of 'Spartacus' Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others".

This is the last candid statement (discoverable by me) from a leading public man on this question. After it the ban on public discussion came down and the great silence ensued, which continues to this day. In 1953 Mr. Churchill refused permission (requisite under English law) for a photostat to be made of this article (Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920), without saying why.

The fact of Jewish leadership was a supremely important piece of knowledge and the later suppression of it, where public debate would have been sanative, produced immense effects in weakening the West. The formulation of any rational State policy becomes impossible when such major elements of knowledge are excluded from public discussion; it is like playing billiards with twisted cues and elliptical balls. The strength of the conspiracy is shown by its success in this matter (as in the earlier period, of Messrs. Robison, Barruel and Morse) more than by any other thing.

At the time, the facts were available. The British Government's White Paper of 1919 (Russia, No. 1, a Collection of Reports on Bolshevism) quoted the report sent to Mr. Balfour in London in 1918 by the Netherlands Minister at Saint Petersburg, M. Oudendyke: "Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things". The United States Ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, reported similarly: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution". M. Oudendyke's report was deleted from later editions of the British official publication and all such authentic documents of that period are now difficult to obtain. Fortunately for the student, one witness preserved the official record.

This was Mr. Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution. The French edition of his book included the official Bolshevik lists of the membership of the ruling revolutionary bodies (they were omitted from the English edition).

These records show that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprized 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People's Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Cheka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919, were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly "Socialist" or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of "opposition" was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Czar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. All the names are given in the original documents reproduced by Mr. Wilton. (In parentheses, the composition of the two short-lived Bolshevik governments outside Russia in 1918-1919, namely those of Hungary and Bavaria, was similar).

Mr. Wilton made a great and thankless effort to tell newspaper readers what went on in Russia (broken, he survived only a few years and died in his fifties). He did not choose the task of reporting the most momentous event that ever came in any journalist's path of duty; it devolved on him. Educated in Russia, he knew the country and its language perfectly, and was held in high esteem by the Russians and the British Embassy alike. He watched the rioting from the window of The Times office, adjoining the Prefecture where the ministers of the collapsing regime took refuge. Between the advent of the Kerensky government in the spring of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, his duty was to report an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs: the rise of a Jewish regime to despotic supremacy in Russia and to overt control of the world-revolution. At that moment he was made to realize that he would not be allowed faithfully to report the fact.

The secret story is told, with surprising candour, in the Official History of his paper, The Times, published in 1952. It shows the hidden mechanism which operated, as early as 1917, to prevent the truth about the revolution reaching the peoples of the West.

This volume pays tribute to the quality of Mr. Wilton's reporting, and his standing in Russia, before 1917. Then the tone of the references to him abruptly changes. Mr. Wilton's early warnings of what was to come in 1917, says the book, "did not at once affect the policy of the paper, partly because their writer did not command full confidence".

Why, if his earlier work and reputation were so good? The reason transpires.

The narrative continues that Mr. Wilton began to complain about the "burking" or suppression of his messages. Then The Times began to publish articles about Russia from men who had little knowledge of that country. As a result the editorial articles about Russia took on the tone, exasperating to Mr. Wilton, with which newspaper-readers became familiar in the following decades: "those who believe in the future of Russia as a free and efficient democracy will watch the vindication of the new regime with patient confidence and earnest sympathy". (Every incident of Mr. Wilton's experience in Moscow, which Colonel Repington was sharing in London, was repeated in my own experience, and in that of other correspondents, in Berlin in 1933-1938).

The "interregnum of five months began, during which a Jewish regime was to take over from Kerensky. At this very moment his newspaper lost "confidence" in Mr. Wilton. Why? The explanation emerges. The Official History of The Times says, "It was not happy for Wilton that one of his messages . . . should spread to Zionist circles, and even into the Foreign Office, the idea that he was an anti-semite" .

"Zionist circles", the reader will observe; not even "Communist circles"; here the working partnership becomes plain. Why should "Zionists" (who wanted the British government to procure them "a homeland" in Palestine) be affronted because a British correspondent in Moscow reported that a Jewish regime was preparing to take over in Russia? Mr. Wilton was reporting the nature of the coming regime; this was his job. In the opinion of "Zionists", this was "anti-semitism", and the mere allegation was enough to destroy "confidence" in him at his head office. How, then, could he have remained "happy" and have retained "confidence". Obviously, only by misreporting events in Russia. In effect, he was expected not to mention the determining fact of the day's news!

When I read this illuminating account I wondered by what route "Zionist circles" had spread to "the Foreign Office", and the Foreign Office to Printing House Square the "idea" that Mr. Wilton was "an anti-semite". The researcher, like the lonely prospector, learns to expect little for much toil, but in this case I was startled by the large nugget of truth which I found in The Times Official History thirty-five years after the event. It said that "the head of propaganda at the Foreign Office sent to the Editor a paper by one of his staff" repeating the "allegation", (which apparently was first printed in some Zionist sheet). The Official History revealed even the identity of this assiduous "one".

It was a young Mr. Reginald Leeper, who three decades later (as Sir Reginald) became British Ambassador in Argentina. I then looked to Who's Who for information about Mr. Leeper's career and found that his first recorded employment began (when he was twenty-nine) in 1917: "entered International Bureau, Department of Information in 1917". Mr. Leeper's memorandum about Mr. Wilton was sent to The Times early in May 1917. Therefore, if he entered the Foreign Office on New Year's day of 1917, he had been in it just four months when he conveyed to The Times his "allegation" about the exceptionally qualified Mr. Wilton, of seventeen years service with that paper, and the effect was immediate; the Official History says that Mr. Wilton's despatches thereafter, during the decisive period, either miscarried or "were ignored". (The editor was the same of whom Colonel Repington complained in 1917-1918 and to whom the present writer sent his resignation in 1938 on the same basic principle of reputable journalism.)

Mr. Wilton Struggled on for a time, continually protesting against the "burking" and suppression of his despatches, and then as his last service to truthful journalism put all that he knew into his book. He recognized and recorded the acts which identified the especial nature of the regime: the law against "anti-semitism", the anti-Christian measures, the canonization of Judas Iscariot, and the Talmudic fingerprint mockingly left in the death-chamber of the Romanoffs.

The law against "anti-semitism" (which cannot be defined) was in itself a fingerprint. An illegal government, predominantly Jewish, by this measure warned the Russian masses, under pain of death, not to interest them selves in the origins of the revolution. It meant in effect that the Talmud became the law of Russia, and in the subsequent four decades this law has in effect and in growing degree been made part of the structure of the west.

The short-lived anti-Christian deeds of the French phase of the revolution reappeared in more open form. The dynamiting of churches and the installation of an anti-God museum in the Cathedral of Saint Basil were the most ostentatious indications of the nature of the regime, which Mr. Wilton indicated: "Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater". This was plain reporting, and if the report had related to "Ukrainians", for instance, instead of "Jews", none would have objected; the mere act of reporting a fact became the ground for secret denunciation because the fact related to Jews.

The memorial to Judas Iscariot, recorded by Mr. Wilton, was another deliberate intimation to Christendom. If the Jewish rulers merely wanted to bring about an equalitarian society in 1917, there was no relevance in bestowing a halo of heroism on a deed of AD 29; the revolution in Russia cannot be understood at all unless the symbolism of this act is comprehended.

The aspect of a Talmudic vengeance on "the heathen" was unmistakably given to the massacres of that period. In August 1918 a Jew, Kanegisser, shot a Jew, Uritsky; thereon a Jew, Peters, at the head of the Petrograd Cheka ordered "mass terror" on Russians and another Jew, Zinovieff, demanded that ten million Russians be "annihilated"; the British Government's White Book on Bolshevism (1919) records the massacre of Russian peasants which followed.

By far the most significant act was the form given to the murder of the Romanoff family. But for Mr. Wilton this story would never have reached the world, which to this day might believe that the Czar's wife and children ended their lives naturally in "protective" custody.

The Czar acted constitutionally to the end, abdicating at the advice of his ministers (March 5, 1917). Thereafter (during the Kerensky period and its first aftermath) he was relatively well treated for a year as the prisoner at Tobolsk of a Russian commandant and Russian guards. In April 1918, when the Jewish regime had gained control, he was transferred, by order from Moscow, to Ekaterinburg. The Russian guards were then withdrawn and their place inside his prison house was taken by men whose identity has never been established: The local Russians later recalled them as "Letts" (the only foreign-speaking Red soldiers known to them), but they seem to have been brought from Hungary.

The Russian commandant's place was taken by a Jew, Yankel Yurovsky (July 7). That completed a chain of Jewish captors from the top, Moscow, through the regional Urals Soviet, to his prison at Ekaterinburg (which is in the Urals). The real ruler of Russia then was the terrorist Yankel Sverdloff, president of the Moscow Cheka, who was a Jew. The Ekaterinburg Cheka was run by seven Jews, one of them Yankel Yurovsky. On July 20 the Urals Soviet announced that it had shot the Czar and sent his wife and son to "a place of security". The Moscow Cheka issued a similar announcement, signed by Sverdloff, "approving the action of the Regional Soviet of the Urals". At that time the entire family was dead.

The truth only became known through the chance that Ekaterinburg fell to the White armies on July 25, that Mr. Wilton accompanied them, and that their commander, General Diterichs, a famous Russian criminologist, M. Sokoloff, and Mr. Wilton uncovered the buried evidence. When the White troops withdrew Mr. Wilton brought away the proofs; they appear in his book and include many photographs.

The murders had been carried out by order from and in constant consultation with Sverdloff in Moscow; records of telephone conversations between him and the Chekists in Ekaterinburg were found. Among these was a report to him from Ekaterinburg saying "Yesterday a courier left with the documents that interest you". This courier was the chief assassin, Yurovsky, and the investigators believed that the "documents" were the heads of the Romanoffs, as no skulls or skull-bones were found.

                                                                           Yurovsky                     Ipatiev House Where Murders Took Place

The deed was described by witnesses who had not been able to escape, and at least one was a participant. At midnight on July 16 Yurovsky awoke the Czar and his family, took them to a basement room and there shot them. The actual murderers were Yurovsky, his seven unidentified foreign accomplices, one Nikulin from the local Cheka, and two Russians, apparently professional gunmen employed by the Cheka. The victims were the Czar, his wife, ailing son (who was held in his father's arms as he could not walk), four daughters, Russian doctor, manservant, cook and maid. The room was still a shambles, from the shooting and bayoneting, when M. Sokoloff and Mr. Wilton saw it, and his book includes the picture of it.

Above: The half-basement room in the Ipatiev House, where the imperial family was killed. Alexis and Alexandra were seated; the other victims – including three family servants and the Romanovs' physician – stood. Yakov Yurovsky had positioned his victims on the pretense that the Communist authorities in Moscow required a photograph. In the last second of her life Olga attempted, but failed, to make the sign of the Cross. She was killed almost instantly; her sisters and brother took much longer to die, and the maid Demidova received more than thirty bayonet wounds. By the end of the massacre the room was awash with blood.

The circumstances having been determined, the investigators almost despaired of finding the bodies, or their remains; they learned that Yurovsky, before escaping the town, had boasted that "the world will never know what we did with the bodies". However, the earth at length gave up its secret. The bodies had been taken by five lorries to a disused iron pit in the woods, cut up and burned, 150 gallons of petrol being used; one Voikoff of the Urals Cheka (a fellow-passenger of Lenin in the train from Germany) as Commissar of Supplies had supplied 400 lbs. of sulphuric acid for dissolving the bones. The ashes and fragments had been thrown down the shaft, the ice at the bottom having first been smashed so that the mass would sink; then a flooring had been lowered and fixed over the place. When this was removed the search reached its end. On top lay the corpse of a spaniel belonging to one of the princesses; below were fragments of bone and skin, a finger, and many identifiable personal belongings which had escaped destruction. A puzzling find was a small collection of nails, coins, pieces of tinfoil and the like. This looked like the contents of a schoolboy's pockets, and was; the little boy's English tutor, Mr. Sidney Gibbes, identified it. The precautions taken to dispose of the bodies and of other evidence were of the kind that only criminals of long experience in their trade could have devised; they resemble the methods used in gang warfare, during the Prohibition period, in the United States.

These discoveries, becoming known in the outer world, exposed the untruth of Sverdloff's announcement that only the Czar had been "executed" and his family sent to "a place of security". The murderers staged a mock trial of "28 persons on the accusation of having murdered the Czar and his family". Only eight names were published, all of them unknown in connection with the crime, and five persons were said to have been shot, who if they existed at all cannot have had any part in it. The arch-assassin, Sverdloff, was soon afterwards killed in some party dispute and thousands of innocent people died in the indiscriminate massacres which followed. Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk to give enduring fame to his part in the symbolic deed.

The chief reason for recounting the details of the pogrom of the Romanoffs is to point to the "fingerprint" which was left in the room where it was done. One of the assassins, presumably their leader, stayed to exult and put a significant signature on the wall, which was covered with obscene or mocking inscriptions in Hebrew, Magyar and German. Among them was a couplet which deliberately related the deed to the Law of the Torah-Talmud and thus offered it to posterity as an example of the fulfilment of that law, and of Jewish vengeance as understood by the Levites. It was written in German by someone who parodied the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine's lines on the death of Belshazzar, the imaginary potentate whose murder is portrayed in Daniel as God's punishment for an affront offered to Judah:

                                                                        
 

Belsazar ward aber in selbiger Nacht

Von selbigen Knechten umgebracht.

The parodist, sardonically surveying the shambles, adapted these lines to what he had just done:

Belsatsar ward in selbiger Nacht

Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.

No clearer clue to motive and identity was ever left behind.

The revolution was not Russian; the eruption was brought about in Russia, but the revolution had its friends in high places everywhere. At this period (1917-1918) the student for the first time is able to establish that leading men began to give that secret support to Communism which they were already giving to its blood brother, Zionism. This happened on both sides of the fighting-line; once the secret, but overriding purposes of the war came into play the distinction between "friend" and "foe" disappeared. The Zionists, though they concentrated "irresistible pressure" on the politicians of London and Washington, long kept their headquarters in Berlin; the Communists obtained decisive support from Germany at one moment and from Germany's enemies the next.

For instance, Germany when the 1914-1918 war began started "sending back to Russia Russians of revolutionary tendencies who were prisoners here, with money and passports, in order that they may stir up trouble at home" (Ambassador Gerard in Berlin to Mr. House). Mr. Robert Wilton says the decision to Foment the revolution in Russia was formally taken at a German and Austrian General Staff meeting at Vienna late in 1915. The German Chief-of-Staff, General Ludendorff, later regretted this: "By sending Lenin to Russia our government assumed. . . a great responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for Russia had to be laid low; but our government should have seen to it that we were not involved in her fall".

That, taken as an isolated case, might be a simple human error: what appeared to be a sound military move produced catastrophic political consequences not foreseen when it was made. But what explanation can be found for American and British politicians, whose foremost military and political principle should have been to sustain Russia and yet who supported the alien revolutionaries who "laid Russia low"?

I have already quoted the editorial about the revolution (". . . a free and efficient democracy . . . the vindication of the new regime . . .") which appeared in The Times of London while its experienced correspondent's despatches were being "ignored" and "confidence" withdrawn from him because the newspaper had received "an allegation" that he was "an anti-semite". On the other side of the Atlantic the true ruler of the Republic, Mr. House was confiding to his diary similar sentiments. For him the alien revolutionaries smuggled into Russia during wartime from the West ("this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America", Mr. Churchill) were honest agrarian reformers: "the Bolshevists appeared to the peace-hungry and land-hungry Russians as the first leaders who made a sincere effort to satisfy their needs" .

Today all know what happened to the Russians' "land-hunger" under Bolshevism. In 1917 the Czars and their ministers for fifty years had been toiling to satisfy this "land-hunger" and by assassination had been thwarted. Apparently Mr. House was ignorant of that. When the revolution was accomplished he instructed the shadow-president: "that literally nothing be done further than that an expression of sympathy be offered for Russia's efforts to weld herself into a virile democracy and to proffer our financial, industrial and moral support in every way possible". *

The resemblance between the first phrase of this sentence and the editorial of The Times in London may be noted; powerful behind-scene groups in both capitals evidently were agreed to present the public masses with this false picture of a "virile" and "efficient" democracy in the making. The second phrase cancelled the policy initially recommended of "literally doing nothing" beyond uttering sympathetic words, by giving the order literally to do everything; for what more can be done than to give "financial, industrial and moral support in every way possible"? This was American state policy from the moment that Mr. House so instructed the president, and it exactly describes the policy pursued by President Roosevelt during the Second World War, as will be shown.

Thus the West, or powerful men in the West, began to range itself with the world-revolution against the Russians, which meant, against all men who abhorred the revolution. Not all the powerful men, or men later to become powerful, lent them selves to this hidden undertaking. At that time Mr. Winston Churchill again stated the nature of the revolution:

"Certainly I dispute the title of the Bolshevists to represent Russia . . . They despise such a mere commonplace as nationality. Their ideal is a worldwide proletarian revolution. The Bolsheviks robbed Russia at one stroke of two most precious things: peace and victory, the victory that was within her grasp and the peace which was her dearest desire. The Germans sent Lenin into Russia with the deliberate intention of working for the downfall of Russia . . . No sooner did Lenin arrive there than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow,, in Berne and other countries" (the reader will perceive whence the "Russian" revolutionaries were brought to Russia) "and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world. . . With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian state and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low . . . Her sufferings are more fearful than modern records hold and she had been robbed of her place among the great nations of the world". (House of Commons, 5 November 1919).

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* It might be significant of the influences which continued to prevail in the entourage of American presidents during the next two generations that President Eisenhower in 1955, from his hospital room in Denver, sent a personal message of congratulations to the Soviet Premier, Bulganin, on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, November 7. The democratic and parliamentary revolution, legitimized by the Czars abdication, occurred in March 1917; November 7 was a day on which the Bolsheviks overthrew the legitimate regime. By 1955 American presidents were habitually warning their people against the menace of "Soviet" or "Communist" (i.e., Bolshevik) aggression.

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Mr. Churchill's description remains valid, particularly the phrase, "the most formidable sect in the world", which resembles the phrase used by Bakunin in his attack on Jewish usurpation of the revolution fifty years earlier. The passage quoted from Mr. Churchill's article earlier in this chapter shows that he was equally aware of the identity of this sect.

Thus Dr. Chaim Weizmann's youthful fellow-conspirators from the Talmudic area of Russia triumphed in Russia at the very moment when he triumphed in London and Washington. The only difference between him and them, from the start, was that between "revolutionary-Zionism" and "revolutionary-Communism", as he shows. In his student days in Berlin, Freiburg and Geneva, he had waged many a hot debate about this point of difference, which for those who reject revolution as such is a distinction without meaning. Mr. Balfour's amanuensis, Mrs. Dugdale, portrays the blood-brothers of the revolution in argument during the years when their simultaneous triumph was in preparation:

"Lenin and Trotsky took power in the same week of November 1917 that Jewish nationalism won its recognition. Years before, in Geneva, Trotsky and Weizmann had night after night expounded from rival cafés in the university quarter their opposed political beliefs. Both of them Russian-born. . . . they had swayed the crowds of Jewish students from one side of the street to the other; Leon Trotsky, apostle of Red revolution; Chaim Weizmann, apostle of a tradition unbroken for two thousand years. Now by a most strange coincidence in the same week each of them accomplished the fulfilment of his dream".

In truth, the pincers in which the West was to be gripped had been forged, and each handle was held by one of two groups of revolutionaries "Russian-born" (but not Russian).

For Dr. Weizmann and his associates in London and Washington, the event in Moscow was a passing embarrassment, in one respect. They had based their demand for Palestine on the legend that "a place of refuge" must be found for Jews "persecuted in Russia" (an obvious non sequitur but good enough for "the mob"), and now there was no "persecution in Russia". On the contrary, in Moscow a Jewish regime ruled and "anti-Semitism" was a capital offence. Where, then, were the Jews who needed "a place of refuge"? (This is evidently the reason why Mr. Robert Wilton had to be prevented from reporting the nature of the new regime in Moscow).

Rabbi Elmer Berger says, "The Soviet government even privileged Jews as Jews.
. . . at a single stroke, the revolution emancipated those very Jews for whom, previously, no solution other than Zionism would be efficacious, according to Zionist spokesmen. Soviet Jews no longer had need of Palestine, or any other refuge. The lever of the suffering of Russian Jewry, which Herzl had often used in attempts to prise a charter for Palestine from some power, was gone".

That did not deter Dr. Weizmann. At once he informed the Jews that they must not expect any respite:

"Some of our friends. . . are very quick in drawing conclusions as to what will happen to the Zionist movement after the Russian revolution. Now, they say, the greatest stimulus for the Zionist movement has been removed. Russian Jewry is free. . . Nothing can be more superficial and wrong than that. We have never built our Zionist movement on the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere. These sufferings were never the cause of Zionism. The fundamental cause of Zionism was, and is, the ineradicable striving of Jewry to have a home of its own".

Dr. Weizmann spoke truth in untruth. It was true that the organizers of Zionism, in their private hearts, had never in reality built their movement on "the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere"; they were indifferent to any suffering, Jewish or other, caused by Zionism. But they had beyond all dispute used "the sufferings of our people in Russia" as their argument in beleaguering Western politicians, who from Mr. Wilson in 1912 onward repeatedly alluded to it.

In this crucial week, the falsity of the entire contention, though revealed, made no difference, for the British Government, as Mrs. Dugdale recorded, was at length committed. Not even a pretence could be maintained that any Jews needed "a place of refuge" but Mr. Lloyd George had undertaken to conquer Palestine for "the Jews".

The basic fallacy of the enterprise was exposed at the very instant when it was clamped like a millstone round the neck of the West. Although this irreparable flaw in its foundation must cause its ultimate collapse, like that of Sabbatai Zevi's messiahship in l666, the tragi-comedy thenceforth had to be played to its ruinous end.

But for one later event, the undertaking would have died a natural death within a few years and would survive today in the annals merely as Balfour's Folly. This event was the coming of Hitler, which for a while filled the gap left by the collapse of the legend of "persecution in Russia" and produced in some Jews a desire to go even to Palestine. For the Zionists Hitler, had he not arisen, would have needed to be created; a collapsing scheme was made by him to look almost lifelike for some time. The Hitlerist episode belongs to a later chapter in this narrative.

Page 283

Chapter 33


THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE

At the same moment in 1917 when the two kindred forces from Russia, revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, emerged into the full open, the third secret purpose of the war, the one of which they were the instruments, also was revealed. This was the project for a "federation of the world" to take over "the management of human affairs" and to rule by force.

The masses then (as in the Second War, twenty-five years later) were being egged on to destroy a "madman in Berlin" on this very ground, that he sought to rule the world by force. In England Mr. Eden Philpotts (one of many such oracles then and in the next war) thundered:

"You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep its curses only, crowned upon your brow . . ." and that was the universal cry. Yet the secret plan promoted in the West was equally one to "grasp the world by force" and to put new "warlords" over it.

It was merely dressed in other words. What was reactionary Prussian militarism in Germany was one of Mr. House's "advanced ideas" in Washington; what was megalomaniac ambition in the Kaiser was an enlightened concept of "a new world order" in London. The politicians of the West became professional dissimulators. Even Disraeli could not foresee in 1832 ( "The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation") that this would become the definition of political practice in the West in the 20th Century; but this happened when Western political leaders, by supporting Zionism and the world-revolution, yielded to the prompting of Asiatics; their acts took on an Asiatic duplicity in place of native candour.

Strangely, Mr. Woodrow Wilson, the most compliant of them all, at the start rebelled most fretfully against the secret constraints. He tried, as has been shown, to declare that "the causes and objects of the war are obscure", and when this was forbidden by Mr. House, still avowed that the belligerents on both sides pursued "the same" objects. He went further at the very start of his presidency, when he wrote, "It is an in tolerable thing that the government of the Republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should have been captured by interests which are special and not general. We know that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington". Presumably he learned the nature of these "interests" and this "control", and the galling knowledge may have caused his collapse (and that of Mr. Roosevelt in the later generation).

Nevertheless, he was used to launch the plan for setting up "a federation of the world", based on force. The idea was "oozed into his brain" by others; the phrase is used by Mr. House's biographer to describe the method by which Mr. House prompted the actions of other men (and by which his own were prompted). In November 1915, when the American people were still ardent for the president who was keeping them out of the war, Mr. House instructed him:

"We must throw the influence of this nation in behalf of a plan by which international obligations must be kept and maintained and in behalf of some plan by which the peace of the world may be maintained".

This was always the sales-talk: that "the plan" would "maintain world peace". Mr. House had long been discussing the plan with Sir Edward Grey (Mr. Asquith's Foreign Secretary; he became blind in 1914 but in a moment of spiritual clairvoyance used the words which have become truer ever since, "The lights are going out all over Europe"). Sir Edward Grey was captivated by "the plan", and wrote to Mr. House, "International law has hitherto had no sanction; the lesson of this war is that the Powers must bind themselves to give it sanction". "Sanction" was the euphemism used by the dissimulators to avoid alarming the masses by the sound of "war" or "force". The dictionary definition, in such a context, is "a coercive measure", and the only means of coercion between nations is, ultimately, war: no "sanction" can be effective unless it is backed by that threat. Therefore Sir Edward Grey thought war could be ended by making war. He was an incorruptible but apparently deluded man; the originators of the great "idea" knew what they meant (and in our day this also has been revealed).

By 1916 Mr. House had instructed Mr. Wilson as to his duty and in May the president publicly announced support for "the plan" at a meeting of a new body candidly called "The League To Enforce Peace". Mr. Wilson knew nothing of its nature: "it does not appear that Woodrow Wilson studied seriously the programme of the League To Enforce Peace" (Mr. House's Private Papers).

This was a reincarnation of the earlier "League to enforce peace" which (as Lord Robert Cecil had reminded Mr. House) "really became a league to uphold tyranny". In 1916 the name gave away the game; American opinion was not then ready to walk into so obvious a trap. Senator George Wharton Pepper recalls: "A heavily-financed organization aptly entitled 'The League To Enforce Peace' was making our task easier by emphasizing, as its title indicated, that the Covenant" (of the League of Nations) "was intended to be made effective by force. . .Our constant contention, in opposition to theirs, was that the appeal to force was at the best futile and at the worst dangerous. . . I contrasted the certain futility of an appeal to international force with the possible hopefulness of reliance upon international conference, and declared myself favourable to any association of the latter type and unalterably opposed to a league which was based on the former".

The dissimulators soon dropped the name, "The League To Enforce Peace", but the "plan", which produced "The League of Nations", transparently remained the same: it was one to transfer the control of national armies to some super-national committee which could use them for "the management of human affairs" in ways serving its own special ends, and that has continued the motive to the present day. As in the earlier case of Zionism, President Wilson was committed long before the crucial moment (by his public dec1aration of May 1916) and as soon as America was in the war (April 1917) announced that it was involved in an undertaking to set up "a new international order"; this statement was made at the moment of the first revolution in Russia and of the preparation of the Balfour Declaration.

Thus the three great "plans" moved together into the West, and this was the project which was to crown the work of the other two. Its basic principle was the destruction of nation-states and nationhood so that it gave expression, in modern form, to the ancient conflict between the Old Testament and the New, between the Levitical Law and the Christian message. The Torah-Talmud is the only discoverable, original source of this idea of "destroying nations"; Mr. House thought it almost impossible to trace any "idea" to its fount, but in this case the track can be followed back through the centuries to 500 BC, and it is nowhere obliterated during those twenty-five hundred years. If before that time anybody in the known world had made this "destructive principle" into a code and creed they and it have faded into oblivion. The idea contained in the Torah-Talmud has gone unbroken through all the generations. The New Testament rejects it and speaks of "the deception of nations", not of their destruction. Revelation foretells a day when this process of deception of nations shall end. Those who seek to interpret prophecy might very well see in The League To Enforce Peace, under its successive aliases, the instrument of this "deception", doomed at the end to fail.

Mr. House having decided, and Mr. Wilson having declared, that "a new international order" must be established, Mr. House (according to Mr. Howden) set up a body known as "The Inquiry" to draft a plan. Its head was his brother-in-law, Dr. Sidney Mezes (then president of the College of the City of New York), and its secretary a Mr. Walter Lippmann (then writing for The New Republic). A Dr. Isaiah Bowman (then director of the American Geographical Society) gave "personal advice and assistance".

The group of men placed in charge of The Inquiry therefore was predominantly Jewish (though in this case not Russian-Jewish: this might indicate the true nature of the superior authority indicated by Dr. Kastein's allusion to "a Jewish international") and Jewish inspiration may thus reasonably be seen in the plan which it produced. This (says Mr. Howden) was a draft "Convention for a League of Nations" to which Mr. House put his signature in July 1918: "President Wilson was not, and never pretended to be, the author of the Covenant". Here, then, are the origins of the League of Nations.

The Peace Conference loomed ahead when Mr. House prepared to launch this "new world order", and its first acts pointed to the identity of the controlling-group behind the Western governments. Zionism and Palestine (issues unknown to the masses when the 1914-1918 war began) were found to be high, if not paramount among the matters to be discussed at the conference which ended it.

President Wilson, for this reason, seems to have known moments of exaltation between long periods of despondency. Rabbi Stephen Wise, at his side, depicted the Palestinean undertaking in such terms that the president, entranced, soliloquised, "To think that I, a son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people". While he thus contemplated himself in the mirror of posterity the rabbi beside him compared him with the Persian King Cyrus, who had enabled the exiled Jews of his land to return to Jerusalem". King Cyrus had allowed native Judahites, if they wished, to return to Judah after some fifty years; President Wilson was required to transplant Judaized Chazars from Russia to a land left by the original Jews some eighteen centuries before.

Across the Atlantic Dr. Weizmann made ready for the Peace Conference. He was then evidently one of the most powerful men in the world, a potentate (or emissary of potentates) to whom the "premier-dictators" of the West made humble obeisance. At a moment in 1918 when the fate of England was in the balance on the stricken Western Front an audience of the King of England was postponed. Dr. Weizmann comp1ained so imperiously that Mr. Balfour at once restored the appointment; save for the place of meeting, which was Buckingham Palace, Mr. Weizmann seems in fact to have given audience to the monarch. During the Second World War the Soviet dictator Stalin, being urged by the Western leaders to take account of the influence of the Pope, asked brusquely, "How many divisions has the Pope?". Such at least was the anecdote, much retold in clubs and pubs, and to simple folk it seemed to express essential truth in a few words. Dr. Weizmann's case shows how essentially untrue it was. He had not a single soldier, but he and the international he represented were able to obtain capitulations never before won save by conquering armies.

He disdained the capitulants and the scene of his triumphs alike. He wrote to Lady Crewe, "We hate equally anti-semites and philo-semites". Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and the other "friends" were philo-semites of the first degree, in Dr. Weizmann's meaning of the word, and excelled themselves in servience to the man who despised them. As to England itself, Dr. Weizmann two decades later, when he contemplated the wild beasts in the Kruger National Park, soliloquised, "It must be a wonderful thing to be an animal on the South African game reserve; much better than being a Jew in Warsaw or even in London".

In 1918 Dr. Weizmann decided to inspect his realm-elect. When he reached Palestine the German attack in France had begun, the depleted British armies were reeling back, and "most of the European troops in Palestine were being withdrawn to reinforce the armies in France". At such a moment he demanded that the foundation stone of a Hebrew University be laid with all public ceremony. Lord Allenby protested that "the Germans are almost at the gates of Paris!" Dr. Weizmann replied that this was "only one episode". Lord Allenby obdured; Dr. Weizmann persisted; Lord Allenby under duress referred to Mr. Balfour and was at once ordered by cable to obey. With great panoply of staff officers, troops and presented arms (disturbed only by the sounds of distant British-Turkish fighting) Dr. Weizmann then held his ceremony on Mount Scopus. .

(I remember those days in France. Even half a million more British soldiers there would have transformed the battle; a multitude of lives would have been saved, and the war probably ended sooner. The French and British ordeal in France made a Zionist holiday in Palestine).

When the war at last ended, on November 11, 1918, none other than Dr. Weizmann was at luncheon the sole guest of Mr. Lloyd George, whom he found "reading the Psalms and near to tears". Afterwards the Zionist chieftain watched from historic Ten Downing Street as the prime minister disappeared, borne shoulder high by a mafficking mob towards a Thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey.

Masses and "managers"; did any among the crowd notice the high, domed head, with bearded face and heavy-lidded eyes watching from the window of Ten Downing Street?

Then Dr. Weizmann led a Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919 where "the new world order" was to be set up. He informed the august Council of Ten that "the Jews had been hit harder by the war than any other group"; the politicians of 1919 made no demur to this insult to their millions of dead. However, a remonstrant Jew, Mr. Sylvain Levi of France, at the last moment tried to instill prudence in them. He told them:

First, that Palestine was a small, poor land with an existing population of 600,000 Arabs, and that the Jews, having a higher standard of life than the Arabs, would tend to dispossess them; second, that the Jews who would go to Palestine would be mainly Russian Jews, who were of explosive tendencies; third, that the creation of a Jewish national home in Pa1estine would introduce the dangerous principle of Jewish dual loyalties.

These three warnings have been fulfilled to the letter, and were heard with hostility by the Gentile politicians assembled at the Peace Conference of 1919. Mr. Lansing, the American Secretary of State, at once gave M. Lévi his quietus. He asked Dr. Weizmann, "What do you mean by a Jewish national home?" Dr. Weizmann said he meant that, always safeguarding the interests of non-Jews, Pa1estine would ultimately become "as Jewish as England is English". Mr. Lansing said this absolutely obscure reply was "absolutely clear", the Council of Ten nodded agreement, and M. Levi, like all Jewish remonstrants for twenty-five centuries, was discomfited. (He was only heard at all to maintain a pretence of impartial consideration; Rabbi Wise, disquietened by "the difficulties we had to face in Paris", had already made sure of President Wilson's docility. Approaching the president privately, he said, "Mr. President, World Jewry counts on you in its hour of need and hope", thus excommunicating M. Levi and the Jews who thought like him. Mr. Wilson, placing his hand on the rabbi's shoulder, "quietly and firmly said, 'Have no fear, Palestine will be yours'.")

One other man tried to avert the deed which these men, with frivolity, were preparing. Colonel Lawrence loved Semites, for he had lived with the Arabs and roused them in the desert against their Turkish rulers. He was equally a friend of Jews (Dr. Weizmann says "he has mistakenly been represented as anti-Zionist") and believed that "a Jewish homeland" (in the sense first given to the term, of a cultural centre) could well be incorporated in the united Arab State for which he had worked.

Lawrence saw in Paris that what was intended was to plant Zionist nationalism like a time-bomb among a clutter of weak Arab states, and the realization broke him. Mr. David Garnett, who edited his Letters , says, "Lawrence won his victories without endangering more than a handful of Englishmen and they were won, not to add subject provinces to our empire, but that the Arabs whom he had lived with and loved should be a free people, and that Arab civilization should be reborn".

That was Lawrence's faith during his "Revolt in the Desert", and what the men who sent him to Arabia told him. When the Paris Conference began he was "fully in control of his nerves and quite as normal as most of us" (Mr. J.M. Keynes). He arrived believing in President Wilson's pledge (speech of the Fourteen Points, January 8, 1918), "The nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". He could not know that these words were false, because Mr. Wilson was secretly committed to Zionism, through the men around him.

After Dr. Weizmann's reply to Mr. Lansing, and its approval by the Council of Ten, the betrayal became clear to Lawrence and he showed "the disillusion and the bitterness and the defeat resulting from the Peace Conference; he had complete faith that President Wilson would secure self-determination for the Arab peoples when he went to the Peace Conference; he was completely disillusioned when he returned" (Mr. Garnett). Lawrence himself later wrote, "We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns" (in the desert) "never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we achieved and the new world dawned the old men came out again and took from us our victory and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew . . . I meant to make a new nation, to restore to the world a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts".

Lawrence, who was broken by this experience, was then among the most famous men in the world. Had he joined the dissimulators hardly any rank or honour would have been refused him. He threw up his rank, and away his decorations, and tried from shame even to lose his identity; he enlisted under an assumed name in the lowest rank of the Royal Air Force, where he was later discovered by an assiduous newspaper man. This last phase of his life, and the motor-bicycle accident which ended it, have a suicidal look (resembling the similar phase and end of Mr. James Forrestal after the Second War) and he must be accounted among the martyrs of this story.

The leading public men were agreed to promote the Zionist adventure through the "international world order" which they were about to found, at any cost in honour and human suffering. In nearly all other questions they differed, so that, the war hardly ended, reputations began bursting like bubbles and friendships cracking like plaster, in Paris. Some breach occurred between President Wilson and his "second personality, independent self" (a similar, mysterious estrangement was to sever President Roosevelt and his other self, Mr. Harry Hopkins, at the end of another war).

Mr. House was at his zenith. Prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors and delegates besieged him at the Hotel Crillon; in a single day he gave forty-nine audiences to such high notables. Once the French Prime Minister, M. Clemenceau, called when Mr. Wilson was with Mr. House; the president was required to withdraw while the two great men privately conferred. Perhaps humiliation at last broke Mr. Woodrow Wilson; he was stricken by mortal illness in Paris (as Mr. Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, though Mr. Wilson survived rather longer). Apparently the two never saw or communicated with each other again! Mr. House merely recorded, "My separation from Woodrow Wilson was and is to me a tragic mystery, a mystery that now can never be dispelled for its explanation lies buried with him".

The illusions of power were dissolving. These men were never truly powerful, because they acted as the instruments of others. They already look wraithlike in the annals, and if the squares and boulevards named after them still bear their names, few remember who they were. Mr. Wilson returned to America and soon died. Mr. House before long was lonely and forgotten in the apartment in East 35th Street. Mr. Lloyd George found himself in the political wilderness and was only able to complete the ruin of a once-great Liberal party; within a decade he found himself at the head of four followers. Mr. Balfour, for a few more years, absent-mindedly haunted Saint James's Park.

They were not able to accomplish all that their mentors wished. Shaken by the violence of American objections, Mr. Wilson "absolutely declined to accept the French demand for the creation of an international force that should operate under the executive control of the League". The American Constitution (the president suddenly recollected) did not permit of any such surrender of sovereignty.

Thus the worst was averted, in that generation. The secret men, who continued to be powerful when these "premier-dictators" and pliable "administrators" were shorn of their semblance of power, had to wait for the Second World War to get their hands on the armies of the nation-states. Then they achieved their "League to enforce peace" almost (but still not quite) in the fullness of despotic power coveted by them. In 1919 they had to content themselves with a modest first experiment: The League Of Nations.

The United States would not even join it; the masses of America, disquietened by the results of the war and instinctively striving to regain the safe haven of "no foreign entanglements", would have none of it. Britain joined, but under other prime ministers than Mr. Lloyd George would not hand over control of its armies. The way to the kind of "new world order" envisaged by Mr. House and his prompters was blocked for the time being. Nevertheless a way was found, through the League of Nations, to effect one fateful, and possibly fatal breach in British sovereignty.

The authority of this "League of Nations", whatever it amounted to, was used to cover the use of British troops as a bodyguard for the Zionists intending to seize Palestine. The device employed to give this mock-legal air to the deed was called "the mandate", and I have earlier shown where it was born. By means of it the League of Nations was able to install the Zionists from Russia in Arabia, where they revealed the "explosive tendencies" foretold by M. Sylvain Levi in 1919 and apparent to all today, in 1956. This was the sole, enduring accomplishment of the "new world order" set up in 1919 and by the ancient test, Cui bono?, the authorship of this "idea" may be judged.

The story of "The mandate" (and of a man who tried to avert it) therefore forms the next chapter in this narrative.

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Chapter 34


THE END OF LORD NORTHCLIFFE

During the three years which followed the Peace Conference of 1919 the way had to be found to keep British armies in Palestine, make them look as if they performed an honourable duty there, and in fact use them as cloak for a deed which had the character of an assassination. This problem, of infinite complexity, was efficiently solved. An impressive picture of the secret manipulation of great governments for a nefarious purpose emerges from the records; the method of exerting "irresistible pressure upon international politics" constantly improved with practice.

After the Peace Conference had approved the Zionist claim to Palestine (and thereby disowned the mass of emancipated Western Jews, personified by M. Sylvain Levi) the next step was taken at the San Remo Conference of 1920, where the victor powers met to dismember the conquered Turkish Empire. This conference adopted the ingenious deception invented by Dr. Weizmann in 1915 and agreed that Britain should administer Pa1estine under "a mandate".

Protests against the undertaking then were growing loud, because its true nature was beginning to be realized, but Mr. Balfour assured Dr. Weizmann that "they were regarded as without importance and would certainly not affect policy, which had been definitely set".

Here is the cryptic statement, often to recur later, that policy in this one question must not, cannot and never will alter, so that national interest, honour and all other considerations are irrelevant. I know of no other case where an unalterable tenet of high State policy has been fixed without regard to State interest or consultation of public opinion at any stage. At San Remo Mr. Lloyd George was worried lest "the frost" of peace should set in before the secret purpose was accomplished, and told Dr. Weizmann, "You have no time to waste. Today the world is like the Baltic before a frost. For the moment it is still in motion. But if it gets set, you will have to batter your heads against the ice blocks and wait for a second thaw". Had Mr. Lloyd George said "second war" he would have been correct and possibly that was what he meant by "thaw". In these circumstances the San Remo Conference "confirmed the Balfour Declaration and the decision to give the mandate to Great Britain". After that only one step remained between the Zionists and their goal; the League of Nations had to invent "mandates", bestow on itself the right to bestow mandates, and then "ratify" this Mandate.

That happened in 1922, as will be seen, but during the interval protests against the deed came from every responsible authority or community directly involved. The forces engaged in promoting it were three: the directing Zionists from Russia, the "philo-semites" in high places whom Dr. Weizmann "hated" while he used them, and, among the masses, that body of sentimental liberals scathingly depicted in the Protocols. Against it was ranked authoritative and experienced opinion in such overwhelming measure that, had the question been any other than this one to which the "administrators" were secretly committed, it would have collapsed. The mass of protest was so great that it is enumerated in its parts here for comparison with the summary which follows. It came from (1) the Palestinean Arabs; (2) the Palestinean Jews; (3) the chief Zionist leader in America, as well as' the anti-Zionist Jews of America and England; (4) the British officials and soldiers in Palestine; (5) British and American official investigators; (6) a large body of the press, then still free of occult control in this matter.

(l) The Arabs saw from the start what was in store for them, for they knew the Torah. Dr. Weizmann had told the Peace Conference "The Bible is our mandate", and they knew about "the God of the Jews" and his promises of pogrom and reward: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee . . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7, 1-3).

Thus Zionism, and Western support of it, meant extermination for them under a Law of 2,500 years earlier (and the events of1948 proved this)In 1945 King Ibn Saoud told President Roosevelt, "You have fought two world wars to discover what we have known for two thousand years" and in 1948 the intention literally to fulfil the above-quoted "statute and commandment" was proved by deed. Significantly, even anti-Zionist Jews could not believe, before it happened, that this literal "fulfilment" was intended. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown correctly cited the above-mentioned passage as the reason for Arab fears and said, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his Bib/e literally and would not be so cruel to his fellow man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of their historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". Mr. Brown of Chicago did not know the Chazars).

The Arabs in 1920 were not deceived by Mr. Balfour's public pledge (in the Declaration) that their "civil and religious rights" would be protected or by Mr. Wilson's public pledge (the Fourteen Points) that they would have "undoubted security of life" and "absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". If they did not know, they guessed that Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson had secretly promised the Zionists Palestine. Knowing the Torah, they equally disbelieved the public statement of Mr. Winston Churchill in 1922 (when he was Colonial Secretary), "Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine.' Phrases have been used such as 'Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English' " (a direct rebuke to Dr. Weizmann) "His Majesty's government regard any such suggestion as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine" (in the Second World War, as Prime Minister, and after it as Opposition leader Mr. Churchill gave his support to the process here denied).

(2) The original Jewish community of Palestine (never taken into consideration at any stage in all these proceedings) was violently anti-Zionist. Dr. Weizmann, almost alone among his fellow-Zionists and the Western politicians associated with them, had slight acquaintance with these original Jews, having made one or two brief visits to Palestine; he says most of his fellow-Zionists from Russia were "completely ignorant" of them. At this period in 1919-1922 the Zionist leaders first learned that the Jews of Palestine held them to be "heathen, impious, heartless, ignorant and malevolent". Dr. Weizmann (whose attitude is the familiar one that he was only acting for their good; "we were only anxious to make conditions a little modern and comfortable for them") was "rather horrified to discover how remote from them we remained". He dismisses them as old fogies who, annoyingly, bombarded the Jewish organizations in America with complaints about the Zionists, "quite ninety percent" of their letters being violently hosti1e. (Typically, Dr. Weizmann learned of the contents of these letters from a British censor, derelict in his duty, who showed them to him). These protests of the native Arabs and native Jews of Palestine were ignored by the politicians of Paris and San Remo.

(3) Mr. Louis Brandeis in 1919 visited the country which then, for twenty years, had formed the object of his revived interest in Judaism. He was at once disillusioned by actual acquaintance with the unknown land and decided that "it would be wrong to encourage immigration". He urged that the World Zionist Organization should be greatly reduced, if not abolished, and that future activity should be restricted to the modest task of building up a "Jewish Homeland" through separate Zionist associations in the various countries. In effect this would have been simply a "cultural centre" in Palestine, consisting perhaps of a university and academies, and of somewhat more numerous farm settlements, with reasonable means of immigration for the small number of Jews who, of their own volition, might wish to go to Palestine.

This meant abandoning the concept of separate Jewish nationhood symbolized by a Jewish State, and was treason. It was (as Dr. Weizmann says) a revival of he old cleavage between "east" and "west"; between "Ostjuden" and emancipated Western Jews; between "Washington" and "Pinsk" (the name of the author of the phrase about "international pressure" was significant, not coincidental).

The Zionists from Russia overthrew Mr. Brandeis as easily as Dr. Herzl in 1903-4. Mr. Brandeis made the proposal summarized above to the Cleveland Congress of American Zionists in 1921. Dr. Weizmann, opposing, insisted on "a national fund" (that is, revenue to be raised by the self-appointed government of a Jewish nation from obligatory tithe-payments by members of the Zionist organization) and "a national budget". Mr. Brandeis's weakness was precisely that of Dr. Herzl in 1903; the great Western governments were committed to the Zionists from Russia. The congress, which if it was in any way "elected" was elected by about one-tenth of the Jews of America, upheld Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Brandeis fell from his high place.

(4) In Palestine the British soldiers and officials saw that an impossible task was to be inflicted on them. They were of a stock that had gained more experience in the administration of overseas territories than any other in history, and experience and instinct alike warned them. They knew how to administer a country justly on behalf of all its native peoples and had often done this. They knew that no country could be justly administered, or even kept quiet, if alien immigrants were to be forced into it and the native peoples compelled to allow this. Their protests, too, began to flow towards London and until the end, thirty years later, were ignored. The Arabs from the start accepted the bitter truth and began (in 1920) to resist by riot, rising and every means at hand; they have never since ceased and obviously will not until their grievance is amended or they are all put in permanent, armed captivity.

(5) As the "front-rank politicians" (Dr. Weizmann's phrase) in London and Washington were resolved at any cost to implant the Zionists in Palestine, without regard to any protest, opinion or counsel whatever, today's student might wonder why President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George sent commissions of investigation to the land bartered about by them. If they hoped to receive encouraging reports (in the manner of Sir Henry Wilson's "mud-months" advice) they were deceived, for these investigators merely confirmed what the Arabs, Jews and British in Palestine all had said. President Wilson's King-Crane Commission (1919) reported that "the Zionist look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine". This commission added, "by various forms of purchase"; the more experienced British officers heard by it correctly informed it that "the Zionist programme could not be carried out except by force of arms". Mr. Lloyd George's Haycraft Commission (1921) reported that the real root of the trouble then starting in Palestine lay in the justified Arab belief that the Zionists intended to dominate in Palestine.

(6) By far the greatest obstacle to the Zionist ambition came from factual reporting in the press of what was happening in Palestine and from editorial comment adverse to Zionism. At any time up to the 1914-1918 war the American and British governments, before they went too far, would have had to reckon with public opinion, accurately informed by the newspapers. The corruption of the press (foretold by the Protocols) began with the censorship introduced during the First World War; the rise of the directing power behind the scenes had been shown by the cases of Colonel Repington, Mr. H.A. Gwynne and Mr. Robert Wilton in 1917-1918; experienced correspondents were driven to resign or to write books because their reports were ignored, burked, or suppressed; an editor who published the faithful report without submission to the censorship was prosecuted.

In 1919-1922 the censorship was ending and the newspapers naturally reverted, in the main, to the earlier practice of true reporting and impartial comment on the facts reported. This re-established the former check on governmental policies, and if it had continued would undoubtedly have thwarted the Zionist project, which could not be maintained if it were open to public scrutiny. Therefore the entire future for the Zionists, at this crucial moment when "the Mandate" still was not "ratified", turned on the suppression of adverse newspaper information and comment. At that very juncture an event occurred which produced that result. By reason of this great effect on the future, and by its own singular nature, the event (denoted in the heading to the present chapter) deserves relation in detail here.

At that stage in the affair England was of paramount importance to. the conspirators (I have shown that Dr. Weizmann and Mr. House both used this word) and in England the energetic Lord Northcliffe was a powerful man. The former Alfred Harmsworth, bulky and wearing a dank Napoleonic forelock, owned the two most widely read daily newspapers, various other journals and periodicals, and in addition was majority proprietor of the most influential newspaper in the world, at that time, The Times of London. Thus he had direct access to millions of people each day and, despite his business acumen, he was by nature a great newspaper editor, courageous, combative and patriotic. He was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in the causes he launched or espoused, but he was independent and unpurchasable. Re somewhat resembled Mr. Randolph Hearst and Colone1 Robert McCormick in America, which is to say that he would do many things to increase the circulation of his newspapers, but only within the limits of national interest; he would not peddle blasphemy, obscenity, libel or sedition. Re could not be cowed and was a force in the land.

Lord Northcliffe made himself the adversary of the conspiracy from Russia in two ways. In May 1920 he caused to be printed in The Times the article, previously mentioned, on the Protocols. It was headed, "The Jewish Peril, A Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for Enquiry". It concluded, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"

Then in 1922 Lord Northcliffe visited Palestine, accompanied by a journalist, Mr. J.M.N. Jeffries (whose subsequent book, Palestine: The Reality, remains the classic work of reference for that period). This was. a combination of a different sort from that formed by the editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian, who wrote their leading article s about Palestine in England and in consultation with the Zionist chieftain, Dr. Weizmann. Lord Northcliffe, on the spot, reached the same conclusion as all other impartial investigators, and wrote, "In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Moslems live there and own it . . . The Jews seemed to be under the impression that all England was devoted to the one cause of Zionism, enthusiastic for it in fact; and I told them that this was not so and to be careful that they do not tire out our people by secret importation of arms to fight 700,000 Arabs. . . There will be trouble in Palestine. . . people dare not tell the Jews the truth here. They have had some from me".

By stating this truth, Lord Northcliffe offended twice; he had already entered the forbidden room by demanding "inquiry" into the origins of the Protocols. Moreover, he was able to publish this truth in the mass-circulation newspapers owned by him, so that he became, to the conspirators, a dangerous man. He encountered one obstacle in the shape of Mr. Wickham Steed, who was editor of The Times and whose championship of Zionism Dr. Weizmann records.

In this contest Lord Northcliffe had an Achilles heel. He particularly wanted to get the truth about Palestine into The Times, but he was not sole proprietor of that paper, only chief proprietor. Thus his own newspapers published his series of articles about Palestine but The Times, in fact, refused to do so. Mr. Wickham Steed" though he had made such large proposals about the future of Palestine, declined to go there, and denied publicity to the anti-Zionist case.

These facts, and all that now follows, are related (again, with surprising candour) in the Official History of The Times (1952). It records that Mr. Wickham Steed "evaded" visiting Palestine when Lord Northcliffe requested him to go there; it also records Mr. Wickham Steed's "inaction" following Lord Northcliffe's telegraphed wish "for a leading article attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism".

In what follows the reader' s attention is particularly directed to dates.

In May 1920 Lord Northcliffe had caused publication of the article about the Protocols in The Times. Early in 1922 he visited Palestine and produced the series of article s above mentioned. On February 26, 1922 he left Palestine, after his request, which was ignored, to the editor of The Times. He was incensed against the incompliant editor and had a message, strongly critical of his editorial policy, read to an editorial conference which met on March 2, 1922. Lord Northcliffe wished that Mr. Wickham Steed should resign and was astonished that he remained after this open rebuke. The editor, instead of resigning, decided "to secure a lawyer's opinion on the degree of provocation necessary to constitute unlawful dismissal". For this purpose he consulted Lord Northcliffe's own special legal adviser (March 7, .1922), who informed Mr. Wickham Steed that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal", "incapable of business" and, judging from his appearance, "unlikely to live long" and advised the editor to continue in his post! The editor then went to Pau, in France, to see Lord Northcliffe, in his turn decided that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal" (March 31, 1922), and informed a director of The Times that Lord Northcliffe was "going mad".

The suggestion of madness thus was put out by an editor whom Lord Northcliffe desired to remove and the impressions of others therefore are obviously relevant. On May 3, 1922 Lord Northcliffe attended a farewell luncheon in London for a retiring editor of one of his papers and "was in fine form". On May 11, 1922 he made "an excellent and effective speech" to the Empire Press Union and "most people who had thought him 'abnormal' believed they were mistaken". A few days later Lord Northcliffe telegraphed instruction s to the Managing Director of The Times to arrange for the editor's resignation. This Managing Director saw nothing "abnormal" in such an instruction and was not "in the least anxious about Northcliffe's health ". Another director, who then saw him, "considered him to have quite as good a life risk as his own"; he "noticed nothing unusual in Northcliffe's manner or appearance" (May 24, 1922).

On June 8,1922 Lord Northcliffe, from Boulogne, asked Mr. Wickham Steed to meet him in Paris; they met there on June 11, 1922, and Lord Northcliffe told his visitor that he, Lord Northcliffe, would assume the editorship of The Times. On June 12,1922 the whole party left for Evian-les-Bains, a doctor being secreted on the train, as far as the Swiss frontier, by Mr. Wickham Steed. Arrived in Switzerland "a brilliant French nerve specialist" (unnamed) was summoned and in the evening certified Lord Northcliffe insane. On the strength of this Mr. Wickham Steed cabled instructions to The Times to disregard and not to publish anything received from Lord Northcliffe, and on June 13, 1922 he left, never to see Lord Northcliffe again. On June 18, 1922 Lord Northcliffe returned to London and was in fact removed from all control of, and even communication with his undertakings (especially The Times; his telephone was cut). The manager had police posted at the door to prevent him entering the office of The Times if he were able to reach it. All this, according to the Official History, was on the strength of certification in a foreign country (Switzerland) by an unnamed (French) doctor. On August 14, 1922 Lord Northcliffe died; the cause of death stated was ulcerative endocarditis, and his age was fifty-seven. He was buried, after a service at Westminster Abbey, amid a great array of mourning editors.

Such is the story as I have taken it from the official publication. None of this was known outside a small circle at the time; it only emerged in the Official History after three decades, and if it had all been published in 1922 would presumably have called forth many questions. I doubt if any comparable displacement of a powerful and wealthy man can be adduced, at any rate in such mysterious circumstances.

For the first time, I now appear in this narrative as a personal witness of events. In the 1914-1918 war I was one participant among uncomprehending millions, and only began to see its true shape long afterwards. In 1922 I was for an instant in, though not of the inner circle; looking back, I see myself closeted with Lord Northcliffe (about to die) and quite ignorant of Zionism, Palestine, Protocols or any other matter in which he had raised his voice. My testimony may be of some interest; I cannot myself judge of its value.

I was in l922,a young man fresh from the war who struggled to find a place in the world and had become a c1erk in the office of The Times. I was summoned thence, in that first week of June when Lord Northc1iffe was preparing to remove Mr. Wickham Steed and himself assume the editorship of The Times, to go as secretary to Lord Northc1iffe who was at Boulogne. I was warned beforehand that he was an unusual man whose every bidding must be quickly done. Possibly for that reason, everything he did seemed to me to be simply the expression of his unusual nature. No suspicion of anything more ever came to me, a week before he was "certified" and, in effect, put in captivity.

I was completely ignorant of "abnormal" Conditions, so that the expert might discount my testimony. Anyway, the behaviour I observed was just what I had been told to expect by those who had worked with him for many years. There was one exception to this. Lord Northcliffe was convinced that his life was in danger and several time said this; specifically, he said he had been poisoned. If this is in itself madness, then he was mad, but in that case many victims of poisoning have died of madness, not of what was fed to them. If by any chance it was true, he was not mad. I remember that l thought it feasible that such a man should have dangerous enemies, though at that time I had no inkling at all of any particular hostility he might have incurred. His belief certainly charged him with suspicion of those around him, but if by chance he had reason for it, then again it was not madness; if all this had transpired in the light of day such things could have been thrashed out.

I cannot judge, and can only record what I saw and thought at the time, as a young man who had no more idea of what went on around him than a babe knows the shape of the world. When I returned to London I was questioned about Lord Northcliffe by his brother, Lord Rothermere, and one of his chief associates, Sir George Sutton. The thought of madness must by that time have been in their minds (the "certification" had ensued) and therefore have underlain their questions, but not even then did any such suspicion occur to me, although I had been one of the last people to see him before he was certified and removed from control of his newspapers. I did not know of that when I saw them or for long afterwards. In such secrecy was all this done that, although I continued in the service of The Times for sixteen years, I only learned of the "madness" and "certification" thirty years late , from the Official History. By that time I was able to see what great consequences had flowed from an affair in which I was an uninitiated onlooker at the age of twenty-seven.

Lord Northc1ifTe therefore was out of circulation, and of the control of his newspapers, during the' decisive period preceding the ratification of "the mandate" by the League of Nations, which clinched the Palestinean transaction and bequeathed the effects of it to our present generation: The opposition of a widely-read chain of journals at that period might have changed the whole course of events. After Lord Northcliffe died the possibility of editorials in The Times "attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism" faded. From that time the submission of the press, in the manner described by the Protocols, grew ever more apparent and in time reached the condition which prevails today, when faithful reporting and impartial comment on this question has long been, in suspense.

Lord Northcliffe was removed from control of his newspapers and put under constraint on June 18, 1922; on July 24, 1922 the Council of the League of Nations met in London, secure from any possibility of loud public protest by Lord Northcliffe, to bestow on Britain a "mandate" to remain in Palestine and by arms to instal the Zionists there (I describe what events have shown to be the fact; the matter was not so depicted to the public, of course).,

This act of "ratifying" the "mandate" was in such circumstances a formality. The real work, of drawing up the document and of ensuring that it received approval, had been done in advance, in the firs t matter by drafters inspired by Dr. Weizmann and in the second by Dr. Weizmann himself in the ante-chambers of many capitals. The members of Mr. House's "Inquiry" had drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations; Dr. Weizmann, Mr. Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise and their associates had drafted the Balfour Dee1aration; now the third essential document had to be drafted, one of a kind that history never knew before. Dr. Weizmann pays Lord Curzon (then British Foreign Secretary) the formal compliment of saying that he was "in charge of the actual drafting of the mandate" but adds, "on our side we had the valuable assistance of Mr. Ben V. Cohen. . . one of the ablest draughtsmen in America". Thus a Zionist in America (Mr. Cohen was to play an important part in a much later stage of this process) in fact drafted a document under which "the new world order" was to dictate British policy, the use of British troops and the future of Palestine.

Lord Curzon 's part was merely to moderate the terms of the "mandate" if he could, and he did achieve minor modifications, though these had little effect on events in the long run. An able statesman (not a politician) who looked like a Roman emperor, he was "entirely loyal to the policy adopted and meant to stand by the Balfour Dec1aration" (Dr. Weizmann), but was known personally to disapprove the project which duty required him to further (this might be the reason why he never became Prime Minister, for which office he was highly qualified). He contrived to delete one word from the draft. Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Cohen desired it to begin, "Recognizing the historic rights of the Jews to Palestine. . ." Lord Curzon said, "If you word it like that, I can see Weizmann coming to me every day and saying he has a right to do this, that 01' the other in Palestine! I won't have it". Thus "historical rights" became "historical connection", a lesser misstatement; Lord Curzon, a scholar certainly did not believe that the Chazars from Russia had any historical connection with the Arabian Peninsula.

Dr. Weizmann, while the draft was thus being prepared, set off on another international tour, to ensure that all members of the Council of the League of Nations would inaugurate "the new world order" by voting for "the Mandate". He called first on the Italian Foreign Minister, one Signor Schanzer, who said the Vatican was worried about the future, under Zionism, of the Room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem. Dr. Weizmann, in the tone habitual among his associates when they spoke of things holy to others, says, "My education in Church history having been deficient, I did not know why the Italians laid such stress on the Room of the Last Supper".*

Dr. Weizmann was able to reassure Signor Schanzer and left Rome assured of Italian support. After that the thing became a landslide and from that time on the "votes" of the League of Nations (and of the later "United Nations") in vital questions were always arranged beforehand by this method of secret canvassing, lobbying and "irresistible pressure" in general. Dr. Weizmann went on to Berlin and found a famous Jewish minister there, Dr. Walter Rathenau, to be violently opposed to Zionism. He "deplored any attempt to turn the Jews of Germany 'into a foreign body on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg': that was all he could see in Zionism". Dr. Rathenau was murdered soon after this, so that the cause of the emancipated Western Jews was deprived of another notable champion.

By his journeys and visits Dr. Weizmann at last assured himself, in advance of the meeting, of all votes at the Council table save two, those of Spain and Brazil. He then called in London, on the Spanish dignitary who was to represent Spain and said, "Here is Spain's opportunity to repay in part that long-outstanding debt which it owes to the Jews. The evil which your forefathers were guilty of against us you can wipe out in part".

Dr. Weizmann was cautious, twice using the words "in part". His host, whose duty was to contemporary Spain, was being allured with the suggestion which had earlier fascinated Mr. Balfour; that Spain owed some indeterminate "debt" to "the Jews", for all of whom his visitor c1aimed to speak, and that by wiping out Arab hopes in Palestine he could wipe out (in part) this debt said to have been incurred by Spain. Considered by standards of reason these conversations read like something from the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party. In any case, the Spanish representative promised the vote of Spain and, for full measure, also that of Brazil, so that the chain of yesses was complete. Even Dr. Weizmann could not tell whether this happy ending to his visit was the result of his own eloquence or of pressure applied at a higher level (that of the Spanish delegate's superiors in Madrid).

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*By 1950 the Zionists had opened a "Cellar of the Catastrophe" on a lower floor of the same building as a place of pilgrimage for Jews. A legend at the entrance said. "Entrance forbidden to those who have not strong nerves", The Chief Rabbi of South Africa after inspecting this place, wrote. "Everything is being done to develop and foster this new cult of Mount Zion; to provide a substitute for the Wailing Wall and an emotional out let for the religious feelings of the people. There seemed to me to be something un-Jewish in it, something which belonged rather to superstition than to true religions faith, . . . . I tremble to think of the effect of these completely apocryphal stories" (of miraculous cures) "on the simple, pious and superstitious Jews of Yemen, Is there being developed a Jewish Lourdes? I hope not, but the signs are ominous".

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In England, as the moment approached, a last bid was made to avert British embroilment in this enterprise. Lords Sydenham, Islington and Raglan led an attack on "the mandate" in the House of Lords and by a large majority carried their motion for the repeal of the Balfour Declaration. However, the upper house, its earlier powers abolished, by that time could only protest, and Mr. Balfour (soon to become a lord) at once reassured Dr. Weizmann: "What does it matter if a few foolish lords pass such a motion?"

After all this secret preparation the stage was set for the meeting of the League Council in London on July 24, 1922 and "everything went off smoothly when Mr. Balfour introduced the subject of the ratification of the Palestine Mandate". Without any demur Britain was awarded "the mandate" to remain in Palestine and to provide an armed cordon for the Zionists when they arrived there. *

Thus in 1922 the British future was left burdened with an undertaking which had never received public scrutiny and during the next three decades the growing bills began to pour in. Early in the process America also was re-involved, although the general public there did not realize this for another thirty years.

President Wilson was dead and his Democratic party was out of office. President Harding was at the White House and the Republican party was back in power. It had been swept back by the wave of popular feeling against the disappointing outcome of the war and of instinctive desire to be free from "entanglements" overseas. The country felt itself well out of the League of Nations and its mysterious activities all over the world.

Then the Republican party led the Republic back in to the embroilments in which the Democratic party first had involved it. Presumably the party-managers, those architects of public misfortune, thought to compete with the other party for the favour of those powerful groups, and the "fluctuating vote" controlled by them, described in Mr. House's diary and novel.

In June 1922, just before the League Council in London bestowed the Palestinean "Mandate" on Britain, the United States Congress passed a joint resolution of both houses, the wording of which was almost identical with that of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Thereafter the Zionist halter was firmly reaffixed round the neck of American State policy, and though the American voter only realized this, it became immaterial to him which party prevailed at elections.

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"The "mandates" also bestowed on Britain in respect of Iraq and Transjordan, and to France in respect of Syria, were soon relinquished, these territories becoming independent states. Other countries received "mandates" in respect of various colonial and oceanic territories, which in time and in fact became their possessions. These other "mandates" were from the start fictitious and served in the office of chaperones to tile dubious one which needed respectable company. Of the entire bogus arrangement only the Palestinean "mandate" continued until. the Zionists being numerous enough and sufficiently supplied with arms, it was abandoned and the country left to the invaders then able to take and hold it by force: The later "United Nations", for obvious reasons, did not resurrect the word "Mandate". It found another word, "Trusteeship", for the same idea, which is transparently that of transferring territories from one ownership to another through a sham process of "international law" and legality.

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