35.THE NATIONAL HOME...303

36.THE STRANGE ROLE OF THE PRESS...307

37.THE MANAGERS, THE MESSIAHS AND THE MASSES...311

38.THE LITTLE COUNTRY FAR AWAY...325

39.THE ARMING OF ZION...333

40.THE INVASION OF AMERICA...339

41.THE REVOLUTION "EXTENDS"...353

42.THE TALMUDIC VENGEANCE...391

             Page 303

             Chapter 35


            THE NATIONAL HOME

For ten years after the foisting of "the Mandate" on the British people the pretence was continued that the "Jewish National Home" in Palestine, under their protection, would be simply "a cultural centre" of Judaism, harmless to the Arabs; a Judaist Mecca with university, library and farm-settlements. The Arabs were never beguiled; they saw that they were the objects of an attempt to reinforce, in the 20th Century AD, the Law of violent dispossession set up by the Levites in the 5th Century BC They responded with riotous protest and warlike uprising which have never since ceased, so that "the war to end war" started warfare without end.

At once it became apparent that Zionism had been inserted like a blasting charge into the life of peoples and that in "a small country the size of Wales or Vermont" (just "liberated" from the Turk) the time-fuse of a future world-conflict had been planted. Nevertheless, a new British Colonial Secretary, Mr. Leopold Amery, went to Palestine in 1925 and (he says) "frankly told the Arabs that there was no possibility of change in the British policy" (Jewish Telegraph Agency) .

These words (1ike Mr. Balfour's earlier statement that British policy in this question was "definitely set") contain the central mystery and challenge. In what other issue in history was a reversal of policy ever declared to be impossible? This policy had been proved impossible of fulfilment, and disastrous. What power dictated that it must be pursued in those or any circumstances whatever? No British or American political leader ever explained this secret capitulation to the electorate, to Parliament or to Congress (in the 1950's statements similar to those of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Amery were often made in America, as will be seen).

During this decade, when the project of the "national home" proved a fiasco, the Western politicians continued to congratulate themselves on what they had done. Mr. Lloyd George told an applauding Zionist audience in London: "I was brought up in a school where I was taught more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land". His day was ending, but candidates for his shoes hastened to dec1are their allegiance. A coming prime minister, Mr. Ramose Macdonald, though unable to attend this meeting, sent a message dec1aring support for Zionism; another, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, joined the circ1e of "friends" (Dr. Weizmann); In South Africa General Smuts saw in his "work for the Jews the justification of his life".

Lord Balfour considered his Declaration the great achievement of his life and in 1925 first went to see the country he had been privately bartering for twenty years. He was (characteristically) a bad sailor and emerged pale from his cabin at Alexandria. At Tel Aviv he said (with intention to flatter) that the Herzliah High School boys "might have come from Harrow" and the mayor "might easily be the mayor of Liverpool or of Manchester", and he "opened" the still unbuilt Hebrew University. He toured Palestine under strong guard and said his cordial reception reminded him of a general election "with everybody on the same side". Then (against Dr. Weizmann's pressing advice) he continued to Syria, where he was besieged by an Arab mob, clamant for his life, in the Victoria Hotel in Damascus, being rushed to the coast amid a strong escort of French cavalry and restored (still seasick) by ship to England.

Mr. J.M.N. Jeffries records what went on in Palestine during this decade. The Zionists began to buy up Arab land (which under the Talmudic Law might never under any conditions be resold to Arabs). The Arabs cheerfully sold them some land but too well knew the Torah to yie1d enough for Palestine ever to be taken from them by simple purchase (as the too-simple King-Crane Commission had foreseen). Moreover, they bred fast and soon showed that Zionist immigration, in any normal circumstances, could never produce a population nearly equal to them. From the start it was clear, as all experienced observers had stated, that they could only be dispossessed through a new world war.

The intention to dispossess them was not admitted at that time. Mr. Churchill's White Paper of 1922, indeed, proposed that they should be allowed to hold elections in their own country! Dr. Weizmann forbade this and thus was placed "in the curious position of seeming to oppose democratic rights to the Arabs"; he then complains that the Arabs, who drew the obvious conclusion from his denial of elections, were the victims of "the deliberate misrepresentation of Zionist aims".

The uproar in Palestine caused the British government to send out more "investigators" (and again, one wonders why, if there was "no possibility of change" in British policy). The Shaw and Simpson Commissions followed the earlier King-Crane and Haycraft Commissions and, once they saw the facts, produced substantially the same reports. On this account Dr. Weizmann asks plaintively why "as often as a commission went out to Palestine to investigate" it was "an almost universal rule that such administrators as came out favourably inclined turned against us in a few months".

The fiasco of the "national home" was so c1ear that even the politicians began to hedge. Mr. Lloyd George in 1925 told the Zionists publicly "any policy of expropriation or anything that suggests it will only make difficulties in the path of Zionism". Dr. Weizmann at once replied: "Mr. Lloyd George will believe me when I say that the Jews are the last people in the world to build their home on the back of somebody else. The Jews have suffered so much from injustice that they have learned their lesson and I can assure you that the Arabs will not suffer at our hands". Again "the word" invites comparison with "the deed" that ensued later.

However, what happened in Palestine during this decade was all incidental to the greater purpose of retaining control over the politicians of London and Washington, so that "policy" there should continue to be "impossible to change". That, and not the success or failure of the "national home" in Palestine, was decisive, and Dr. Weizmann at the end triumphed again.

At this period he had to deal with a greater difficulty than any offered by the Western politicians: the alarm, and hostility, of that "World Jewry" which he and his associates from Russia claimed to represent. The emancipated Jews could have offered effective opposition to the Zionists if they had formed an anti-Zionist organization. They feared to do so, and this was their undoing. They did not want Zionist nationalism and a Jewish state, but they did want the Judaist Mecca, the cultural and religious centre, and feared that the term "anti-Zionist" would imply antagonism to that. Through this chink in their armour Dr. Weizmann unerringly reached.

His whole undertaking in Palestine was then near collapse. The "Mandate" provided that the British government would recognize his Zionist Organization as "an appropriate Jewish agency for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the administration of Palestine" in matters affecting "the establishment of the Jewish National Home". However, there was a qualification: this agency was "to take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish National Home".

As masses of Jews were openly opposed to Dr. Weizmann's Zionism, even he could not pretend that he spoke for them. Thus he transferred his canvassing from the antechambers of the Gentiles to the Jews and for eight years sped about the world in search of a solution to this problem, The great mass of emancipated Jews of the West resolutely opposed any project that might turn out to be one for the recreation of "a Jewish nation".

Then Dr. Weizmann found the riddle's answer. He coined the term "non-Zionist". The Jews in Britain remained aloof but those in America fell into the trap. "Non-Zionist" seemed to offer the best of both worlds; it would enable them to oppose Zionist nationalism while supporting the Judaist-Mecca idea. In 1928 a group of Jews announced that they represented "the non-Zionists" and would work with Dr. Weizmann for "the upbuilding of Palestine". On this basis Dr. Weizmann in 1929 set up his "Enlarged Jewish Agency", thereafter claiming that, by inc1uding "non-Zionists", it fulfilled all provisions of "the Mandate" and that he once more represented "all Jews". The dilemma from which Dr. Weizmann was rescued is shown by his words: he says he regarded the Zionist situation as "hopeless and helpless unless the non-Zionists came to the rescue",

The Arabs at once saw that this "enlarged" Jewish agency would be the true government of Palestine and intensified their resistance. The result was that at last a British government felt forced to admit the fiasco and in 1930 the Passfield White Paper undertook to suspend Zionist immigration and to curtail the authority of the Jewish Agency. The "set" policy was "changed"! Dr. Weizmann, his authority reinforced by the recruitment of the "non-Zionists", struck at once. He gave audience to the British prime minister, then Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, who behaved like a man held up by a gun; he not only revoked the White Paper but humbly asked Dr. Weizmann whom he should appoint as the next High Commissioner in Palestine.

Thus the years that the Zionists have eaten continued. What these politicians feared, none can confidently say; their memoirs are uniformly silent on this central mystery and their capitulations are unique in history. Mr. Macdonald's surrender re-established the principle that "policy" in this matter was "set" and immutable, and during the ensuing twenty years this became the paramount principle of all British and American state policy. The politicians of both countries evidently held Dr. Weizmann to be the emissary of a power which they dared not disobey; their demeanour resembled the African Native's rolling-eyed fear of the witchdoctor.

Mr. Macdonald's submission restored the situation in London to its former shape, but in Palestine the "national home", an artificial growth forcibly implanted in a hostile soil, continued to wither. In ten years the Jewish population increased by less than a hundred thousand immigrants. In 1927 three thousand more emigrants departed than immigrants came. A small revival followed in 1928, but the average yearly exodus from Palestine, up to 1932, was almost a third of the immigration.

The Zionist adventure was in collapse, as all qualified parties had foretold. Left alone, the Jews of the world clearly would never in any substantial numbers go to Palestine; if events took their natural course the Arab population evidently would increase its preponderance.

Nothing was to take its natural course. At that very moment the mysterious Hitler arose in Germany (and at the same instant Mr. Roosevelt in America) and the Second World War loomed up ahead.

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Chapter 36


THE STRANGE ROLE OF THE PRESS

The years which followed, 1933-1939, were those of the brewing of the Second World War. "Prussian militarism", supposed to have been laid low in 1918, rose up more formidable than ever and the spectacle so absorbed men's minds that they lost interest in the affair in Palestine, which seemed unrelated to the great events in Europe. In fact it was to loom large among those "causes and objects" of the second war which President Wilson had called "obscure" in the first one. The gap left by the collapse, in 1917, of the legend of "Jewish persecution in Russia" was filled by "the Jewish persecution in Germany" and, just when Zionism was "helpless and hopeless", the Zionists were able with a new cry to affright the Jews and beleaguer the Western politicians. The consequences showed in the outcome of the ensuing war, when revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism proved to be the sole beneficiaries.

My own experience during those years ultimately produced this book. When they began, in 1933, I had climbed from my clerkship to be a correspondent of The Times in Berlin and was happy in that calling. When they ended, in 1939, I was fully disenchanted with it and had felt compelled to throw up my livelihood. The tale of the years between will show the reason.

From 1927 on I reported the rise of Hitler, and by chance was passing the Reichstag when it burst into flames in 1933. This event (used to set up the secret-police-and-concentration-camp system in Germany, on the Bolshevist model) cemented Hitler in power, but some prescience, that night, told me that it meant much more than that. In fact the present unfinished ordeal of the West dates from that night, not from the later war. Its true meaning was that the area of occupation of the world-revolution spread to the middle of Europe, and the actual transfer to Communist ownership in 1945 merely confirmed an accomplished fact (theretofore disguised from the masses by the bogus antagonism between National Socialism and Communism) which the war, at its outset, was supposed to undo. The only genuine question which the future has yet to answer is whether the world-revolution will be driven back or spread further westward from the position which, in effect, it occupied on the night of February 27, 1933.

From the start of Hitler's regime (on that night) all professional observers in Berlin, diplomats and journalists, knew that it meant a new war unless this were prevented. Prevention at that time was relatively simple; Mr. Winston Churchill in his memoirs rightly called the Second War "the unnecessary war". It could have been prevented by firm Western opposition to Hitler's preliminary warlike forays (into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia) at any time up to 1938 when (as Mr. Churchill also confirms) the German generals, about to overthrow Hitler, were themselves undone by the Western capitulation to him at Munich.

The trained observers in Berlin were agreed that he would make war if allowed and so advised their governmental or editorial superiors in London. The Chief Correspondent of The Times in Berlin, Mr. Norman Ebbutt (I was the second correspondent) reported early in 1933 that war must be expected in about five years unless it were forethwarted, and this particular report was printed. He, I and many other reporters during the following years grew alarmed and perplexed by the suppression, "burking" and ignoring of despatches, and by the depictment of Hitler, in Parliament and the newspapers, as an inherently good man who would remain peaceable if his just grievances were met (at others' expense).

This period has become known as that of "the policy of appeasement" but encouragement is the truer word, and the policy changed the probability of war into certainty. The strain brought Mr. Ebbutt to physical collapse. From 1935 on I was Chief Correspondent in Vienna, which was then but another vantage-point for surveying the German scene. From there, late in 1937, I informed The Times that both Hitler and Goering had said that the war would begin "by the autumn of 1939"; I had this information from the Austrian Chancellor. I was in Vienna during Hitler's invasion and then, after brief arrest by Storm Troops on the way out, transferred to Budapest, where I was when the supreme capitulation of Munich followed in September 1938. Realizing then that a faithful reporter could do nothing against "the policy of appeasement", and that his task was meaningless, I resigned by expostulant letter, and still have the editor's discursive acknowledgement.

Fourteen years later The Times publicly confessed error, in respect of its "policy of appeasement", in that curiously candid Official History of 1952. This contains a grudging reference to me: "There were resignations from junior members of the staff" (I was forty-three in 1938, was Chief Correspondent for Central Europe and the Balkans, had worked for The Times for seventeen years, and I believe I was the only correspondent to resign). In this volume The Times also undertook never so to err again: "it is not rash to say that aggression will never again be met at Printing House Square in terms of mere 'Munich'." The editorial articles and reports of The Times about such later events as the bisection of Europe in 1945, the Communization of China, the Zionization of Palestine and the Korean war seem to me to show that its policies did not change at all.

Thus my resignation of 1938 was inspired by a motive similar to that of Colonel Repington (of whom I then had not heard) in 1918. There was a major military danger to England and qualified reporters were not allowed to make this plain to the public: the result, in my opinion, was the Second World War. The journalist should not regard himself too seriously, but if his reports are disregarded in the most momentous matters of the day he feels that his calling is a sham and then he had best give it up, at any cost. This is what I did, and I was comforted, many years later, when I read Sir William Robertson's words to Colonel Repington: "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".

When I resigned in 1938 I had a second reason, not present in 1933, for perplexity about the way the press is conducted. In that matter, too, I could only assume that some infatuation worked to distort the truthful picture of events. The outcome of the ensuing war, however, showed that a powerful motive had lain behind this particular misrepresentation.

In the case of "the Jewish persecution" in Germany I found that impartial presentation of the facts gradually gave way to so partisan a depictment that the truth was lost. This transformation was effected in three subtle stages. First the persecution of "political opponents and Jews" was reported; then this was imperceptibly amended to "Jews and political opponents"; and at the end the press in general spoke only of "the persecution of Jews". By this means a false image was projected on to the public mind and the plight of the overwhelming majority of the victims, by this fixing of the spotlight on one group, was lost to sight. The result showed in 1945, when, on the one hand, the persecution of Jews was made the subject of a formal indictment at Nuremberg, and on the other hand half of Europe and all the people in it were abandoned to the selfsame persecution, in which the Jews had shared in their small proportion to populations everywhere.

At that period I, typical of Englishmen of my generation, had never thought of Jews as different from myself, nor could I have said what might make a Jew, in his opinion, different from me. If I later became aware of any differentiation, or of the desire of a powerful group to assert one, this was not the result of Hitler's deeds but of the new impediment to impartial reporting which I then began to observe. When the general persecution began I reported it as I saw it. If I learned of a concentration camp containing a thousand captives I reported this; if I learned that the thousand included thirty or fifty Jews I reported that. I saw the first terror, spoke with many of the victims, examined their injuries, and was warned that I incurred Gestapo hostility thereby. The victims were in the great majority, certainly much over ninety percent, Germans, and a few were Jews. This reflected the population-ratio, in Germany and later in the countries overrun by Hitler. But the manner of reporting in the world's press in time blocked-out the great suffering mass, leaving only the case of the Jews.

I illustrate this by episodes and passages from my own experience and reporting. Rabbi Stephen Wise, writing in 1949, gave the following version of events personally reported by me in 1933, and undoubtedly purveyed the same version in the presidential circle of which he was a familiar during those years: "The measures against the Jews continued to outstrip in systematic cruelty and planned destruction the terror against other groups. On January 29, 1933 Hitler was summoned to be chancellor . . . at once the reign of terror began with beatings and imprisonment of Jews. . . We planned a protest march in New York on May 10, the day of the ordered burning of Jewish books in Germany . . . the brunt of the attack was borne by Jews. . . concentration camps were established and filled with Jews".

All these statements are false. The measures against the Jews did not outstrip the terror against other groups; the Jews were involved in a much larger number of others. The reign of terror did not begin on January 29, 1933, but in the night of the Reichstag fire, February 27. No "burning of Jewish books" was ordered; I attended and reported that bonfire and have looked up my report published in The Times, to verify my recollection. A mass of "Marxist" books was burned, including the works of many German, English and other non-Jewish writers (my books, had they then been published, would undoubtedly have been among them); the bonfire included some Jewish books. the "brunt" of the terror was not borne by Jews, nor were the concentration camps "filled with Jews". The number of Jewish victims was in proportion to their ratio of the population.

Nevertheless this false picture, by iteration, came to dominate the public mind during the Second War. At the time of my resignation, which was provoked solely by the "policy of appeasement" and the imminent advent of "the unnecessary war", this other hindrance to faithful reporting was but a secondary, minor annoyance. Later I discerned that the motive behind it was of major importance in shaping the course and outcome of the Second War". When I came to study the story of Mr. Robert Wilton I perceived that there was also a strong resemblance between my experience and his. He sought to explain the nature of an event in Russia and thus was inevitably led into "the Jewish question". Twenty years later I observed that it was in fact impossible to draw public attention to the misreporting of the nature of the persecution of Germany and to explain that the Jews formed only a small fraction of the victims.

That matter had nothing to do with my resignation, but I was becoming aware of it around that time, and this widening perception is reflected in the two books which I published after renouncing journalism. The first, Insanity Fair, was devoted entirely to the menace of war. I thought, somewhat vaingloriously, that one voice might still avert it, and today's reader may still verify that motive. To account for this excess of zeal in me, the indulgent reader, if he be old enough, might recall the feeling of horror which the thought of another world war caused in those who had known the first one. This feeling can never be fully comprehended by those of later generations, who have become familiar with the thought of a series of wars, but it was overpowering at the time.

The second book, Disgrace Abounding, on the eve of war continued the warning theme, but in it, for the first time, I gave some attention to "the Jewish question". My experience was widening and I had begun to discern the major part it would play in forming the shape and issue of the Second War which then was clearly at hand. My thought from then on was much given to it; in this way I came in time to write the present book and in that light the remaining chapters on the brewing, course and aftermath of the Second War, are written.

Page 311

Chapter 37


THE MANAGERS, THE MESSIAHS AND THE MASSES

Amid jubilant scenes in Washington and Berlin on two successive days (March 4 and 5, 1933) the two twelve-year reigns began which were to end at almost the same instant in 1945. Today an impartial historian could hardly compute which reign produced the greater sum of human suffering. At the start the two men who appeared on the central scene were both hailed as Messiahs. In America a Rabbi Rosenblum described President Roosevelt as "a Godlike messenger, the darling of destiny, the Messiah of America's tomorrow"; there spoke a political flatterer in words intended to "persuade the multitude". In 1937, in Prague menaced by Hitler, a Jewish acquaintance told me his rabbi was preaching in the synagogue that Hitler was "the Jewish Messiah" (a pious elder who sought to interpret events in terms of Levitical prophecy). All through these years the masses in both countries (and for that matter in Russia too) had their particular "premier-dictator" depicted to them in such terms, or in those of "Big Brother", "Papa", "Uncle", "Beloved Leader" or the fireside-loving "Friend". The apparent antagonists, Mr. Roosevelt and Herr Hitler, both in different ways promoted "the destructive principle" in its three recognizable forms: revolutionary-Communism, revolutionary-Zionism and the ensuing "world government to enforce peace".

Mr. Roosevelt's reign began with a significant deception. He used a wheeled chair but the public masses were never allowed to see him, in flesh or picture, until he had been helped to an upright position. His infirmity was known; nevertheless, some directing intelligence decreed that the false picture of a robust man must to his last day be presented to the multitude (and even afterwards, for the sculptor who later made his London monument had to depict him in this sturdy pose).

Mr. Roosevelt created precedent by having his cabinet sworn in the hand of a distinguished Jew, Mr. Justice Cardozo, who was a committed Zionist, having yielded in 1918 to Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise, with the despondent-sounding words, "Do what you please with my name"; he then received his Supreme Court judgeships, Rabbi Wise requesting them for him, first from Governor Al Smith of New York State and then from President Herbert Hoover. Thus the shadow of "dual allegiance" fell on Mr. Roosevelt's administration at its start (as on Mr. Wilson's, from the figure of Mr. Brandeis).

Mr. Roosevelt, after the Republican interregnum of 1921-1933, resumed the Wilson policies and in that spirit approached the major problem of America's future at that moment: namely, whether the forces represented by the great Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, which had occurred in the six decades following the Civil War, should or should not govern America. All competent authorities had observed, usually with foreboding, the rapid rise of this new problem in American life, and had depicted the effects of the transplantation to American soil of a large population-mass which, under its religious directors, rejected the concept of "the melting-pot" and of "assimilation". Mr. James Truslow Adams referred to it in his Epic of America, and Rudyard Kipling, who lived in New England in the 1890's, wrote:

"The land was denuding itself of its accustomed inhabitants and their places had not yet been taken by the wreckage of Eastern Europe. . . Immigrants were coming into the States at about a million head a year . . . Somewhere in the background, though he did not know it, was the 'representative' American, who traced his blood through three or four generations and who, controlling nothing and affecting less, protested that . . . all foreign elements could and would soon be assimilated into 'good Americans'. And not a soul cared what he said . . . What struck me. . . was the apparent waste and ineffectiveness, in the face of the foreign inrush, of all the indigenous effort of the past generation. It was then that I first began to wonder whether Abraham Lincoln had not killed too many autochthonous 'Americans' in the Civil War, for the benefit of their hastily imported Continental supporters. This is black heresy, but I have since met men and women who have breathed it. The weakest of the old-type immigrants had been sifted and salted by the long sailing-voyage of those days. But steam began in the later sixties and early seventies, when human cargoes could be delivered with all their imperfections in a fortnight or so. And one million more-or-less acclimatized Americans had been killed".

This problem was only new to America; it was the oldest problem in recorded history and, as this narrative has shown, had recurred in country after country, down the ages, whenever Jewish immigration reached flood levels. Dr. Weizmann is a witness to it, for he discusses it in relating his beleaguerment of a British official, Sir William Evans Gordon, who grappled with it in England twenty years before it excited the alarm of United States Congresses. In 1906 Sir William sought to solve it through an Aliens Bill (as the 67th and 68th United States Congresses by quota laws). Dr. Weizmann says that in performing his duty Sir William (like Senator Pat McCarran and Representative Francis E. Walter in America in the 1950's) came to be "generally regarded as responsible for all the difficulties placed in the way of Jewish immigrants into England". Dr. Weizmann then continues:
"Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them. . . England had reached the point where she could or would absorb so many Jews and no more. . . The reaction against this cannot be looked upon as anti-semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration and we cannot shake it off. Sir William had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice. He acted . . . in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country. . . In his opinion it was physically impossible for England to make good the wrongs which Russia had inflicted on its Jewish population . . . .I am fairly sure he would equally have opposed mass inf1ux of any foreign element; but, as it happened, no other foreign element pressed for admission in such numbers". (Forty years later Dr. Weizmann spoke similarly to Jews in America: "Certain countries can digest a certain number of Jews; once that number has been passed, something drastic must happen; the Jews must go").

Dr. Weizmann thus soberly presented the valid argument against unrestricted Jewish immigration only because he was speaking chiefly to Jews and was drumming into them the Talmudic argument that Jews cannot be assimilated; this argument is essential to Zionism, but is not inherently true. The quoted passages show that in 1906 a man in authority was still able to state that his country could not make good "wrongs" supposed to have been inflicted on Jews in another country, and to let "the interests of his country" govern his duty. In the ensuing decades all the premier-dictators of the West made it State policy to remedy alleged wrongs, done by a third party, at the expense of an innocent fourth party. The absurdity is shown by Dr. Weizmann's own last-quoted remark, that when the number of digestible Jews is exceeded in any country "something drastic must happen; the Jews must go". He and his associates for half a century had been using all their power in America to gain unrestricted access for Jews, so that, according to his own words, they were deliberately leading the Jews there to disaster; the time must come, if what he said was true, when governments elsewhere in the world will be under pressure to admit large numbers of Jews from America because of "the wrongs" done them there.

Such was the background of the dominant issue in American life when Mr. Roosevelt became president. Between 1881 and 1920 over three million legally-recorded immigrants entered the United States from Russia, most of them Jews. According to the United States Census Bureau the country contained 230,000 Jews in 1877 and about 4,500,000 in 1926. Only "estimates" are at any time obtainable in matters of Jewish population, as the "elders" oppose head-counting by others, and these figures are generally held to have been largely under-estimated. In the ensuing decade the figures eluded all verification, chiefly owing to changes in immigrant-classification ordered by President Roosevelt, and even the competent authorities will not attempt to estimate the extent of unrecorded and illegal immigration (competent observers judge that the total number of Jews in the United States now may be around ten million). In any case, the greatest single community of Jews in the world today is in the American Republic, having been transplanted thither during the last two generations.

In proportion to the total American population even the highest estimate would not reach one-tenth. In itself this is a relatively small group; politically organized to tip the balance of power it is of decisive importance. This problem was recognized and the Congressional Committee on Immigration in 1921 declared:

"The processes of assimilation and amalgamation are slow and difficult. With the population of the broken parts of Europe headed this way in ever-increasing numbers, why not peremptorily check the stream with this temporary measure, and in the meantime try the unique and nove1 experiment of enforcing all the immigration 1aws on our statutes?"

A quota law then passed limited the number of any nationality entering the United States to three percent of the foreign-born of that nationality resident in the United States in 1910. The next Congress went much further than the general statement above quoted; it was specific about the danger, the same Committee reporting:

"If the princip1e of individua1 liberty, guarded by a constitutional government, created on this continent nearly a century and half ago is to endure, the basic strain of our population must be maintained and our economic standards preserved. . . The American people do not concede the right of any foreign group . . . to dictate the character of our legislation".

The years which then followed showed that the effect of Mr. Roosevelt's presidency would be further to break down the principle stated, to alter "the basic strain", and to enable "a foreign group" to dictate State policy.

Mr. Roosevelt (like Mr. Wi1son, Mr. Lloyd George and General Smuts) evidently was selected before he was elected. Mr. Howden says that Mr. House "picked Roosevelt as a natural candidate for the presidency long before any other responsible politician", chose him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, and then through the years groomed him for the presidency, expecting to govern through him, as through President Wilson. Then something went wrong. Mr. House was confident that President Roosevelt would call on him but then realized that "certain people don't want the president to listen to me". These people were evidently too strong, for Mr. House was dropped without any courtesy and at this point (1933) disappears from the story.

One can only offer a reasonable surmise about the reasons. Mr. House, at seventy-five, regretted young Philip Dru of 1912, who had thought the American Constitution "outmoded and grotesque", had seized power by force and then governed by emergency decree. He had a new set of more sober and responsible ideas ready for Mr. Roosevelt and, from relegation, then "watched with forbidding" the concentration of irresponsible power in Mr. Roosevelt's hands. Mr. House had caused President Wilson, as his first major act, to write into the American Constitution (as the Sixteenth Amendment) the chief destructive measure proposed in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto of 1848, the "progressive income tax", but in the 1930's Mr. House was alarmed by the completely untrammelled control of the public purse which his second "Rockland" obtained.

Presumably, then, Mr. House was discarded because he had retreated from his earlier ideas, for those original ideas governed Mr. Roosevelt's policy throughout his twelve years. He supported the world-revolution; his first major act of State policy was to recognize the Communist Government and in the ensuing war he resumed the House-Wilson policy of "all support". He supported revolutionary-Zionism. Finally, he took up the old "league to enforce peace" idea and re-foisted it on the West under a new name, that of the "United Nations".

Thus Mr. Roosevelt put "Philip Dru's" ideas into further practice. Of Mr. Wilson in the earlier generation his Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, had said, "All Philip Dru had said should be comes about; the President comes to Philip Dru in the end". As to Mr. Roosevelt, twenty years later, Mr. House's biographer (Mr. Howden) says, "It is impossible to compare Dru's suggested legislation with Mr. Roosevelt's and not be impressed by their similarity".

This is an illustrative example of the transmission of ideas from generation to generation, among a governing group. Mr. House's ideas were those of "the revolutionaries of 1848", which in turn derived from Weishaupt and the revolutionaries of 1789, who had them from some earlier source. When Mr. House abandoned them they were transmitted without a hitch to the ruling group around another president, and the one man who had modified these ideas was left behind.

Mr. House was the only casualty in the inner circle. Mr. Bernard Baruch was adviser to Mr. Roosevelt even before he became president. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt records that "Mr. Baruch was a trusted adviser to my husband both in Albany and in Washington", that is, during Mr. Roosevelt's four-year term as Governor of New York State, before his presidential nomination. During this pre-presidential period Mr. Roosevelt (according to one of Mr. Baruch's biographers, Mr. Morris V. Rosenbloom), although America had repudiated the League of Nations, drafted the plan for a new body to be called the United Nations. Rabbi Stephen Wise and Mr. Brandeis, of the earlier group around President Wilson, regrouped themselves around President Roosevelt (Hitler's anti-Jewish measures in Germany at this time revived Mr. Brandeis's desire to drive Arabs out of Palestine).

Right at the start of Mr. Roosevelt's twelve years some doubt may have arisen about his docility, and means have been found to ensure it (the reader will recall "Rockland's" attempt to assert independence in 1912 and the "exultant conspirators" mirth about his capitulation). That would explain the curious fact that Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had campaigned for Mr. Roosevelt as senator in 1914 and as governor of New York State in 1928, did not support him for the presidency in 1932. Then something happened to reassure the rabbi, for immediately after Mr. Roosevelt's election he proclaimed that the new president had "re-won my unstinted admiration", and by 1935 was again an intimate of the White House.

In the light of earlier experience, the identity of the men surrounding President Roosevelt plainly pointed to the policies he would pursue. He made this clearer by widening the circle of his Jewish advisers. In 1933 this had a new significance. In 1913 President Wilson's Jewish advisers were publicly accepted as Americans like any other Americans, and simply of the Jewish faith. In 1933 the question of their allegiance had been raised by the Zionist adventure in Palestine. In addition, the issues of the world-revolution and of world-government had arisen since 1913, and both of these also threw up the question of American national interest, so that the feelings entertained about them in the president's immediate circle became a matter of first importance.

All this lent a specific significance to the earlier Congressional pronouncement (1924), denying the right of "any foreign group" to "dictate the character of our legislation". Among the president's "advisers" many were of foreign birth or in effect became "foreign" by their devotion to Zionism or their attitude towards the world-revolution and world-government. In this sense a "foreign group", embodying the mass-immigration of the preceding hundred years, formed itself around the American president and "steered" the course of events. The twelve years which followed showed that any "advice" acted on by the president must have been to the benefit of the destructive principle in its three interrelated forms: Communism, Zionism, world-government.

Prominent among his advisers (in addition to the three powerful men above named) was the Viennese-born Professor Felix Frankfurter. Mr. House's biographer Mr. Howden, who expresses Mr. House's opinion, thinks he was the most powerful of all: "Professor Frankfurter duplicated with Mr. Roosevelt, more than anyone else. . . the part played by Mr. House with President Wilson". The part played by unofficial advisers is always difficult to determine and this opinion may place Professor Frankfurter too high in the hierarchy. However, he was undoubtedly important (he, too, first came into the advisory circle under Mr. Wilson).

Like Mr. Brandeis and Mr. Cardozo, he became a Supreme Court Justice and never openly appeared in American politics; yet the effects of his influence are plainer to trace than those of other men, which have to be deeply delved for. He was head of the Harvard Law School during the 1930's and in that capacity trained an entire generation of young men who were to give a definite shape to the events of the 1940's and 1950's. They received marked preference for high employment in their later careers.

They include in particular Mr. Alger Hiss, who by trial and conviction was revealed as a Communist agent, though he was a high "adviser" of President Roosevelt, (Mr. Justice Frankfurter voluntarily appeared at the trial to testify to Mr. Hiss's character), and Mr. Dean Acheson, who as American Secretary of State at that time declared he would not "turn his back" on Mr. Hiss, and others. Mr. Hiss played an important part at the Yalta Conference, where the abandonment of half Europe to the revolution was agreed; Mr. Acheson's period of office coincided with the abandonment of China to the revolution.

Apart from this distinct group of young men apparently trained during President Roosevelt's early years in office to take over the State Department, the president was accompanied by a group of Jewish advisers at the highest level. Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior (a leading Zionist, whose "Morgenthau Plan" of 1944 was the original basis for the bisection of Europe in 1945) was his Secretary of the Treasury for eleven of the twelve years. Other intimate associates were Senator Herbert Lehman (another leading Zionist who took great part in promoting the "second exodus" from Europe in 1945-1946, which led to the war in Palestine), Judge Samuel Rosenmann (a resident inmate of the White House, who helped write Mr. Roosevelt's speeches), Mr. David Niles (of Russian-born parentage, and for many years "adviser on Jewish affairs" to Mr. Roosevelt and his successor), Mr. Benjamin Cohen (a drafter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and another important Zionist), and three Jews from Russia, Messrs. Sidney Hillman, Isador Lubin and Leo Pasvolsky.

These leading names, from the personal entourage of the president, represent only the pinnacle of an edifice that was set around all American political life. This sudden growth of Jewish influence, behind the scenes of power, obviously was not a spontaneous natural phenomenon. The selection was discriminatory; anti-Zionist, anti-revolutionary and anti-world-government Jews were excluded from it. The formation of this "palace guard" was unpopular, but unofficial advisers are difficult to attack on specific grounds and Mr. Roosevelt ignored all protests, and so escorted began his thrice-renewed presidency. Hitler simultaneously appeared as the symbol, at that moment, of the mathematically-recurrent Jewish persecution, and in the calculations of President Roosevelt's advisers took the place occupied by "the Czar" twenty years before in those of Mr. Wilson's.

Mr. Roosevelt's long continuance in office was chiefly due to Mr. House's master-plan for winning elections. Under this strategy of the intensive appeal to the "fluctuating" vote "discrimination" became the chief slogan. It was raised on behalf of the Negroes, who were used as a stalking-horse*; and in fact was used to crush objection to the excessive influence of the "foreign group" represented by "the palace guard". Coupled with it was the appeal to the poor in the form of promises to soak the rich. This strategy proved so effective that the Republicans beat a retreat and began to compete with the Democrats for the favour of "the foreign group", who were held to be the arbiters of elections. In this way the secret grip on power was made secure, and the American elector was in fact deprived of true choice between parties. Mr. Roosevelt fortified himself by his policy of "deficit-spending", the basic theory of which was that the amount of public debt was unimportant, as the State only owed it to itself. At that point the American people lost and have never since regained control of the public purse, and the occupant of the White House became able by a stroke of the pen to command expenditures which in earlier times would have covered the annual budgets of half-a-dozen thrifty States. Mr. Roosevelt gained these powers by invoking the need to beat "The Crisis", and he produced The Permanent Emergency in which his country still lives.
* See footnote on page 318

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His presidency followed a design obviously predetermined and the course of events in the world might have been entirely different if it had been shorter. However, the hidden mechanism was so efficient, and the hold of his mentors on it so secure, that he was maintained in office through three re-elections. Only once was his tenure threatened with unexpected interruption, dangerous to these plans.

In a Southern State, Louisiana, arose a politico of Mr. Roosevelt's type. Mr. Huey Long, a young demagogue with a fleshy face and curly hair from a poor hillbilly home, grew popular (like Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt) by attacking "the interests" (in his particular countryside, the oil interests in general and Standard Oil in particular). The idol of the poor whites, he was elected governor in 1928 and at once tried to raise money for building schoolhouses by putting a tax on oil, whereon at the opening of the Louisiana Legislature one Rabbi Walter Peiser refused to invoke a blessing, calling him "an unworthy governor".

Mr. Long grew more popular and was elected to the United States Senate where (March 1935) he devoted "a large part" of a speech to "an attack on Mr. Bernard Baruch", in whom he apparently saw the supreme representative of the "interests" (about the only charge never made against Mr. Long, who had many Jewish associates, was that he was "anti-semitic"). Mr. Long was becoming a force in the land and wrote a book called My First Week in the White House, containing illustrations which showed Mr. Roosevelt, looking much like the Roosevelt of Yalta, listening humbly to the wisdom of a hale and ebullient Huey Long.

He set out to undo Mr. Roosevelt by outdoing him in Mr. Roosevelt's especial skill: lavish spending and lavish promises. He did this in an ingenious way (he was possibly trickier than even Mr. Roosevelt). Mr. Long, with his "Share the Wealth" and "Every Man a King" programme, controlled the political machine in Louisiana. When the Roosevelt money began to flow into the States (for expenditure on all manner of crisis "projects", and incidentally on votes) Mr. Long calmly diverted it to his own similar ends. He forced through the Louisiana Legislature a law prohibiting local authorities from receiving any Washington money without the consent of a Louisiana State Board. As he controlled this board, he intercepted the cornucopian stream and the money was spent to enhance his, not Mr. Roosevelt's voting strength. He did with public money what Mr. Roosevelt was doing, but for his own political account.

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* The agitation about the lot of the American Negro, of which so much is heard in the outer world, is kept going, from New York, almost entirely by the two chief Jewish publicity organizations (the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, both of which dispose of large funds) and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which from its inception has been largely Jewish-directed. The Negro himself plays a passive part in it. His wish is for better opportunities of advancement alongside the white population; he does not desire to interbreed. The energy of the Jewish organizations which claim to intercede in his cause is entirely directed towards a compulsory intermingling which neither race desires. Thus the influence of these non-Negro groups was the chief one behind the litigation leading to the Supreme Court ruling of 1955, which held the existing separate-school system to be illegal and ordered its abolition and compulsory mixed-schooling (this judgment can hardly be enforced in the South without civil war and it has been followed by various violent episodes, including the use of the National Guard and of tanks to enforce mixed-schooling). I was able to see the American Jewish Committee's budget for 1953, the estimates for which were $1,753,000. This stated, in respect of the Negroes, "The status of Jews is more secure in most of the civil and political rights areas than that of some other groups, especially Negroes. But so long as a successful threat is made to the enjoyment of rights by Negroes, the rights of Jews are riskfully in balance. Accordingly, a large proportion of our work has been directed towards securing greater equalization of opportunities for such other groups, rather than for ourselves . . . An example of this is our relationship with the N.A.A.C.P., which comes to us for assistance in certain matters where we have a special competence. . . A fruitful weapon is court action. . . We participate directly in litigation . . . We have filed briefs attacking segregation. . . and have prepared briefs challenging discrimination against Negroes". The Supreme Court is composed of political appointees, not of professional jurists; this is an important factor in what might develop into a grave situation.
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In 1935 Mr. Roosevelt's second election campaign loomed ahead. Suddenly his advisers became aware that Mr. Long was popular far beyond his native Louisiana; he was a national figure. The Democratic National Committee "was astonished when a secret poll revealed that Long on a third-party ticket could poll between three and four million votes and that his Share The Wealth plan had eaten deeply into the Democratic strength in the industrial and farm States" (Mr. John T. Flynn).

Therefore Mr. Long, although he could not have become president at that time, certainly could have prevented Mr. Roosevelt's re-election, and the ruling few suddenly beheld a disturber of their regime. However, as Mr. Flynn says, "Fate had gone Democratic and remained so"; on September 8, 1935 Mr. Long was shot in the Louisiana State Capitol by a young Jew, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss. The motive will never be known because Dr. Weiss, who might have explained it, was shot by Mr. Long's tardy bodyguard.*

The political effect was clear; Mr. Roosevelt's re-election was ensured. The usual suggestion of "a madman" was conveyed to the public mind and various other motives, not entailing insanity, also were suggested. No public investigation was made, as in the cases of other political assassinations of the last hundred years, in respect of which investigation was denied or curtailed. Such investigations as have been made (for instance, in the cases of President Lincoln, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and King Alexander of Yugoslavia) have never supported the theory (always put forward) of the lonely "madman", but have revealed thorough organization with powerful support. The removal of Mr. Long determined the pattern of events for a decade, so that it was as important in its effects as the murders of more highly-placed men.

Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936. His allotted task evidently was to re-involve his country in the "foreign entanglements" of Mr. House and Mr.Wilson, and, like Mr. Wilson, he promised from election to election to keep it out of these. Meanwhile, the uproar about Hitler grew and, as I have shown, his persecution of men was subtly transformed into a "persecution of Jews". Mr. Roosevelt, just two years before the Second War, made public, through cryptic statement which to the initiated was an undertaking to involve his country in war and to wage it primarily for the cause represented by his palace guard. Mr. Wilson made his public statement, with its menace to Russia, in December 1911, about three years before the First World War; Mr. Roosevelt made his, with its menace to Germany, in October 1937, about two years before the Second World War. The two statements are implicitly identical in identifying the American cause with the Jewish cause as misrepresented by the Zionists.

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* Mr. Long had foretold his assassination in July, saying in the Senate that enemies bad planned his death with "one man, one gun, and one bullet" as the medium. He said that a dictograph, concealed in a New Orleans hotel room where his "enemies" had met, recorded this conversation. A contemporary writer who claims to have been present at the meeting, Mr. Hodding Carter, says, "The 'plotting' was limited to such hopefully expressed comments as, 'I wish somebody would kill the . . . .' ".

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Mr. Roosevelt said (October 5, 1937), "Let no one imagine that America will escape. . . that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked . . . When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disaster".

The president's speech-writers on this occasion were not cryptic enough. The allusion to "joining in a quarantine" was instantly understood by the public masses also as a threat of war. This caused such consternation that Mr. Roosevelt was obliged up to the very moment, four years later, when America was actually involved in war to promise "again and again and again" that "your sons will not be sent into any foreign war". (In October 1937 he certainly knew that war was coming in the autumn of 1939; at that very moment I had informed The Times from Vienna that Hitler and Goering had said so, and the American president would not have been less accurately informed).

By 1937 the falsification of the news-picture from Germany, which was described in the last chapter, had been going on for four years. I gave several instances, and here adduce another. Rabbi Stephen Wise relates that the American Jewish Congress immediately after Hitler's advent to power started the boycott-Germany movements on the basis of "cable reports" from Germany that "a nationwide pogrom" of Jews was being "planned".* He then mentions, casually, that the "reported" pogrom "did not come off", but the boycott did. **

Starting with this imaginary pogrom in Berlin, the propagandist campaign in America formed the basis on which Mr. Roosevelt rested his "quarantine" speech. The Zionists around the president were not truly concerned about the suffering of Jews at all; on the contrary, it was necessary to their politics in America and to the entire undertaking, and they feared its alleviation. In this they continued the policy of the Talmudic revolutionaries in Czarist Russia, who went to the length of assassination to prevent the emancipation of Jews, as has been shown.

* The Nazis always claimed that their one-day Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 was in reply to this provocation from New York, and Rabbi Wise's book of 1949 thus bears out their statement.

** See footnote on page 321

321



Thus Rabbi Wise records that he and his fellow Zionists were not deterred by urgent protests and appeals from the Jews in Germany to stop the boycott. The prospect of an accommodation between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, indeed, appalled them and Rabbi Wise informed his associates of his "two fears" in this respect:

". . . that our Jewish brothers in Germany might feel moved or compelled to accept a peace agreement or pact that might mean some slight amelioration or mitigation of their wrongs. . . that the Nazi regime might decide to prevent some of the evil consequences of its regime by such palliative treatment of the Jews as would disarm worldwide Jewish protest". (He describes the second possibility as the "graver" danger).

Thus they feared that "the persecution" would collapse; the words are specific. Rabbi Wise, in New York, preferred that Jews in Germany should suffer rather than this should happen: "To die at the hands of Nazism is cruel; to survive by its grace were ten thousand times worse. We will survive Nazism unless we commit the inexpiable sin of bartering or trafficking with it in order to save some Jewish victims" (1934, to the world Jewish Conference). "We reject out of hand with scorn and contempt any and every proposal which would ensure the security of some Jews through the shame of all Jews" (1936). Mr. Brandeis, in Washington, was equally resolute for martyrdom in Germany: "Any arrangement which results in making a market abroad for German goods strengthens Hitler.... ...To thus relieve Hitler's economic distress in order to save by emigration some of Germany's Jews would be .... deplorable statesmanship".*

For the Zionists in America the spectral danger of a reconciliation between Hitler and the Jews became most acute in 1938. General Smuts then sent his Defence Minister, Mr. Oswald Pirow, to Germany to ease tension in the Jewish question, if he could. The British prime minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, welcomed the attempt; he told Mr. Pirow that the pressure of international Jewry was one of the principal obstacles to an Anglo-German understanding and said he would be helped in resisting this pressure (Leon Pinsker's "irresistible pressure") if Hitler could be induced to moderate his spleen.

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* In fact, these Zionists were quite ready to "'traffic with the Nazis" and make financial deals with them when it suited their purpose. Seven years later, when the Second War was at its climax, Rabbi Stephen Wise received an offer from "'a group of Nazi functionaries" to allow Jews to go from Poland to Hungary, against payment. Both these countries were German-occupied, so that the advantage to the Jews involved is not apparent, and Mr. Wise must have had some ulterior reason (possibly connected with the later "'exodus" to Palestine) for wishing to transfer Jews from occupied Poland to occupied Hungary in wartime when he had so fiercely opposed their liberation from Germany in peacetime'. He requested President Roosevelt to release dollars for the bribe, to be deposited to these Nazis' account in Switzerland, whereon the president "'immediately" answered, "'Why don't you go ahead and do it, Stephen!" Instructions were then given to another prominent Zionist, Mr. Henry Morgenthau at the Treasury, and despite State Department and British Foreign Office protests the money was transferred to the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress for crediting to the Nazi leaders!

** The word "pogrom" (a Russian one meaning "'massacre") plays an especial part in this propaganda. It is applied to any kind of disturbance in which Jews are involved and has by suggestion been given this specific, though false significance, so that the casual reader might suspect a misprint if he were to read of "a pogrom of Russians" (or of Arabs). Dr. Weizmann says "'there were never any pogroms" in his native Russian countryside but uses the word continually, explaining that "'it is not necessary to live among pogroms to know that the Gentile world is poisoned". In inciting a British military governor of Palestine to harsh measures against Arabs Dr. Weizmann said he "had had some experience with the atmosphere which precedes pogroms", though by his own earlier statement he had none. He describes as a pogrom disorders in which five or six Jews were injured, and as "'Arab terrorism" the events of 1938, in which 69 British, 92 Jews and 1500 Arabs were killed. A distinguished British officer, Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart V.C., who lived in Poland between the two wars, says 'The Jewish question seemed unanswerable . . . Pogroms were rumoured to be taking place, but I considered the rumours to have been grossly exaggerated for there were no ocular proofs of the massacre of thousands of Jews".
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Mr. Pirow then went to Germany. He says that he made a specific proposal, that Hitler responded favourably, and that agreement was in sight.

At that very instant fate again intervened, as in the case of Mr. Huey Long, Count Stolypin, Czar Alexander II and others; whenever a chance of pacification appeared fate intervened. A young Jew shot a German diplomat, Herr von Rath, in Paris. Riots followed in Germany, synagogues were burned, and Mr. Pirow's mission abruptly ended. No investigation into the murder, or any organization that might have been behind it, was held, or if one was begun it never produced any informative result; Rabbi Wise presents the familiar picture (found also in Mr. House's novel) of the "half-crazed youth", maddened beyond endurance.

Mr. Roosevelt responded immediately: "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States. . . I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization . . . I asked our Ambassador in Berlin to return at once for report and consultation" .

The words referred to the synagogue-burning. (Mr. Roosevelt did not comment on the murder) and the central sentence is demonstrably untrue, because Mr. Roosevelt, and all his contemporaries, had earlier seen the wanton destruction of religious edifices. True, they had not been synagogues, but Mr. Roosevelt had "seen" the dynamiting of Christian churches and cathedrals in Communized Russia, and on becoming president had rushed to recognize the government that did it. Moreover, when he made this declaration he had just sent a telegram cordially approving the enforced capitulation of Czechoslavakia to Hitler and in that deed had found nothing incongruous with 20th Century civilization. This was the moment when I threw up my post, feeling unable to continue in journalism at a time when untruth was master of "the news".

The United States in effect became involved in the Second War when President Roosevelt made these declarations in 1937 and 1938, not on the day of Pearl Harbour, and a straight line led from them to his later statement of July 17, 1942, when he implicitly promised vengeance on Germany solely on account of its treatment of Jews; the men who prompted him to that public threat had from the start vehemently opposed any mitigation of Jewish suffering in Germany.

The murder of von Rath in Paris was the shot of Serajevo which in effect opened the second war, as the developing fluid, time, now reveals. Unlike Mr. Wilson, Mr. Roosevelt never privately believed that he would keep his country neutral; in 1938 his mentor, Mr. Bernard Baruch, declared "We are going to lick that fellow Hitler; he isn't going to get away with it" (General George C. Marshall). Unless some change occurs, and none is foreseeable yet, the American president in any third war would find himself held in the same coils as his predecessors of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.

During these six years when "the unnecessary war" was brewed I watched the turbulent, darkening scene from Berlin and Vienna and all the great cities on which the long night was soon to fall: Prague and Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest, Sofia and Warsaw. I saw as much as any man, I suppose, of the stoking of the furnace from which the ingot, war, was produced; and more than most, because I was not confined to any one country or faction, but had the run of them all. I knew the noise of the bravoes in the Storm Troopers' Stammkneipen, the furtive, bitter talk of their adversaries in private dwellings, and the nervous murmur of men on the run, who glanced ever over their shoulders. I saw the face of the mob, that dinosaur without a cerebral cavity, in both its moods: the inflamed one of illusory hope (in Berlin) and the hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed one of hopeless disillusionment (in Moscow). I met fear at every level, from the street-cleaner to the head of state or of government; I saw the terror in both its headquarter cities.

I knew or met many of the men who appeared to be powerful and to uphold opposing causes, and yet by their acts all brought "the unnecessary war" nearer and nearer. I talked with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels; I lunched quietly by the Geneva lakeside with chubby Maxim Litvinoff, a typical figure of the Café des Exiles, and wondered what he knew of Russia who so little Russia knew, though he was Foreign Minister of that communized land. I saw Mussolini, and Ramsay Macdonald, one of the British prime ministers who passed shadow-like across the blind during these years. I talked for long hours with Edouard Benesh in the old castle at Prague, with Austrian chancellors and Hungarian prime ministers, with Balkan kings and politicians. I went to watch the League of Nations, with high expectations then (for I was still callow) and was repelled by the manner of its proceedings, which was without dignity, by the lobbying and canvassing behind the scenes, and by the throng of hangers-on and intriguers which enfringed it; I think few enthusiasts for the "United Nations" would be found among those who knew the League of Nations. I went to Moscow, in the journalistic bodyguard of a rising young minister named Anthony Eden, and there saw a regime which was the facsimile of the National Socialist one in Germany in every major respect save the status of the Jews, who appeared to me to be predominant in the key-positions of the Soviet state.

It was all a whirling confusion, at the centre of which was one plain fact: that Hitler would make war unless he were prevented and that this war was coming, because he would not be prevented. There was another British prime minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin (a source of grief to the newspaper correspondents in Germany) who withheld the truth of Hitler's warlike intentions from his countrymen because, as he later said, he would have "lost the election" if he had told it. If his successor, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, thought that by continuing the policy of encouragement to Hitler he could "steer" Hitler to direct his war against the Soviet (I have no proof of this, but it may have been Mr. Chamberlain's ca1culation) that was at least a policy, where before was no policy at all. But it was a mistaken policy, for all qualified observers in Germany foresaw that when he struck Hitler would join hands with Stalin in waging war, not wage war against him (I wrote this in my pre-war books).

When I experienced Hitler's first two invasions, of Austria and Czechoslovakia, I realized that the last hope of averting the unnecessary war was gone. I felt that I lived in a mad world and this explains the title, Insanity Fair, which I gave to the book I wrote at that time. I could see only a lunatic lack of policy then. Eighteen years later, in the light of all that has come about and been made known, the possibility that the unnecessary war was not in all quarters held to be unnecessary obviously cannot be written off.

Page 325

Chapter 38


THE LITTLE COUNTRY FAR AWAY

In forgotten Palestine during the 1930-1940 decade, while "The Chief" and "Der Fuehrer" reigned in Washington and Berlin, matters went from bad to worse and at the end a British government was about to abandon the hopeless task foisted on it by Mr. Balfour (who died in 1930 after a deathbed leave-taking from Dr. Weizmann) when, on the eve of another war, a Mr. Winston Churchill recommitted his country to it. Thus the British people, believing that their business was solely with Hitler, once more went into war under sealed orders, among which was the purpose, unsuspected by them, that had brought them to the brink of defeat in 1918.

Successive British governments, in this affair, found themselves in the plight of the circus clown who cannot rid himself of the fly-paper; each time they thought they had shaken it off, Dr. Weizmann affixed it in a new place. In Palestine the British administrators and soldiers, on whom "the Mandate" had been thrust, could not do their duty. The Arabs obdurately rebelled; the Zionists in London importuned the government there to use force against the Arabs; if the men on the spot tried to act impartially between the parties orders from home restrained them.

British history overseas is probably vindicated by results in every case but this. It produced free overseas nations in empty lands, and in conquered ones populated by others the oft-proclaimed (and ever-derided) intention to upraise the conquered and then depart is being carried out; India is only one proof of that. In the case of Palestine all the rules previously followed by Britain overseas were broken and all experience set at naught, under the "pressure" exercized in London, or from other capitals if London ever baulked.

Thus the British officials and troops sent to Palestine were the unluckiest in British history (characteristically, the only man among them who was publicly honoured after their departure was a traitor). They knew how to administer a genuine "protectorate"; the word has an honest meaning as well as the false one mockingly given to it by Hitler in Czechoslovakia. Occupation with the consent, or at the invitation of native inhabitants can be an admirable thing. I have travelled in one such genuine "protectorate", Basutoland. The British went there at Basuto request and the consequence was that the Basuto survived as a free nation, where they would otherwise have been enslaved by stronger neighbours. Their lot and prospect today are better than they could have become in any other way and they realize this, so that a few dozen white administrators govern 660,000 Basuto in mutual esteem.

The British in Palestine, for the first time in their nation' s history, were required to repress the people they had come to "protect" and to protect others who were in fact invaders from Russia. The corruption of "the civil power" in England, from Mr. Balfour's time on, achieved this result. The supreme maxim of Western constitutionalism is that "the civil power" must always be superior to the military one, so that militarist regimes may not arise. But if the civil power yields to the dictates of a secret third party with military aims, it becomes in fact inferior to a military power, though not to its native generals. In this way the supreme maxim is stood on its head, because a nation' s armed forces can then be put at the service of interests alien to, and destructive of, its own. This happened in Palestine.

The repression of native Arabs as "rebels" did not help Zionism in Palestine. At the start of the 1930-1940 decade the rise of Hitler strengthened its position in the lobbies of London and Washington, but this improvement was counterbalanced by the further deterioration which occurred in Palestine itself as the decade wore on. During this later period Dr. Weizmann, who from 1904 to 1919 had concentrated his efforts on the British government extended his activities to two new places; his orbit covered "Jerusalem, London and New York" and he dealt with British prime ministers like a man whittling sticks.

His next victim was, once more, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, who after desertion by his Socialist colleagues became prime minister of a coalition government of all other parties. Young Jimmy Macdonald from Lossiemouth, Scotland's poor boy made good, was by this time Mr. Ramsay Macdonald of the graying, floating hair. He made his son, Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and therewith both Macdonalds left the happy dreamland of Socialist platform oratory for the cold, hard world of "irresistible pressure". Mr. Macdonald again set out to stop the endless fighting and rioting in Palestine, which by this time had claimed many British lives, and soon announced that his government would suspend Zionist immigration, regulate Zionist land purchases, and punish incitements to disorder "in whatever quarter they may originate ".

Mr. Macdonald at once became the object of violent attack and began to wear the bewildered mien for which he became famous (and which I observed when I met him in 1935). He received the visit of Dr. Weizmann and three Zionist associates and was accused of "dealing rather frivolously" with "the moral implications of promises given to Jews" (Dr. Weizmann). Leading politicians in his own country, America and South Africa began a furious campaign against him. Intimidated a second time, he appointed a special Cabinet Committee to reconsider the oft-considered "Palestine policy". A Socialist minister, Mr. Arthur Henderson, was chairman and Mr. Malcolm Macdonald was secretary; Dr. Weizmann and six leading Zionists formed "the committee"; the Arabs, as usual, were not represented.

Dr. Weizmann violently attacked the undertaking to punish incitements to disorder from whatever quarter; disorder, violence and massacre, he said, originated only with the native Arabs. Mr. Macdonald again surrendered in a letter to Dr. Weizmann, under the terms of which Zionist immigration to Palestine in 1934 and 1935 exceeded all previous figures. Having dealt with Mr. Macdonald Dr. Weizmann undertook the grand tour. As the Second War approached he was everywhere, in South Africa, Turkey, France, Italy, Belgium and other lands. In France he met "every premier between the two wars" and of these he found M. Leon Blum, a co-religionist, to be especially sympathetic. M. Aristide Briand, the Foreign Minister, was also well-disposed "although a little vague as to what was going on" (Dr. Weizmann often refers in such terms to the Western politicians who did his bidding). He saw Mussolini three times. He spoke to distinguished audiences about the iniquities of Hitler and told them it was "the responsibility of the civilized world" on this account to expel the Palestinean Arabs (he did not put it so plainly).

Nevertheless, by the later 1930's Zionism in Palestine was disintegrating again. But for the Second War it would have faded into oblivion, an Arabian Jameson Raid undertaken in irresponsibility and ignominiously ended.

In 1936 Arab rioting became even more violent. By then successive British governments for fourteen years, at Zionist behest, had refused to allow the Arabs to hold elections. With time Dr. Weizmann's argument that this refusal was of the essence of "democracy" lost appeal and the British government found itself in an increasingly difficult dilemma. Mr. Stanley Baldwin (after succeeding Mr. Macdonald) resorted to the old "pending-basket" procedure; he sent one more commission of investigation (the fifth?) to Palestine, and at this point the thing became plain farce.

Mr. Macdonald had been cowed by Dr. Weizmann and his bodyguard into cancelling a "Palestine policy" announced after full consultation with his responsible advisers. Now that Mr. Baldwin sent a commission to Palestine to discover an alternative policy it was received by Dr. Weizmann! With agility he hopped from London to Jerusalem and back, telling the British government in London what to do, their Commissioners in Palestine what to report, and the British government in London, again, what it should do with the report when it arrived. (Betweenwhiles he visited New York to arrange for more "pressure" from that quarter).

This Peel Commission received from some quarter a proposal that the eternal dilemma might be solved by partitioning Palestine, and promptly consulted Dr. Weizmann. Until that moment the pretence had been kept up, all through the years, that the Zionists did not claim a Jewish state, only the "national home". Dr. Weizmann knew that if a British government could once be brought to support "partition" it would at last be committed to a separate Jewish state.

His Asiatic mastery of the art of negotiation compels admiration. By invoking the Old Testament he firmly nailed down the idea of partition without committing himself to any boundaries. He said that he might be able to make some concession about the actual area to be taken for his Zionists, as Jehovah had not indicated precise frontiers in his revelations to the Levites. This accepted the offer of territory while leaving the entire question of boundaries open so that even "partition", obviously, was to be no solution. The words with which Dr. Weizmann supported partition are of interest in the light of later events: "The Arabs are afraid that we shall absorb the whole of Palestine. Say what we will about the preservation of their rights, they are dominated by fear and will not listen to reason. A Jewish state with definite boundaries internationally guaranteed would be something final; the transgressing of these boundaries would be an act of war which the Jews would not commit, not merely because of its moral implications, but because it would arouse the whole world against them".

The Peel Commission recommended partition and stated that "the Mandate" was unworkable. Had the British Government acted on that report and promptly withdrawn from Palestine much might have been spared mankind, but within two years the Second World War re-involved it in the insoluble problem.

As it approached Dr. Weizmann continued to beleaguer the Western politicians with the argument that "the Jewish National Home would play a very considerable role in that part of the world as the one reliable ally of the democracies". By this he meant that the Zionist demand for arms for the forcible seizure of Palestine, which was about to be made, would be presented in that way, through the politicians and the press, to the public masses of the West. In 1938 he then proposed to Mr. Ormsby-Gore, British Secretary for the Colonies, that the Zionists should be allowed to form a force of something like 40,000 men. This presupposed that the unnecessary war would come about (an anticipation in which the leading men behind the scenes apparently were all agreed), and Dr. Weizmann did all he could to ensure this, using the case of the Jews as his sole argument. After the murder of von Rath and the anti-Jewish disorders in Germany he told Mr. Anthony Eden:

"If a government is allowed to destroy a whole community which has committed no crime . . . it means the beginning of anarchy and the destruction of the basis of civilization. The powers which stand looking on without taking any measures to prevent the crime will one day be visited by severe punishment".

Hitler's persecution of men was ignored in these private, fateful, interviews in political antechambers; the plight of one "community" alone was advanced as the argument for war. The Zionists, as events have shown, were intent on destroying "a whole community which had committed no crime" (the Arabs of Palestine, who knew nothing of Hitler) and the arms they demanded were used for that purpose. Significantly, Dr. Weizmann put his argument in terms of the Christian creed; under that teaching the destruction of a community innocent of crime is itself a crime which will bring "severe punishment". Under the Levitical Law, however, which Dr. Weizmann invoked as the basis of his demand for Palestine, it is the chief "statute and commandment", to be rewarded by power and treasure, not punished.

In the last twelvemonth before the Second War the secret arbiters of power exerted their maximum effort to gain control of men and events. Mr. Roosevelt was "committed" but could only be made use of at a later stage. In England Mr. Baldwin, the Worcestershire squire and manufacturer, gave way to the Birmingham business-man, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, in whom a serious obstacle to the exercise of "irresistible pressure" behind the scenes arose.

Mr. Chamberlain's name is linked with the final, fatal act of encouragement to Hitler: the abandonment and enforced surrender of Czechoslovakia at Munich. For a few weeks the public masses thought he had saved the peace by this deed and at that moment I, in Budapest and Prague, first understood what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, "I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world of their times".

Nevertheless, Mr. Chamberlain may have calculated that he was compelled to do what he did by the state of British weakness and unpreparedness which his predecessor, Mr. Baldwin, had allowed to come about. I believe he was wrong if he so calculated; even at that late moment firmness would have saved the day, because the German generals were ready to overthrow Hitler; but he may have been honestly convinced that he could not act otherwise. Where he unforgivably erred was in depicting the deed of Munich as something morally right and in bolstering up this contention with allusions to "a small country a long way away with which we have nothing to do", or similar words.

However, he was at least consistent in this last attitude. He wanted to disentangle England from its imbroglio in another small country far away where it had found only tribulation bequeathed to it by Mr. Balfour. What he did incurred the bitter enmity of those who were powerful behind the political scenes, and in my opinion the true source of his overthrow may have been the same as that of Mr. Asquith in 1916.

1938, when the word "partition" rang out, was the bloodiest year in Palestine up to that time; 1500 Arabs were killed. The Peel Commission had recommended partition but could not suggest how it might be effected. Yet another body of investigators was sent out, this time in search of a means of bisecting the infant without killing it. This Woodhead Commission reported in October 1938 that it could not devise a practical plan; in November the von Rath murder and the anti-Jewish disorders which followed it in Germany were used by the Zionists to intensify their incitements against the Arabs in Palestine.

Mr. Chamberlain then did an extraordinary thing, by the standards prevailing. He called a Palestine conference in London at which the Arabs (for the first time since the Peace Conference of 1919) were represented. From this conference emerged the White Paper of March 1939 in which the British government undertook "the establishment within ten years of an independent Palestine state" and "the termination of the Mandate". In this state the native Arabs and immigrant Zionists were to share the government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community were safeguarded. Jewish immigration was to be limited to 75,000 annually for five years and the irrevocable land-purchases were to be restricted.

This plan, if carried out, meant peace in Palestine at last, but no separate Jewish state. At that moment the figure of Mr. Winston Churchill advanced to the forefront of British affairs. He had for ten years been in political eclipse and the future student may be interested to know what contemporaries have already forgotten: that during this period he was a highly unpopular man, not because of any specific acts or quality, but because he was consistently given that "bad press" which is the strongest weapon in the hands of those who control political advancement. This organized hostility was made particularly plain during the abdication crisis of 1937, when his pleas for time received much more bitter attack than they inherently deserved and he was howled down in the House of Commons. His biographers depict him as suffering from depression during these years and thinking himself "finished" politically. His feeling in that respect may be reflected in his published words (privately written) to Mr. Bernard Baruch early in 1939: "War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you will be in it. You will be running the show over there, but I will be on the sidelines over here".

Very soon after he wrote this Mr. Churchill's political fortunes took a sudden turn for the better and (as in the case of Mr. Lloyd George in 1916) his attitude towards Zionism appears to have had much to do with this, to judge from what has been published. His record in this matter suggests that Mr. Churchill, the product of Blenheim and Brooklyn, is something of "a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma", to use the words employed by him about the Communist state in 1939. In 1906, as has been shown, he was among the earliest of the politicians who supported Zionism on the hustings, so that a Zionist speaker said any Jew who voted against him was a traitor. However, in office during the First War he took little part in that affair and Dr. Weizmann only mentions him once at that period, and then not as a "friend". Then, as Colonial Secretary in 1922, he gave offence to Zion by his White Paper, which Dr. Weizmann calls "a serious whittling down of the Balfour Declaration". It proposed for Palestine "a Legislative Council with a majority of elected members", and this would have meant, not only holding those elections which Dr. Weizmann to the end forbade, but allowing the native Arabs of Palestine to govern their own country!

Thus Mr. Churchill's ten years in the political wilderness, 1929-1939, were also ones during which he was in disfavour with the Zionists and Dr. Weizmann's narrative never mentions him until the eve of the Second War, when he is suddenly "discovered" (as the playwrights used to say) in it as a most ardent champion of Zionism. This is the more curious because, as late as October 20, 1938, Mr. Churchill was still talking like the author of the White Paper of 1922: "We should . . . give to the Arabs a solemn assurance. . . that the annual quota of Jewish immigration should not exceed a certain figure for a period of at least ten years". Very soon after that he re-emerges in Dr. Weizmann's account as a man implicitly and privately agreed to support a Zionist immigration of millions.

Quite suddenly Dr. Weizmann says that in 1939 he "met Mr. Winston Churchill" (ignored in his story for seventeen years) "and he told me he would take part in the debate, speaking of course against the Proposed White Paper". The reader is left to guess why Mr. Churchill should have undertaken "of course" to speak against a document which, in its emphasis on the need to do justice to the Arabs, was in accord with his own White Paper of 1922 and with his speeches for seventeen years after it.

Then, on the day of this debate, Dr. Weizmann was invited to lunch with Mr. Churchill "who read his speech out to us" and asked if Dr. Weizmann had any changes to suggest. The reader will recall that editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian wrote editorial articles about Zionism after consultation with the chieftain of one interested party; now Mr. Churchill approached a debate on a major issue of state policy in the same manner. He was renowned for the quality of his speeches, and became so in America on account of the strange fact (as it was considered there) that he wrote them himself. However, in the circumstances above described by Dr. Weizmann, the point of actual penmanship appears of minor importance.

At that moment Mr. Churchill's "championship" (Dr. Weizmann) was vain; the great debate ended in victory for Mr. Chamberlain and his White Paper by a majority of 268 to 179. It was substantial, but many politicians already smelt the wind and their sail-trimming instinct is reflected in the unusually large number of abstentions: 110. This gave the first warning to Mr. Chamberlain of the method, of dereliction within his own party, by which he was to be overthrown. The debate showed another interesting thing, namely, that the Opposition party by this time held Zionism to be a supreme tenet of its policy, and, indeed, the ultimate test by which a man could prove whether he was a "Socialist" or not! The rising Socialist party had long forgotten the wrongs of the working man, the plight of the oppressed and the sad lot of "the underdog"; it was caught up in international intrigue and wanted to be on the side of the top-dog. Thus Mr. Herbert Morrison, a Socialist leader, pointed accusingly at Mr. Malcolm Macdonald (whose department was closely identified with the White Paper) and mourned the heresy of a man who "was once a Socialist". Socialism, too, by this time meant driving Arabs out of Palestine, and the trade union notables, with their presentation gold watches, did not care how poor or oppressed those distant people were.

The Second War broke out very soon after the issuance of the White Paper and the debate. At once all thought of "establishing an independent Palestine" and "terminating the Mandate" was suspended, for the duration of the war (and at its end a very different picture was to be unveiled). At its start Mr. Roosevelt in America was "publicly and privately committed" to support Zionism (Mr. Harry Hopkins). In England Mr. Chamberlain was an impediment, but he was on his way out. Mr. Churchill was on his way in. The people wanted him, because he was "the man who had been right" about Hitler and the war; they knew nothing of his talks with Dr. Weizmann and the effects these might produce.

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Chapter 39


THE ARMING OF ZION

For six years the grappling masses surged to and fro over three continents, and at the end those who thought themselves the victors were further from the Holy Grail than at the start; at the victor-politicians' parleys the cock crowed a second time. Three decades earlier President Wilson had striven to cry that "the causes and objects are obscure . . . the objects of the statesmen on both sides are virtually the same", and the outcome justified him. The German leaders then had decided to "foment" and Mr. House to "support" the world-revolution; the Zionists kept their headquarters in Berlin as long as they thought that a victorious Germany might set up the "Jewish homeland" in Palestine, and only transferred them when victory was seen to lie with the West.

The Second War again bore out the truth of Mr. Wilson's stifled cry. It could not have begun at all without the complicity of the world-revolution in the onslaught of the new "madman in Berlin", and the peoples then overrun could discern no difference between the Communist and the Nazi oppression. Then, when the two turned against each other, Mr. Hopkins (in Mr. House's stead) began to "support" the world-revolution again, so that victory could bring no "liberation". Hitler wanted to re-segregate the Jews; Mr. Brandeis in America similarly, and imperially, decreed that "No Jew must live in Germany". Mr. Churchill desired that "three or four million Jews" should be transplanted to Palestine; the Communist state, by profession anti-Zionist, supplied the first contingent of these. When the smoke of battle cleared only three purposes had been achieved, none of them disclosed at its start: the world-revolution, with Western arms and support, had advanced to the middle of Europe; Zionism had been armed to establish itself in Palestine by force; the "world-government", obviously the result which these two convergent forces were intended to produce, had been set up anew in embryo form, this time in New York. The war behind the war was the true one; it was fought to divert the arms, manpower and treasure of the West to these purposes. Through the dissolving fog of war the shape of the great "design" first revealed by Weishaupt's paper, and exposed again in the Protocols, showed clear.

When the war began the intention to abandon the unworkable "Mandate" and withdraw from Palestine, after ensuring the equitable representation of all parties there, was official British policy, approved by Parliament. The Zionists saw that no British government, in any foreseeable future, could be brought to perform the actual deed of assassination: that is to say, to expel the Arabs from their own Palestine by arms. They set about to obtain arms for themselves under cover of the war.

The war was hardly begun when Dr. Weizmann appeared in Mr. Churchill's office. Unknown to the general public, this remarkable man for thirty-three years (from the day of his interview with Mr. Balfour) had exercised mastery over the politicians of England and America. His person cannot have inspired such awe, so that they must have seen in him the representative of a force which cowed them; the one which Dr. Kastein called "the Jewish international" and Mr. Neville Chamberlain "international Jewry".

Mr. Churchill, returned to office after ten years as First Lord of the Admiralty, presumably should have been absorbed by the war at sea, but Dr. Weizmann was concerned with other things. He said, "after the war we would want to build up a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine" and states that Mr. Churchill replied, "Yes, indeed, I quite agree with that". Mr. Churchill, twelve months earlier, had called for "solemn assurances" to the Arabs that Zionist immigration would be regulated and restricted. Even today, in 1956, Palestine has but 1,600,000 Jews and a state of permanent warfare exists in Arabia in consequence of their introduction; if their number is to be doubled or trebled the shape of the future is apparent and Mr. Churchill, in 1939, presumably saw it.

Mr. Churchill then had no responsibility for Palestine. Dr. Weizmann evidently expected that Mr. Churchill would soon be Prime Minister. He then went to America and expounded his plan to President Roosevelt, finding him "interested" but cautious (his third election campaign impended), and returned to England, where Mr. Churchill had supplanted Mr. Chamberlain in the highest office.

Thus the situation of 1916 was recreated, with a small difference. Mr. Lloyd George was required to divert British armies to Palestine, for the initial conquest of the coveted land, and did so. Mr. Churchill was asked to divert arms to the Zionists there so that they could establish themselves, and sought to comply. Indeed, he had been giving orders in that sense for five months when he next saw Dr. Weizmann, and records them in appendices to his war memoirs.

He became prime minister on May 10, 1940 as France collapsed and the British island stood alone, defended only by the remnant of its air forces and its navy; the army had been destroyed in France. On May 23 he instructed his Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd, that the British troops in Palestine should be withdrawn and "the Jews armed in their own defence and properly organized as speedily as possible". He repeated the order on May 29 (while the evacuation from Dunkirk was in progress) and on June 2. On June 6 he complained of military opposition to it, and at the end of June of "difficulties" with two responsible ministers, particularly Lord Lloyd ("who was a convinced anti-Zionist and pro-Arab; I wished to arm the Jewish colonists".

Thus the matter was already being discussed in terms, not of national interest, but of "pro" this and "anti" that, the language of the soap-box. Mr. Churchill continued in this strain, telling Lord Lloyd that the large numbers of troops in Palestine were "the price we have to pay for the anti-Jewish policy which has been persisted in for some years" (the policy of his own White Paper of 1922). If the Jews were properly armed, he said, British troops would be released for service elsewhere "and there would be no danger of the Jews attacking the Arabs". He refused to acquaint Parliament with the views of the responsible minister: "I could certainly not associate myself with such an answer as you have drawn up for me".

At that moment arms were more precious than diamonds in England. The armies rescued from France were without weapons and disorganized; Mr. Churchill records that the whole island contained barely 500 field guns and 200 tanks of any age or kind; months later he was still urgently appealing to President Roosevelt for 250,000 rifles for "trained and uniformed men" who had none. In those days I scoured the countryside to obtain, at last, a forty-year old pistol which would fire only single shots. Mr. Churchill's rousing words about fighting forever on the beaches and in the streets and never giving up did not thrill me, because I knew that, if an invasion once gained foothold, they were empty; men cannot fight tanks with bare hands. The unarmed state of the land was dire. I should have been bewildered had I known that Mr. Churchill, at such a time, gave his mind so persistently to the arming of Zionists in Palestine.

The danger of invasion was receding when Dr. Weizmann next saw Mr. Churchill, in August 1940. He then proposed that the Zionists should form an army of 50,000 men, and in September presented Mr. Churchill with "a five-point programme", the main point of which was "the recruitment of the greatest possible number of Jews in Palestine for the fighting services". He says that Mr. Churchill "consented to this programme".

Lord Lloyd (like Sir William Robertson, Mr. Edwin Montagu and many others in the First War) fought hard to avert all this. He was pursued by the untimely fate which dogged many of the men who tried to do their duty in this matter: he died in 1941, aged only 62. However, responsible officials and soldiers never ceased to try and restrain the "top-line politicians" from this new diversion. Dr. Weizmann complains that, despite Mr. Churchill's support, "exactly four years were to pass before, in September 1944, the Jewish Brigade was officially formed", and attributes this delay to the obstinate resistance of "experts" (his word). Mr. Churchill similarly complained: "I wished to arm the Jews at Telaviv . . . Here I encountered every kind of resistance" (July 1940, just before the air attack on Britain began).

Dr. Weizmann evidently thought the time was come to subdue this resistance by "pressure" from another quarter, for in the spring of 1941, he went again to America. At this time (as in the First War) he was nominally giving the British "war effort" the benefit of his scientific knowledge, on this occasion in the field of isoprene. He says he was "absorbed in the work", but he contrived to make himself free from it and, as he was Dr. Weizmann, no difficulties arose about crossing the Atlantic in wartime.

The ground had been prepared for him in America, where Rabbi Stephen Wise was instructing President Roosevelt (as he had instructed the long-dead President Wilson) about his duty towards Zionism: "On May 13, 1941 I found it necessary to send the president firsthand reports from Palestine" (the rabbi' s firsthand reports about a "reported" pogrom in 1933 had produced the boycott in New York) "and write about the imperilled status of the unarmed Jews . . . The British Government ought to be made to understand how enormous would be the shock and how damaging its effect upon the democratic cause, if there should be a general slaughter because of failure adequately to arm the Jews as well as to strengthen the defences of Palestine with guns, tanks and planes".

The president replied, "I can merely call to the attention of the British our deep interest in the defence of Palestine and our concern for the defence of the Jewish population there; and, as best I can, supply the British forces with the material means by which the maximum protection to Palestine will be afforded". Equipped with this letter (as Dr. Weizmann once with a report of an interview written on British Foreign Office letter-paper) Rabbi Stephen Wise "the next day left for Washington, and after conference with high government officials felt more confident that the British would be made to understand that there must be adequate equipment (guns, tanks and planes) for our people in Palestine. . . And probably thanks to the intervention of Mr. Roosevelt, the business of parity had been dropped to a large extent" (the last allusion is to the insistence of responsible British administrators that, if arms were being handed around, Arabs and Zionists in equal numbers should be armed in Palestine; even Mr. Churchill had found difficulty in resisting this proposal).

These Zionist potentates in the various countries applied "irresistible pressure on international politics" in perfect synchronization. If London lagged in compliance, it was "made to understand" by Washington; had the positions been reversed the procedure would have been the opposite. Thus the mechanism had been well oiled when Dr. Weizmann arrived and he soon satisfied himself that "the top political leaders" showed "real sympathy for our Zionist aspirations".

In Washington, as in London, he found the responsible officials a nuisance: "The trouble always began when it came to the experts in the State Department". Below the "top-line politician" in Washington level ministers and high officials, and in Palestine American professors, missionaries and businessmen, all tried to keep American state policy free of this incubus. The chief responsible official in Washington is described by Dr. Weizmann in the identical terms used by Mr. Churchill to Lord Lloyd: "The head of the Eastern Division of the State Department was an avowed anti-Zionist and pro-Arab"; this indicates the original source of political vocabulary at the top level.

Dr. Weizmann realized that from this period on Washington was the place whence pressure might best be maintained on London, and early in 1942 transferred himself thither. His liberation from the scientific work which "absorbed" him in England was easily arranged, President Roosevelt discovering that Dr. Weizmann was urgently needed in America to work on the problem of synthetic rubber. The American Ambassador in London, Mr. John G. Winant, scented trouble and "earnestly advised" Dr. Weizmann, when he reached America, to devote himself "as completely as possible to chemistry". Mr. Winant was alarmed about the consequences of all these machinations, and foreboding eventually broke him; his death, soon afterwards, was of tragic nature. As for his counsel, Dr. Weizmann remarks that "actually, I divided my time almost equally between science and Zionism", and if that was so "chemistry" came off better than any who knew Dr. Weizmann would have expected.

Before he left he "dropped in" at Ten Downing Street, where by 1942 he had been on dropping-in terms for nearly thirty years, to bid goodbye to Mr. Churchill's secretary, as he says. Not surprisingly, he saw Mr. Churchill, who said (according to Dr. Weizmann):

"When the war is over, I would like to see Ibn Saud made lord of the Middle East, the boss of the bosses, provided he settles with you . . . of course we shall help you. Keep this confidential, but you might talk it over with Roosevelt when you get to America. There's nothing he and I cannot do if we set our minds on it". (Dr. Weizmann, after the interview, made a note of this confidence and gave it to the Zionist political secretary with instructions to disclose it to the Zionist executive if anything befell Dr. Weizmann; also, he published it in his later book).

Mr. Churchill erred if he expected Dr. Weizmann to help set up an Arabian "lord of the Middle East", for that potentateship is obviously reserved to Zionism. Hence Dr. Weizmann did not even convey Mr. Churchill's message when he saw President Roosevelt and talked only about his scientific work. In other quarters he pressed for "America to send the maximum number of planes and tanks to that theatre" (Africa, where they would be most accessible to the Zionists in Palestine). At this stage he began close co-operation with Mr. Henry Morgenthau, junior, of the president's inner circle, who was to prove of "peculiar assistance" at the later, decisive moment.

Dr. Weizmann again encountered irritating hindrances: "Our difficulties were not connected with the first-rank statesmen. These had, for by far the greatest part, always understood our aspirations, and their statements in favour of the Jewish National Home really constitute a literature. It was always behind the scenes, and on the lower levels, that we encountered an obstinate, devious and secretive opposition. . . All the information supplied from the Middle East to the authorities in Washington worked against us".

For nearly forty years, at that time, Dr. Weizmann had worked "behind the scenes", deviously and in secret; history shows no comparable case. At one more behind-the-scenes meeting with President Roosevelt he then imparted Mr. Churchill's message, or rather (according to his own account) a different one: he said Mr. Churchill had assured him that "the end of the war would see a change in the status of the Jewish National Home, and that the White Paper of 1939 would go". He describes this as Mr. Churchill's "plan" but it is not the message previously quoted, although it might depict Mr. Churchill's mind. What is significant is that Dr. Weizmann omitted Mr. Churchill's main proposal, to make King Ibn Saoud "lord of the Middle East . . . provided he settles with you".

Dr. Weizmann says that President Roosevelt's response to Mr. Churchill's plan (as thus misrepresented to him) was "completely affirmative", which in Zionese means that he said "Yes" to a Jewish state ("a change in the status of the Jewish National Home"). The president, according to Dr. Weizmann, then himself introduced the name of Ibn Saoud, and showed himself "aware of the Arab problem". Dr. Weizmann, if his account is correct, did not then say that Mr. Churchill recommended "a settlement" with Ibn Saoud. On the contrary, Dr. Weizmann "maintained the thesis that we could not rest our cause on the consent of the Arabs". .

That was the opposite of Mr. Churchill's envisaged "settlement" and was specific: it meant war against the Arabs and American support for such a war. Thereon Mr. Roosevelt merely "again assured me of his sympathies and of his desire to settle the problem".

There is some mystery in this reserve of President Roosevelt in the matter of "the Arab problem" which might have had important consequences had he not died, two years later, almost immediately after meeting Ibn Saoud. However, what he cautiously said and privately thought was no longer of vital importance in 1943, because the real decision had been taken. Behind the scenes, under cover of a war in Europe, arms were on their way to the Zionists, and this secret process was to determine the shape of the future. From this moment neither the top-line politicians, if they rebelled, nor the hard-pressed responsible officials had the power to prevent Zionism from planting in Palestine a time-bomb which may yet blow up the second half of the 20th Century.

For the time being Dr. Weizmann, in July 1943, returned to London, assured that "pressure" from Washington would be maintained.

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Chapter 40


THE INVASION OF AMERICA

While military invasions and counter-invasions multiplied during the six years of the Second War, absorbing all thought and energy of the masses locked in combat, a silent invasion went on which produced more momentous effects than the armed ones. This was the political invasion of the American Republic and its success was shown by the shape of American state policy at the war's end, which was so directed as to ensure that the only military invasions that yielded enduring "territorial gains" were those of the revolution into Europe and of the Zionists into Arabia. Historically surveyed, Mr. Roosevelt's achievement may now be seen to have been threefold and in each respect perilous to his country' s future: he helped to arm Zionism, he armed the revolution in its Moscow citadel, and he opened the doors of his American citadel to its agents.

He began the process at the start of his presidency by his recognition of the Soviet, when the ambassador of the revolution, Maxim Litvinoff, undertook that the revolutionary state would keep its nose out of American domestic affairs; Mr. Roosevelt's mentors were not the men to remind him that when once the fox gets in his nose he'll soon find ways to make his body follow. The story of his support of the revolutionary state by money and arms belongs to a later chapter; this one aims to tell the tale of its penetration of the American Republic on its own soil during his long presidency.

Mr. Roosevelt began by breaking down the barriers against uncontrolled immigration which the Congresses immediately before him strove to set up, because they saw in it the danger of the capture of the American administration by "a foreign group". Under various of his edicts the supervision of immigration was greatly weakened. Immigration officials were forbidden to put questions about Communist associations, and the separate classification of Jewish immigrants was discontinued. This was supported by a continuous press campaign against all demands for enquiry into loyalty or political record as "discrimination against the foreign-born".

None can say how many people entered the United States during that period. By 1952 Senator Pat McCarran, chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, estimated that, apart from legal immigration, five million aliens had illegally entered the country, including large numbers of "militant Communists, Sicilian bandits and other criminals". The chief investigating officer of the Immigration Service declined even to estimate the number of illegal entrants but said that at that time (when some measure of control had been re-established) "over half a million a year" were being intercepted and sent back at the Mexican border alone. The Social Security authorities, who supplied the cards necessary to obtain employment, were forbidden to give any information about applicants to the immigration or police authorities.

This mass of immigrants went to swell the size of the "fluctuating vote" on which Mr. Roosevelt's party (still following Mr. House's strategy) concentrated its electoral effort and its cry of "no discrimination". Under the president's restrictions on loyalty-interrogations the way into the civil service and armed forces was opened to American-born or legally-domiciled alien Communists. The results to which this led were shown in part by the many exposures of the post-war period, the literature of which would fill an encyclopaedia of many volumes. The entire West was also involved (as the Canadian, British and Australian exposures in time showed) and the significant thing is that, with the Canadian exception, no governmental investigation ever led to these partial revelations, which were always the work of persistent private remonstrants; nor was genuine remedial action ever taken, so that the state of affairs brought about during the 1930's and 1940's today continues not much changed, a source of grave weakness to the West in any new war.

The renewal of large-scale immigration formed the background to the political invasion of the Republic. This was a three-pronged movement which aimed at the capture of the three vital points of a state's defences: state policy at the top level, the civil services at the middle level and "public opinion" or the mass-mind at the base. The way in which control over acts of state policy was achieved (through the "adviserships" which became part of American political life after 1913) has already been shown, this part of the process having preceded the others. The methods used to attempt the capture of government services will be discussed later in this chapter. In what immediately follows the capture of the mass-mind in America, through control of published information, will be described; it was indispensable to the other two thrusts.

This form of political invasion is called by Dr. Weizmann, who exhaustively studied it in his youth, when he was preparing in Russia for his life's work in the west, "the technique of propaganda and the approach to the masses". The operation so described may now be studied in actual operation:

Far back in this book the reader was invited to note that "B'nai B'rith" put out a shoot. B'nai B'rith, until then, might be compared with such groups of other religious affiliation as the Young Men's Christian Association or the Knights of Columbus; its declared objects were the help of the poor, sick and fatherless and good works in general. The little offshoot of 1913, the "Anti-Defamation League", had by 1947 become a secret police of formidable power in America.*

In Doublespeak "anti-defamation" means "defamation" and this body lived by calumny, using such terms as anti-semite, fascist, rabble-rouser, Jew-baiter, Red-baiter, paranoiac, lunatic, madman, reactionary, diehard, bigot and more of the like. The vocabulary is fixed and may be traced back to the attacks on Barruel, Robison and Morse after the French revolution; the true nature of any writer's or newspaper's allegiance may be detected by keeping count of the number of times these trade-mark words are used. The achievement of this organization (usually known as the AD.L.) has been by iteration to make fetishes of them, so that party politicians hasten to deny that they are any of these things. Under this regime reasoned debate became outlawed; there is something of sorcery in this subjugation of two generations of Western men to the mumbo-jumbo of Asiatic conspirators.

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* In fact though not in form. The secret police in countries where the institution is native (Hitler's Gestapo was copied from the Asiatic model, which had a century-old tradition in Russia and Turkey) have the entire power and resources of the state behind them; indeed, they are the state. In America Zionism built the nucleus of a secret police nearly as effective in many ways as those prototypes. It could only become equally effective if it gained full control of the state's resources, including the power of arrest and imprisonment, and in my judgment that was the ultimate goal.
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When the A.D.L. was born in 1913 it had merely desk-room in the parent B'nai B'rith office and a tiny budget. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown wrote, "Through the intervention of the A.D.L. we have succeeded in muzzling the non-Jewish press to the extent that newspapers in America abstain from pointing out that any person unfavourably referred to is a Jew". In 1948 the Jewish Menorah Journal of New York wrote, "Should but one phrase in a reprinted literary classic reflect unjustly upon Jews, the A.D.L. will promptly belabour the innocent publisher until he bowdlerizes the offending passage. Let one innocent movie-producer incorporate a Jewish prototype, however inoffensive, in his picture and the hue and cry raised by the A.D.L. will make him wish he's never heard of Jews. But when Jews are subtly propagandized into accepting Communist doctrine . . . the A.D.L. remains silent. No word, no warning, no hint of caution, much less exposure and condemnation: although there are men high in the councils of the organization who should know by their own experience how the Communists 'infiltrate'." (The Menorah Journal spoke for the many Jews who were alarmed because the A.D.L. was attacking anti-Communism as anti-semitism).

These quotations show th