THE CONTROVERSY OF ZION
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 32
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 32
THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN
The simultaneous triumphs of Bolshevism in Moscow and Zionism in London in the same week of
1917 were only in appearance distinct events, The identity of their original source has been shown in an
earlier chapter, and the hidden men who promoted Zionism through the Western governments also
supported the world-revolution. The two forces fulfilled correlative tenets of the ancient Law: "Pull down
and destroy . . . rule over all nations"; the one destroyed in the East and the other secretly ruled in the West.
1917 gave proof of Disraeli's dictum about the revolution in its 1848 phase, when he said that Jews
headed "every one" of the secret societies and aimed to destroy Christianity. The controlling group that
emerged in 1917 was so preponderantly Jewish that it may be called Jewish. The nature of the instigating
force then became a matter of historical fact, not of further polemical debate. It was further identified by its
deeds: the character of its earliest enactments, a symbolic mockery of Christianity, and a special mark of
authorship deliberately given to the murder of the monarch. All these bore the traits of a Talmudic
vengeance.
In the forty years that have passed great efforts have been made to suppress public knowledge of this
fact, which has been conclusively established, by non-sequential rebukes to any who claim to discuss history.
For instance, in the 1950's an able (and deservedly respected) Jewish writer in America, Mr. George Sokolsky,
in criticizing a book previously cited wrote, "It is impossible to read it without reaching the conclusion that
Professor Beaty seeks to prove that Communism is a Jewish movement". In respect of the leadership it was
that for a long period before 1917 (as to later and the present situation, subsequent chapters will look at the
evidence). It was not a conspiracy of all Jews, but neither were the French revolution, Fascism and National
Socialism conspiracies of all Frenchmen, Italians or Germans. The organizing force and the leadership were
drawn from the Talmudic-controlled Jewish areas of Russia, and in that sense Communism was demonstrably
Eastern Jewish.
As to the purposes revealed when the revolution struck in 1917, these showed that it was not episodic
or spontaneous but the third "eruption" of the organization first revealed through Weishaupt. The two main
features reappeared: the attack on all legitimate government of any kind whatsoever and on religion. Since
1917 the world-revolution has had to cast aside the earlier pretence of being directed only against "kings" or
the political power of priests.
One authority of that period knew and stated this. In the tradition of Edmund Burke and John
Robison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and Disraeli, Mr. Winston Churchill wrote:
"It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate
among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. . .
From the days of 'Spartacus' Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun
(Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the
overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and
impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown,
a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive
movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great
cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in
the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very
great one; it probably outweighs all others".
This is the last candid statement (discoverable by me) from a leading public man on this question.
After it the ban on public discussion came down and the great silence ensued, which continues to this day. In
1953 Mr. Churchill refused permission (requisite under English law) for a photostat to be made of this article
(Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920), without saying why.
The fact of Jewish leadership was a supremely important piece of knowledge and the later suppression of it, where public debate would have been sanative, produced immense effects in weakening the West. The formulation of any rational State policy becomes impossible when such major elements of knowledge are excluded from public discussion; it is like playing billiards with twisted cues and elliptical balls. The strength of the conspiracy is shown by its success in this matter (as in the earlier period, of Messrs. Robison, Barruel and Morse) more than by any other thing.
At the time, the facts were available. The British Government's White Paper of 1919 (Russia, No. 1, a Collection of Reports on Bolshevism) quoted the report sent to Mr. Balfour in London in 1918 by the Netherlands Minister at Saint Petersburg, M. Oudendyk: "Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things". The United States Ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, reported similarly: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying. to start a worldwide social revolution". M. Oudendyke's report was deleted from later editions of the British official publication and all such authentic documents of that period are now difficult to obtain. Fortunately for the student, one witness preserved the official record.
This was Mr. Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution. The French edition of his book included the official Bolshevik lists of the membership of the ruling revolutionary bodies (they were omitted from the English edition).
These records show that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians(including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprized 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People's Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919, were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly "Socialist" or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of "opposition" was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Czar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. All the names are given in the original documents reproduced by Mr. Wilton. (In parentheses, the composition of the two short-lived Bolshevik governments outside Russia in 1918-1919, namely those of Hungary and Bavaria, was similar).
Mr. Wilton made a great and thankless effort to tell newspaper readers what went on in Russia (broken, he survived only a few years and died in his fifties). He did hot choose the task of reporting the most momentous event that ever came in any journilist's path of duty; it devolved on him. Educated in Russia, he knew the country and its language perfectly, and was held in high esteem by the Russians and the British Embassy alike. He watched the rioting from the window of The Times office, adjoining the Prefecture where the ministers of the collapsing regime took refuge. Between the advent of the Kerensky government in the spring of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, his duty was to report an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs: the rise of a Jewish regime to despotic supremacy in Russia and to overt control of the world-revolution. At that moment he was made to realize that he would not be allowed faithfully to report the fact.
The secret story is told, with surprising candour, in the Official History of his paper, The Times, published in 1952. It shows the hidden mechanism which operated, as early as 1917, to prevent the truth about the revolution reaching the peoples of the West.
This volume pays tribute to the quality of Mr. Wilton's reporting, and his standing in Russia, before 1917. Then the tone of the references to him abruptly changes. Mr. Wilton's early warnings of what was to come in 1917, says the book, "did not at once affect the policy of the paper, partly because their writer did not command full confidence".
Why, if his earlier work and reputation were so good? The reason transpires. The narrative continues that Mr. Wilton began to complain about the "burking" or suppression of his messages. Then The Times began to publish articles about Russia from men who had little knowledge of that country. As a result the editorial articles about Russia took on the tone, exasperating to Mr. Wilton, with which newspaper-readers became familiar in the following decades: "those who believe in the future of Russia as a free and efficient democracy will watch the vindication of the new regime with patient confidence and earnest sympathy". (Every incident of Mr. Wilton's experience in Moscow, which Colonel Repington was sharing in London, was repeated in my own experience, and in that of other correspondents, in Berlin in 1933-1938).
The "interregnum of five months began, during which a Jewish regime was to take over from Kerensky. At this very moment his newspaper lost "confidence" in Mr. Wilton. Why? The explanation emerges. The Official History of The Times says, "It was not happy for Wilton that one of his messages . . . should spread to Zionist circles, and even into the Foreign Office, the idea that he was an anti-semite" .
"Zionist circles", the reader will observe; not even "Communist circles"; here the working partnership becomes plain. Why should "Zionists" (who wanted the British government to procure them "a homeland" in Palestine) be affronted because a British correspondent in Moscow reported that a Jewish regime was preparing to take over in Russia? Mr. Wilton was reporting the nature of the coming regime; this was his job. In the opinion of "Zionists", this was "anti-semitism", and the mere allegation was enough to destroy "confidence" in him at his head office. How, then, could he have remained "happy" and have retained "confidence". Obviously, only by misreporting events in Russia. In effect, he was expected not to mention the determining fact of the day's news!
When I read this illuminating account I wondered by what route "Zionist circles" had spread to "the Foreign Office", and the Foreign Office to Printing House Square the "idea" that Mr. Wilton was "an antisemite". The researcher, like the lonely prospector, learns to expect little for much toil, but in this case I was startled by the large nugget of truth which I found in The Times Official History thirty-five years after the event. It said that "the head of propaganda at the Foreign Office sent to the Editor a paper by one of his staff" repeating the "allegation", (which apparently was first printed in some Zionist sheet). The Official History revealed even the identity of this assiduous "one".
It was a young Mr. Reginald Leeper, who three decades later (as Sir Reginald) became British Ambassador in Argentina. I then looked to Who's Who for information about Mr. Leeper's career and found that his first recorded employment began (when he was twenty-nine) in 1917: "entered International Bureau, Department of Information in 1917". Mr. Leeper's memorandum about Mr. Wilton was sent to The Times early in May 1917. Therefore, if he entered the Foreign Office on New Year's day of 1917, he had been in it just four months when he conveyed to The Times his "allegation" about the exceptionally qualified Mr. Wilton, of seventeen years service with that paper, and the effect was immediate; the Official History says that Mr. Wilton's despatches thereafter, during the decisive period, either miscarried or "were ignored". (The editor was the same of whom Colonel Repington complained in 1917-1918 and to whom the present writer sent his resignation in 1938 on the same basic principle of reputable journalism.)
Mr. Wilton Struggled on for a time, continually protesting against the "burking" and suppression of his despatches, and then as his last service to truthful journalism put all that he knew into his book. He recognized and recorded the acts which identified the especial nature of the regime: the law against "antisemitism", the anti-Christian measures, the canonization of Judas Iscariot, and the Talmudic fingerprint mockingly left in the death-chamber of the Romanoffs.
The law against "anti-semitism" (which cannot be defined) was in itself a fingerprint. An illegal government, predominantly Jewish, by this measure warned the Russian masses, under pain of death, not to interest themselves in the origins of the revolution. It meant in effect that the Talmud became the law of Russia, and in the subsequent four decades this law has in effect and in growing degree been made part of the structure of the west.
The short-lived anti-Christian deeds of the French phase of the revolution reappeared in more open form. The dynamiting of churches and the installation of an anti-God museum in the Cathedral of Saint Basil were the most ostentatious indications of the nature of the regime, which Mr. Wilton indicated: "Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater". This was plain reporting, and if the report had related to "Ukrainians", for instance, instead of "Jews", none would have objected; the mere act of reporting a fact became the ground for secret denunciation because the fact related to Jews.
The memorial to Judas Iscariot, recorded by Mr. Wilton, was another deliberate intimation to Christendom. If the Jewish rulers merely wanted to bring about an egalitarian society in 1917, there was no relevance in bestowing a halo of heroism on a deed of AD 29; the revolution in Russia cannot be understood at all unless the symbolism of this act is comprehended.
The aspect of a Talmudic vengeance on "the heathen" was unmistakably given to the massacres of hat period. In August 1918 a Jew, Kannegisser, shot a Jew, Uritsky; thereon a Jew, Peters, at the head of the Petrograd Cheka ordered "mass terror" on Russians and another Jew, Zinovieff, demanded that ten million Russians be "annihilated"; the British Government's White Book on Bolshevism (1919) records the massacre of Russian peasants which followed.
By far the most significant act was the form given to the murder of the Romanov family. But for Mr. Wilton this story would never have reached the world, which to this day might believe that the Czar's wife and children ended their lives naturally in "protective" custody.
The Czar acted constitutionally to the end, abdicating at the advice of his ministers (March 5, 1917). Thereafter (during the Kerensky period and its first aftermath) he was relatively well treated for a year as the prisoner at Tobolsk of a Russian commandant and Russian guards. In April 1918, when the Jewish regime had gained control, he was transferred, by order from Moscow, to Ekaterinburg. The Russian guards were then withdrawn and their place inside his prison house was taken by men whose identity has never been established: The local Russians later recalled them as "Letts" (the only foreign-speaking Red soldiers known to them), but they seem to have been brought from Hungary.
The Russian commandant's place was taken by a Jew, Yankel Yurovsky (July 7). That completed a
chain of Jewish captors from the top, Moscow, through the regional Urals Soviet, to his prison at
Ekaterinburg (which is in the Urals). The real ruler of Russia then was the terrorist Yankel Sverdloff,
president of the Moscow Cheka, who was a Jew. The Ekaterinburg Cheka was run by seven Jews, one of
them Yankel Yurovsky. On July 20 the Urals Soviet announced that it had shot the Czar and sent his wife
and son to "a place of security". The Moscow Cheka issued a similar announcement, signed by Sverdloff,
"approving the action of the Regional Soviet of the Urals". At that time the entire family was dead.
The truth only became known through the chance that Ekaterinburg fell to the White armies on July 25, that Mr. Wilton accompanied them, and that their commander, General Diterichs, a famous Russian criminologist, M. Sokoloff, and Mr. Wilton uncovered the buried evidence. When the White troops withdrew Mr. Wilton brought away the proofs; they appear in his book and include many photographs.
The murders had been carried out by order from and in constant consultation with Sverdloff in Moscow; records of telephone conversations between him and the Chekists in Ekaterinburg were found. Among these was a report to him from Ekaterinburg saying "Yesterday a courier left with the documents that interest you". This courier was the chief assassin, Yurovsky, and the investigators believed that the "documents" were the heads of the Romanoffs, as no skulls or skull-bones were found.
The deed was described by witnesses who had not been able to escape, and at least one was a participant. At midnight on July 16 Yurovsky awoke the Czar and his family, took them to a basement room and there shot them. The actual murderers were Yurovsky, his seven unidentified foreign accomplices, one Nikulin from the local Cheka, and two Russians, apparently professional gunmen employed by the Cheka. The victims were the Czar, his wife, ailing son (who was held in his father's arms as he could not walk), four daughters, Russian [278] doctor, manservant, cook and maid. The room was still a shambles, from the shooting and bayoneting, when M. Sokoloff and Mr. Wilton saw it, and his book includes the picture of it.
The circumstances having been determined, the investigators almost despaired of finding the bodies, or their remains; they learned that Yurovsky, before escaping the town, had boasted that "the world will never know what we did with the bodies". However, the earth at length gave up its secret. The bodies had been taken by five lorries to a disused iron pit in the woods, cut up and burned, 150 gallons of petrol being used; one Voikoff of the Urals Cheka (a fellow-passenger of Lenin in the train from Germany) as Commissar of Supplies had supplied 400 lbs. of sulphuric acid for dissolving the bones. The ashes and fragments had been thrown down the shaft, the ice at the bottom having first been smashed so that the mass would sink; then a flooring had been lowered and fixed over the place. When this was removed the search reached its end. On top lay the corpse of a spaniel belonging to one of the princesses; below were fragments of bone and skin, a finger, and many identifiable personal belongings which had escaped destruction. A puzzling find was a small collection of nails, coins, pieces of tinfoil and the like. This looked like the contents of a schoolboy's pockets, and was; the little boy's English tutor, Mr. Sidney Gibbes, identified it. The precautions taken to dispose of the bodies and of other evidence were of the kind that only criminals of long experience in their trade could have devised; they resemble the methods used in gang warfare, during the Prohibition period, in the United States.
These discoveries, becoming known in the outer world, exposed the untruth of Sverdloff's announcement that only the Czar had been "executed" and his family sent to "a place of security". The murderers staged a mock trial of "28 persons on the accusation of having murdered the Czar and his family". Only eight names were published, all of them unknown in connection with the crime, and five persons were said to have been shot, who if they existed at all cannot have had any part in it. The arch-assassin, Sverdloff, was soon afterwards killed in some party dispute and thousands of innocent people died in the indiscriminate massacres which followed. Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk to give enduring fame to his part in the symbolic deed.
The chief reason for recounting the details of the pogrom of the Romanoffs is to point to the "fingerprint" which was left in the room where it was done. One of the assassins, presumably their leader, stayed to exult and put a significant signature on the wall, which was covered with obscene or mocking inscriptions in Hebrew, Magyar and German. Among them was a couplet which deliberately related the deed to the Law of the Torah-Talmud and thus offered it to posterity as an example of the fulfilment of that law, and of Jewish vengeance as understood by the Levites. It was written in German by someone who parodied the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine's lines on the death of Belshazzar, the imaginary potentate whose murder is portrayed in Daniel as God's punishment for an [279] affront offered to Judah:
The parodist, sardonically surveying the shambles, adapted these lines to what he had just done:
No clearer clue to motive and identity was ever left behind. The revolution was not Russian; the eruption was brought about in Russia, but the revolution had its friends in high places everywhere. At this period (1917-1918) the student for the first time is able to establish that leading men began to give that secret support to Communism which they were already giving to its blood brother, Zionism. This happened on both sides of the fighting-line; once the secret, but overriding purposes of the war came into play the distinction between "friend" and "foe" disappeared. The Zionists, though they concentrated "irresistible pressure" on the politicians of London and Washington, long kept their headquarters in Berlin; the Communists obtained decisive support from Germany at one moment and from Germany's enemies the next.
For instance, Germany when the 1914-1918 war began started "sending back to Russia Russians of revolutionary tendencies who were prisoners here, with money and passports, in order that they may stir up trouble at home" (Ambassador Gerard in Berlin to Mr. House). Mr. Robert Wilton says the decision to Foment the revolution in Russia was formally taken at a German and Austrian General Staff meeting at Vienna late in 1915. The German Chief-of-Staff, General Ludendorff, later regretted this: "By sending Lenin to Russia our government assumed. . . a great responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for Russia had to be laid low; but our government should have seen to it that we were not involved in her fall".
That, taken as an isolated case, might be a simple human error: what appeared to be a sound military move produced catastrophic political consequences not foreseen when it was made. But what explanation can be found for American and British politicians, whose foremost military and political principle should have been to sustain Russia and yet who supported the alien revolutionaries who "laid Russia low"?
I have already quoted the editorial about the revolution (". . . a free and efficient democracy . . . the vindication of the new regime . . .") which appeared in The Times of London while its experienced correspondent's despatches were being "ignored" and "confidence" withdrawn from him because the newspaper had received "an allegation" that he was "an anti-semite". On the other side of the Atlantic the true ruler of the Republic, Mr. House was confiding to his diary similar sentiments. For him the alien revolutionaries smuggled into Russia [280] during wartime from the West ("this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America", Mr. Churchill) were honest agrarian reformers: "the Bolshevists appeared to the peace-hungry and land-hungry Russians as the first leaders who made a sincere effort to satisfy their needs" .
Today all know what happened to the Russians' "land-hunger" under Bolshevism. In 1917 the Czars and their ministers for fifty years had been toiling to satisfy this "land-hunger" and by assassination had been thwarted. Apparently Mr. House was ignorant of that. When the revolution was accomplished he instructed the shadow-president: "that literally nothing be done further than that an expression of sympathy be offered for Russia's efforts to weld herself into a virile democracy and to proffer our financial, industrial and moral support in every way possible". *
* It might be significant of the influences which continued to prevail in the entourage of American presidents during the next two generations that President Eisenhower in 1955, from his hospital room in Denver, sent a personal message of congratulations to the Soviet Premier, Bulganin, on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, November 7. The democratic and parliamentary revolution, legitimized by the Czars abdication, occurred in March 1917; November 7 was a day on which the Bolsheviks overthrew the legitimate regime. By 1955 American presidents were habitually warning their people against the menace of "Soviet" or "Communist" (i.e., Bolshevik) aggression [281] brought to Russia) "and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world. . . With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian state and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low . . . Her sufferings are more fearful than modern records hold and she had been robbed of her place among the great nations of the world". (House of Commons, 5 November 1919).
The resemblance between the first phrase of this sentence and the editorial of The Times in London
may be noted; powerful behind-scene groups in both capitals evidently were agreed to present the public
masses with this false picture of a "virile" and "efficient" democracy in the making. The second phrase cancelled
the policy initially recommended of "literally doing nothing" beyond uttering sympathetic words, by giving
the order literally to do everything; for what more can be done than to give "financial, industrial and moral
support in every way possible"? This was American state policy from the moment that Mr. House so
instructed the president, and it exactly describes the policy pursued by President Roosevelt during the Second
World War, as will be shown.
Thus the West, or powerful men in the West, began to range itself with the world-revolution against the Russians, which meant, against all men who abhorred the revolution. Not all the powerful men, or men later to become powerful, lent themselves to this hidden undertaking. At that time Mr. Winston Churchill again stated the nature of the revolution:
"Certainly I dispute the title of the Bolshevists to represent Russia . . . They despise such a mere commonplace as nationality. Their ideal is a worldwide proletarian revolution. The Bolsheviks robbed Russia at one stroke of two most precious things: peace and victory, the victory that was within her grasp and the peace which was her dearest desire. The Germans sent Lenin into Russia with the deliberate intention of working for the downfall of Russia . . . No sooner did Lenin arrive there than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgo,, in Berne and other countries" (the reader will perceive whence the "Russian" revolutionaries were
Mr. Churchill's description remains valid, particularly the phrase, "the most formidable sect in the world", which resembles the phrase used by Bakunin in his attack on Jewish usurpation of the revolution fifty years earlier. The passage quoted from Mr. Churchill's article earlier in this chapter shows that he was equally aware of the identity of this sect.
Thus Dr. Chaim Weizmann's youthful fellow-conspirators from the Talmudic area of Russia triumphed in Russia at the very moment when he triumphed in London and Washington. The only difference between him and them, from the start, was that between "revolutionary-Zionism" and "revolutionary-Communism", as he shows. In his student days in Berlin, Freiburg and Geneva, he had waged many a hot debate about this point of difference, which for those who reject revolution as such is a distinction without meaning. Mr. Balfour's amanuensis, Mrs. Dugdale, portrays the blood-brothers of the revolution in argument during the years when their simultaneous triumph was in preparation:
"Lenin and Trotsky took power in the same week of November 1917 that Jewish nationalism won its recognition. Years before, in Geneva, Trotsky and Weizmann had night after night expounded from rival cafés in the university quarter their opposed political beliefs. Both of them Russian-born. . . . they had swayed the crowds of Jewish students from one side of the street to the other; Leon Trotsky, apostle of Red revolution; Chaim Weizmann, apostle of a tradition unbroken for two thousand years. Now by a most strange coincidence in the same week each of them accomplished the fulfilment of his dream".
In truth, the pincers in which the West was to be gripped had been forged, and each handle was held by one of two groups of revolutionaries "Russian-born" (but not Russian).
For Dr. Weizmann and his associates in London and Washington, the event in Moscow was a passing embarrassment, in one respect. They had based their demand for Palestine on the legend that "a place of refuge" must be found for Jews "persecuted in Russia" (an obvious non sequitur but good enough for "the mob"), and now there was no "persecution in Russia". On the contrary, in Moscow a Jewish regime ruled and "anti-Semitism" was a capital offence. Where, then, were the Jews who needed "a place of refuge"? (This is evidently the reason why Mr. Robert Wilton had to be prevented from reporting the nature of the new regime in Moscow).
Rabbi Elmer Berger says, "The Soviet government even privileged Jews as Jews… at a single stroke, the revolution emancipated those very Jews for whom, previously, no solution other than Zionism would be efficacious, according to Zionist spokesmen. Soviet Jews no longer had need of Palestine, or any other refuge. The lever of the suffering of Russian Jewry, which Herzl had often used in attempts to prise a charter for Palestine from some power, was gone".
That did not deter Dr. Weizmann. At once he informed the Jews that they must not expect any respite:
"Some of our friends. . . are very quick in drawing conclusions as to what will happen to the Zionist movement after the Russian revolution. Now, they say, the greatest stimulus for the Zionist movement has been removed. Russian Jewry is free. . . Nothing can be more superficial and wrong than that. We have never built our Zionist movement on the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere. These sufferings were never the cause of Zionism. The fundamental cause of Zionism was, and is, the ineradicable striving of Jewry to have a home of its own".
Dr. Weizmann spoke truth in untruth. It was true that the organizers of Zionism, in their private hearts, had never in reality built their movement on "the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere"; they were indifferent to any suffering, Jewish or other, caused by Zionism. But they had beyond all dispute used "the sufferings of our people in Russia" as their argument in beleaguering Western politicians, who from Mr. Wilson in 1912 onward repeatedly alluded to it.
In this crucial week, the falsity of the entire contention, though revealed, made no difference, for the British Government, as Mrs. Dugdale recorded, was at length committed. Not even a pretence could be maintained that any Jews needed "a place of refuge" but Mr. Lloyd George had undertaken to conquer Palestine for "the Jews".
The basic fallacy of the enterprise was exposed at the very instant when it was clamped like a millstone round the neck of the West. Although this irreparable flaw in its foundation must cause its ultimate collapse, like that of Sabbatai Zevi's messiahship in l666, the tragi-comedy thenceforth had to be played to its ruinous end.
But for one later event, the undertaking would have died a natural death within a few years and would survive today in the annals merely as Balfour's Folly. This event was the coming of Hitler, which for a while filled the gap left by the collapse of the legend of "persecution in Russia" and produced in some Jews a desire to go even to Palestine. For the Zionists Hitler, had he not arisen, would have needed to be created; a collapsing scheme was made by him to look almost lifelike for some time. The Hitlerist episode belongs to a later chapter in this narrative.
The masses then (as in the Second War, twenty-five years later) were being egged on to destroy a "madman in Berlin" on this very ground, that he sought to rule the world by force. In England Mr. Eden Philpotts (one of many such oracles then and in the next war) thundered:
"You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep its curses only, crowned upon your brow . . ." and that was the universal cry. Yet the secret plan promoted in the West was equally one to "grasp the world by force" and to put new "warlords" over it.
It was merely dressed in other words. What was reactionary Prussian militarism in Germany was one of Mr. House's "advanced ideas" in Washington; what was megalomaniac ambition in the Kaiser was an enlightened concept of "a new world order" in London. The politicians of the West became professional dissimulators. Even Disraeli could not foresee in 1832 ( "The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation") that this would become the definition of political practice in the West in the 20th Century; but this happened when Western political leaders, by supporting Zionism and the world-revolution, yielded to the prompting of Asiatics; their acts took on an Asiatic duplicity in place of native candour.
Strangely, Mr. Woodrow Wilson, the most compliant of them all, at the start rebelled most fretfully against the secret constraints. He tried, as has been shown, to declare that "the causes and objects of the war are obscure", and when this was forbidden by Mr. House, still avowed that the belligerents on both sides pursued "the same" objects. He went further at the very start of his presidency, when he wrote, "It is an in tolerable thing that the government of the Republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should have been captured by interests which are special and not general. We know that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington". Presumably he learned the nature of these "interests" and this "control", and the galling knowledge may have caused his collapse (and that of Mr. Roosevelt in the later generation).
Nevertheless, he was used to launch the plan for setting up "a federation of the world", based on force. The idea was "oozed into his brain" by others; the phrase is used by Mr. House's biographer to describe the method by which Mr. House prompted the actions of other men (and by which his own were prompted). In November 1915, when the American people were still ardent for the president who was keeping them out of the war, Mr. House instructed him:
"We must throw the influence of this nation in behalf of a plan by which international obligations must be kept and maintained and in behalf of some plan by which the peace of the world may be maintained".
This was always the sales-talk: that "the plan" would "maintain world peace". Mr. House had long been discussing the plan with Sir Edward Grey (Mr. Asquith's Foreign Secretary; he became blind in 1914 but in a moment of spiritual clairvoyance used the words which have become truer ever since, "The lights are going out all over Europe"). Sir Edward Grey was captivated by "the plan", and wrote to Mr. House, "International law has hitherto had no sanction; the lesson of this war is that the Powers must bind themselves to give it sanction". "Sanction" was the euphemism used by the dissimulators to avoid alarming the masses by the sound of "war" or "force". The dictionary definition, in such a context, is "a coercive measure", and the only means of coercion between nations is, ultimately, war: no "sanction" can be effective unless it is backed by that threat. Therefore Sir Edward Grey thought war could be ended by making war. He was an incorruptible but apparently deluded man; the originators of the great "idea" knew what they meant (and in our day this also has been revealed).
By 1916 Mr. House had instructed Mr. Wilson as to his duty and in May the president publicly announced support for "the plan" at a meeting of a new body candidly called "The League To Enforce Peace". Mr. Wilson knew nothing of its nature: "it does not appear that Woodrow Wilson studied seriously the programme of the League To Enforce Peace" (Mr. House's Private Papers).
This was a reincarnation of the earlier "League to enforce peace" which (as Lord Robert Cecil had reminded Mr. House) "really became a league to uphold tyranny". In 1916 the name gave away the game; American opinion was not then ready to walk into so obvious a trap. Senator George Wharton Pepper recalls: "A heavily-financed organization aptly entitled 'The League To Enforce Peace' was making our task easier by emphasizing, as its title indicated, that the Covenant" (of the League of Nations) "was intended to be made effective by force. . .Our constant contention, in opposition to theirs, was that the appeal to force was at the best futile and at the worst dangerous. . . I contrasted the certain futility of an appeal to international force with the possible hopefulness of reliance upon international conference, and declared myself favourable to any association of the latter type and unalterably opposed to a league which was based on the former".
The dissimulators soon dropped the name, "The League To Enforce Peace", but the "plan", which produced "The League of Nations", transparently remained the same: it was one to transfer the control of national armies to some super-national committee which could use them for "the management of human affairs" in ways serving its own special ends, and that has continued the motive to the present day. As in the earlier case of Zionism, President Wilson was [285] committed long before the crucial moment (by his public declaration of May 1916) and as soon as America was in the war (April 1917) announced that it was involved in an undertaking to set up "a new international order"; this statement was made at the moment of the first revolution in Russia and of the preparation of the Balfour Declaration.
Thus the three great "plans" moved together into the West, and this was the project which was to crown the work of the other two. Its basic principle was the destruction of nation-states and nationhood so that it gave expression, in modern form, to the ancient conflict between the Old Testament and the New, between the Levitical Law and the Christian message. The Torah-Talmud is the only discoverable, original source of this idea of "destroying nations"; Mr. House thought it almost impossible to trace any "idea" to its fount, but in this case the track can be followed back through the centuries to 500 BC, and it is nowhere obliterated during those twenty-five hundred years. If before that time anybody in the known world had made this "destructive principle" into a code and creed they and it have faded into oblivion. The idea contained in the Torah-Talmud has gone unbroken through all the generations. The New Testament rejects it and speaks of "the deception of nations", not of their destruction. Revelation foretells a day when this process of deception of nations shall end. Those who seek to interpret prophecy might very well see in The League To Enforce Peace, under its successive aliases, the instrument of this "deception", doomed at the end to fail.
Mr. House having decided, and Mr. Wilson having declared, that "a new international order" must be established, Mr. House (according to Mr. Howden) set up a body known as "The Inquiry" to draft a plan. Its head was his brother-in-law, Dr. Sidney Mezes (then president of the College of the City of New York), and its secretary a Mr. Walter Lippmann (then writing for The New Republic). A Dr. Isaiah Bowman (then director of the American Geographical Society) gave "personal advice and assistance".
The group of men placed in charge of The Inquiry therefore was predominantly Jewish (though in this case not Russian-Jewish: this might indicate the true nature of the superior authority indicated by Dr. Kastein's allusion to "a Jewish international") and Jewish inspiration may thus reasonably be seen in the plan which it produced. This (says Mr. Howden) was a draft "Convention for a League of Nations" to which Mr. House put his signature in July 1918: "President Wilson was not, and never pretended to be, the author of the Covenant". Here, then, are the origins of the League of Nations.
The Peace Conference loomed ahead when Mr. House prepared to launch this "new world order", and its first acts pointed to the identity of the controlling-group behind the Western governments. Zionism and Palestine (issues unknown to the masses when the 1914-1918 war began) were found to be high, if not paramount among the matters to be discussed at the conference which ended it.
President Wilson, for this reason, seems to have known moments of exaltation between long periods of despondency. Rabbi Stephen Wise, at his side, depicted the Palestinean undertaking in such terms that the president, entranced, soliloquised, "To think that I, a son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people". While he thus contemplated himself in the mirror of posterity the rabbi beside him compared him with the Persian King Cyrus, who had enabled the exiled Jews of his land to return to Jerusalem". King Cyrus had allowed native Judahites, if they wished, to return to Judah after some fifty years; President Wilson was required to transplant Judaized Chazars from Russia to a land left by the original Jews some eighteen centuries before.
Across the Atlantic Dr. Weizmann made ready for the Peace Conference. He was then evidently one of the most powerful men in the world, a potentate (or emissary of potentates) to whom the "premierdictators" of the West made humble obeisance. At a moment in 1918 when the fate of England was in the balance on the stricken Western Front an audience of the King of England was postponed. Dr. Weizmann complained so imperiously that Mr. Balfour at once restored the appointment; save for the place of meeting, which was Buckingham Palace, Mr. Weizmann seems in fact to have given audience to the monarch. During the Second World War the Soviet dictator Stalin, being urged by the Western leaders to take account of the influence of the Pope, asked brusquely, "How many divisions has the Pope?". Such at least was the anecdote, much retold in clubs and pubs, and to simple folk it seemed to express essential truth in a few words. Dr. Weizmann's case shows how essentially untrue it was. He had not a single soldier, but he and the international he represented were able to obtain capitulations never before won save by conquering armies.
He disdained the capitulants and the scene of his triumphs alike. He wrote to Lady Crewe, "We hate equally anti-semites and philo-semites". Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and the other "friends" were philosemites of the first degree, in Dr. Weizmann's meaning of the word, and excelled themselves in servience to the man who despised them. As to England itself, Dr. Weizmann two decades later, when he contemplated the wild beasts in the Kruger National Park, soliloquised, "It must be a wonderful thing to be an animal on the South African game reserve; much better than being a Jew in Warsaw or even in London".
In 1918 Dr. Weizmann decided to inspect his realm-elect. When he reached Palestine the German attack in France had begun, the depleted British armies were reeling back, and "most of the European troops in Palestine were being withdrawn to reinforce the armies in France". At such a moment he demanded that the foundation stone of a Hebrew University be laid with all public ceremony. Lord Allenby protested that "the Germans are almost at the gates of Paris!" Dr. Weizmann replied that this was "only one episode". Lord Allenby obdured; Dr. Weizmann persisted; Lord Allenby under duress referred to Mr. Balfour and was at once ordered by cable to obey. With great panoply of staff officers, troops and presented arms (disturbed only by the sounds of distant British-Turkish fighting) Dr. Weizmann then held his ceremony on Mount Scopus.
(I remember those days in France. Even half a million more British soldiers there would have transformed the battle; a multitude of lives would have been saved, and the war probably ended sooner. The French and British ordeal in France made a Zionist holiday in Palestine).
When the war at last ended, on November 11, 1918, none other than Dr. Weizmann was at luncheon the sole guest of Mr. Lloyd George, whom he found "reading the Psalms and near to tears". Afterwards the Zionist chieftain watched from historic Ten Downing Street as the prime minister disappeared, borne shoulder high by a mafficking mob towards a Thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey.
Masses and "managers"; did any among the crowd notice the high, domed head, with bearded face and heavy-lidded eyes watching from the window of Ten Downing Street?
Then Dr. Weizmann led a Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919 where "the new world order" was to be set up. He informed the august Council of Ten that "the Jews had been hit harder by the war than any other group"; the politicians of 1919 made no demur to this insult to their millions of dead. However, a remonstrant Jew, Mr. Sylvain Levi of France, at the last moment tried to instil prudence in them. He told them:
First, that Palestine was a small, poor land with an existing population of 600,000 Arabs, and that the Jews, having a higher standard of life than the Arabs, would tend to dispossess them; second, that the Jews who would go to Palestine would be mainly Russian Jews, who were of explosive tendencies; third, that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine would introduce the dangerous principle of Jewish dual loyalties.
These three warnings have been fulfilled to the letter, and were heard with hostility by the Gentile politicians assembled at the Peace Conference of 1919. Mr. Lansing, the American Secretary of State, at once gave M. Lévi his quietus. He asked Dr. Weizmann, "What do you mean by a Jewish national home?" Dr. Weizmann said he meant that, always safeguarding the interests of non-Jews, Palestine would ultimately become "as Jewish as England is English". Mr. Lansing said this absolutely obscure reply was "absolutely clear", the Council of Ten nodded agreement, and M. Levi, like all Jewish remonstrants for twenty-five centuries, was discomfited. (He was only heard at all to maintain a pretence of impartial consideration; Rabbi Wise, disquietened by "the difficulties we had to face in Paris", had already made sure of President Wilson's docility. Approaching the president privately, he said, "Mr. President, World Jewry counts on you in its hour of need and hope", thus excommunicating M. Levi and the Jews who thought like him. Mr. Wilson, placing his hand on the rabbi's shoulder, "quietly and firmly said, 'Have no fear, Palestine will be yours'.")
One other man tried to avert the deed which these men, with frivolity, were preparing. Colonel Lawrence loved Semites, for he had lived with the Arabs and roused them in the desert against their Turkish rulers. He was equally a friend of Jews (Dr. Weizmann says "he has mistakenly been represented as anti-Zionist") and believed that "a Jewish homeland" (in the sense first given to the term, of a cultural centre) could well be incorporated in the united Arab State for which he had worked.
Lawrence saw in Paris that what was intended was to plant Zionist nationalism like a time-bomb among a clutter of weak Arab states, and the realization broke him. Mr. David Garnett, who edited his Letters , says, "Lawrence won his victories without endangering more than a handful of Englishmen and they were won, not to add subject provinces to our empire, but that the Arabs whom he had lived with and loved should be a free people, and that Arab civilization should be reborn".
That was Lawrence's faith during his "Revolt in the Desert", and what the men who sent him to Arabia told him. When the Paris Conference began he was "fully in control of his nerves and quite as normal as most of us" (Mr. J.M. Keynes). He arrived believing in President Wilson's pledge (speech of the Fourteen Points, January 8, 1918), "The nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". He could not know that these words were false, because Mr. Wilson was secretly committed to Zionism, through the men around him.
After Dr. Weizmann's reply to Mr. Lansing, and its approval by the Council of Ten, the betrayal became clear to Lawrence and he showed "the disillusion and the bitterness and the defeat resulting from the Peace Conference; he had complete faith that President Wilson would secure self-determination for the Arab peoples when he went to the Peace Conference; he was completely disillusioned when he returned"(Mr. Garnett). Lawrence himself later wrote, "We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns" (in the desert) "never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we achieved and the new world dawned the old men came out again and took from us our victory and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew . . . I meant to make a new nation, to restore to the world a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts".
Lawrence, who was broken by this experience, was then among the most famous men in the world. Had he joined the dissimulators hardly any rank or honour would have been refused him. He threw up his rank, and away his decorations, and tried from shame even to lose his identity; he enlisted under an assumed name in the lowest rank of the Royal Air Force, where he was later discovered by an assiduous newspaper man. This last phase of his life, and the [289] motor-bicycle accident which ended it, have a suicidal look (resembling the similar phase and end of Mr. James Forrestal after the Second War) and he must be accounted among the martyrs of this story.
The leading public men were agreed to promote the Zionist adventure through the "international world order" which they were about to found, at any cost in honour and human suffering. In nearly all other questions they differed, so that, the war hardly ended, reputations began bursting like bubbles and friendships cracking like plaster, in Paris. Some breach occurred between President Wilson and his "second personality, independent self" (a similar, mysterious estrangement was to sever President Roosevelt and his other self, Mr. Harry Hopkins, at the end of another war).
Mr. House was at his zenith. Prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors and delegates besieged him at the Hotel Crillon; in a single day he gave forty-nine audiences to such high notables. Once the French Prime Minister, M. Clemenceau, called when Mr. Wilson was with Mr. House; the president was required to withdraw while the two great men privately conferred. Perhaps humiliation at last broke Mr. Woodrow Wilson; he was stricken by mortal illness in Paris (as Mr. Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, though Mr. Wilson survived rather longer). Apparently the two never saw or communicated with each other again! Mr. House merely recorded, "My separation from Woodrow Wilson was and is to me a tragic mystery, a mystery that now can never be dispelled for its explanation lies buried with him".
The illusions of power were dissolving. These men were never truly powerful, because they acted as the instruments of others. They already look wraithlike in the annals, and if the squares and boulevards named after them still bear their names, few remember who they were. Mr. Wilson returned to America and soon died. Mr. House before long was lonely and forgotten in the apartment in East 35th Street. Mr. Lloyd George found himself in the political wilderness and was only able to complete the ruin of a once-great Liberal party; within a decade he found himself at the head of four followers. Mr. Balfour, for a few more years, absentmindedly haunted Saint James's Park.
They were not able to accomplish all that their mentors wished. Shaken by the violence of American objections, Mr. Wilson "absolutely declined to accept the French demand for the creation of an international force that should operate under the executive control of the League". The American Constitution (the president suddenly recollected) did not permit of any such surrender of sovereignty.
Thus the worst was averted, in that generation. The secret men, who continued to be powerful when these "premier-dictators" and pliable "administrators" were shorn of their semblance of power, had to wait for the Second World War to get their hands on the armies of the nation-states. Then they achieved their "League to enforce peace" almost (but still not quite) in the fullness of despotic power coveted by them. In 1919 they had to content themselves with a modest first experiment: The League Of Nations.
The United States would not even join it; the masses of America, disquietened by the results of the war and instinctively striving to regain the safe haven of "no foreign entanglements", would have none of it. Britain joined, but under other prime ministers than Mr. Lloyd George would not hand over control of its armies. The way to the kind of "new world order" envisaged by Mr. House and his prompters was blocked for the time being. Nevertheless a way was found, through the League of Nations, to effect one fateful, and possibly fatal breach in British sovereignty.
The authority of this "League of Nations", whatever it amounted to, was used to cover the use of British troops as a bodyguard for the Zionists intending to seize Palestine. The device employed to give this mock-legal air to the deed was called "the mandate", and I have earlier shown where it was born. By means of it the League of Nations was able to install the Zionists from Russia in Arabia, where they revealed the "explosive tendencies" foretold by M. Sylvain Levi in 1919 and apparent to all today, in 1956. This was the sole, enduring accomplishment of the "new world order" set up in 1919 and by the ancient test, Cui bono?, the authorship of this "idea" may be judged.
The story of "The mandate" (and of a man who tried to avert it) therefore forms the next chapter in this narrative.
After the Peace Conference had approved the Zionist claim to Palestine (and thereby disowned the mass of emancipated Western Jews, personified by M. Sylvain Levi) the next step was taken at the San Remo Conference of 1920, where the victor powers met to dismember the conquered Turkish Empire. This conference adopted the ingenious deception invented by Dr. Weizmann in 1915 and agreed that Britain should administer Palestine under "a mandate".
Protests against the undertaking then were growing loud, because its true nature was beginning to be realized, but Mr. Balfour assured Dr. Weizmann that "they were regarded as without importance and would certainly not affect policy, which had been definitely set".
Here is the cryptic statement, often to recur later, that policy in this one question must not, cannot and never will alter, so that national interest, honour and all other considerations are irrelevant. I know of no other case where an unalterable tenet of high State policy has been fixed without regard to State interest or consultation of public opinion at any stage. At San Remo Mr. Lloyd George was worried lest "the frost" of peace should set in before the secret purpose was accomplished, and told Dr. Weizmann, "You have no time to waste. Today the world is like the Baltic before a frost. For the moment it is still in motion. But if it gets set, you will have to batter your heads against the ice blocks and wait for a second thaw". Had Mr. Lloyd George said "second war" he would have been correct and possibly that was what he meant by "thaw". In these circumstances the San Remo Conference "confirmed the Balfour Declaration and the decision to give the mandate to Great Britain". After that only one step remained between the Zionists and their goal; the League of Nations had to invent "mandates", bestow on itself the right to bestow mandates, and then "ratify" this Mandate.
That happened in 1922, as will be seen, but during the interval protests against the deed came from every responsible authority or community directly involved. The forces engaged in promoting it were three: the directing Zionists from Russia, the "philo-semites" in high places whom Dr. Weizmann "hated" while he used them, and, among the masses, that body of sentimental liberals scathingly depicted in the Protocols. Against it was ranked authoritative and experienced opinion in such overwhelming measure that, had the question been any other than this one to which the "administrators" were secretly committed, it would have collapsed. The mass of protest was so great that it is enumerated in its parts here for comparison with the summary which follows. It came from (1) the Palestinian Arabs; (2) the Palestinian Jews; (3) the chief Zionist leader in America, as well as' the anti-Zionist Jews of America and England; (4) the British officials and soldiers in Palestine; (5) British and American official investigators; (6) a large body of the press, then still free of occult control in this matter.
(1) The Arabs saw from the start what was in store for them, for they knew the Torah. Dr. Weizmann had told the Peace Conference "The Bible is our mandate", and they knew about "the God of the Jews" and his promises of pogrom and reward: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee . . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7, 1-3).
Thus Zionism, and Western support of it, meant extermination for them under a Law of 2,500 years earlier (and the events of 1948 proved this). In 1945 King Ibn Saoud told President Roosevelt, "You have fought two world wars to discover what we have known for two thousand years" and in 1948 the intention literally to fulfil the above-quoted "statute and commandment" was proved by deed. Significantly, even anti-Zionist Jews could not believe, before it happened, that this literal "fulfilment" was intended. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown correctly cited the above-mentioned passage as the reason for Arab fears and said, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his Bible literally and would not be so cruel to his fellow man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of their historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". Mr. Brown of Chicago did not know the Chazars).
The Arabs in 1920 were not deceived by Mr. Balfour's public pledge (in the Declaration) that their "civil and religious rights" would be protected or by Mr. Wilson's public pledge (the Fourteen Points) that they would have "undoubted security of life" and "absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". If they did not know, they guessed that Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson had secretly promised the Zionists Palestine. Knowing the Torah, they equally disbelieved the public statement of Mr. Winston Churchill in 1922 (when he was Colonial Secretary), "Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine.' Phrases have been used such as 'Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English' " (a direct rebuke to Dr. Weizmann) "His Majesty's government regard any such suggestion as impracticable and have no such aim in [293] view. Nor have they at any time contemplated the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine" (in the Second World War, as Prime Minister, and after it as Opposition leader Mr. Churchill gave his support to the process here denied).
(2) The original Jewish community of Palestine (never taken into consideration at any stage in all these proceedings) was violently anti-Zionist. Dr. Weizmann, almost alone among his fellow-Zionists and the Western politicians associated with them, had slight acquaintance with these original Jews, having made one or two brief visits to Palestine; he says most of his fellow-Zionists from Russia were "completely ignorant" of them. At this period in 1919-1922 the Zionist leaders first learned that the Jews of Palestine held them to be "heathen, impious, heartless, ignorant and malevolent". Dr. Weizmann (whose attitude is the familiar one that he was only acting for their good; "we were only anxious to make conditions a little modern and comfortable for them") was "rather horrified to discover how remote from them we remained". He dismisses them as old fogies who, annoyingly, bombarded the Jewish organizations in America with complaints about the Zionists, "quite ninety percent" of their letters being violently hostile. (Typically, Dr. Weizmann learned of the contents of these letters from a British censor, derelict in his duty, who showed them to him). These protests of the native Arabs and native Jews of Palestine were ignored by the politicians of Paris and San Remo.
(3) Mr. Louis Brandeis in 1919 visited the country which then, for twenty years, had formed the object of his revived interest in Judaism. He was at once disillusioned by actual acquaintance with the unknown land and decided that "it would be wrong to encourage immigration". He urged that the World Zionist Organization should be greatly reduced, if not abolished, and that future activity should be restricted to the modest task of building up a "Jewish Homeland" through separate Zionist associations in the various countries. In effect this would have been simply a "cultural centre" in Palestine, consisting perhaps of a university and academies, and of somewhat more numerous farm settlements, with reasonable means of immigration for the small number of Jews who, of their own volition, might wish to go to Palestine.
This meant abandoning the concept of separate Jewish nationhood symbolized by a Jewish State, and was treason. It was (as Dr. Weizmann says) a revival of he old cleavage between "east" and "west"; between "Ostjuden" and emancipated Western Jews; between "Washington" and "Pinsk" (the name of the author of the phrase about "international pressure" was significant, not coincidental).
The Zionists from Russia overthrew Mr. Brandeis as easily as Dr. Herzl in 1903-4. Mr. Brandeis made the proposal summarized above to the Cleveland Congress of American Zionists in 1921. Dr. Weizmann, opposing, insisted on "a national fund" (that is, revenue to be raised by the self-appointed government of a Jewish nation from obligatory tithe-payments by members of the Zionist organization) and "a national budget". Mr. Brandeis's weakness was precisely that of Dr. Herzl in 1903; the great Western governments were committed to the Zionists from Russia. The congress, which if it was in any way "elected" was elected by about one-tenth of the Jews of America, upheld Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Brandeis fell from his high place.
(4) In Palestine the British soldiers and officials saw that an impossible task was to be inflicted on them. They were of a stock that had gained more experience in the administration of overseas territories than any other in history, and experience and instinct alike warned them. They knew how to administer a country justly on behalf of all its native peoples and had often done this. They knew that no country could be justly administered, or even kept quiet, if alien immigrants were to be forced into it and the native peoples compelled to allow this. Their protests, too, began to flow towards London and until the end, thirty years later, were ignored. The Arabs from the start accepted the bitter truth and began (in 1920) to resist by riot, rising and every means at hand; they have never since ceased and obviously will not until their grievance is amended or they are all put in permanent, armed captivity.
(5) As the "front-rank politicians" (Dr. Weizmann's phrase) in London and Washington were resolved at any cost to implant the Zionists in Palestine, without regard to any protest, opinion or counsel whatever, today's student might wonder why President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George sent commissions of investigation to the land bartered about by them. If they hoped to receive encouraging reports (in the manner of Sir Henry Wilson's "mud-months" advice) they were deceived, for these investigators merely confirmed what the Arabs, Jews and British in Palestine all had said. President Wilson's King-Crane Commission (1919) reported that "the Zionist look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine". This commission added, "by various forms of purchase"; the more experienced British officers heard by it correctly informed it that "the Zionist programme could not be carried out except by force of arms". Mr. Lloyd George's Haycraft Commission (1921) reported that the real root of the trouble then starting in Palestine lay in the justified Arab belief that the Zionists intended to dominate in Palestine.
(6) By far the greatest obstacle to the Zionist ambition came from factual reporting in the press of what was happening in Palestine and from editorial comment adverse to Zionism. At any time up to the 1914-1918 war the American and British governments, before they went too far, would have had to reckon with public opinion, accurately informed by the newspapers. The corruption of the press (foretold by the Protocols) began with the censorship introduced during the First World War; the rise of the directing power behind the scenes had been shown by the cases of Colonel Repington, Mr. H.A. Gwynne and Mr. Robert Wilton in 1917-1918; experienced correspondents were driven to resign or to write books because their reports were ignored, burked, or suppressed; an editor who published the faithful report without submission to the censorship was prosecuted.
In 1919-1922 the censorship was ending and the newspapers naturally reverted, in the main, to the earlier practice of true reporting and impartial comment on the facts reported. This re-established the former check on governmental policies, and if it had continued would undoubtedly have thwarted the Zionist project, which could not be maintained if it were open to public scrutiny. Therefore the entire future for the Zionists, at this crucial moment when "the Mandate" still was not "ratified", turned on the suppression of adverse newspaper information and comment. At that very juncture an event occurred which produced that result. By reason of this great effect on the future, and by its own singular nature, the event (denoted in the heading to the present chapter) deserves relation in detail here.
At that stage in the affair England was of paramount importance to. the conspirators (I have shown that Dr. Weizmann and Mr. House both used this word) and in England the energetic Lord Northcliffe was a powerful man. The former Alfred Harmsworth, bulky and wearing a dank Napoleonic forelock, owned the two most widely read daily newspapers, various other journals and periodicals, and in addition was majority proprietor of the most influential newspaper in the world, at that time, The Times of London. Thus he had direct access to millions of people each day and, despite his business acumen, he was by nature a great newspaper editor, courageous, combative and patriotic. He was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in the causes he launched or espoused, but he was independent and unpurchasable. He somewhat resembled Mr. Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick in America, which is to say that he would do many things to increase the circulation of his newspapers, but only within the limits of national interest; he would not peddle blasphemy, obscenity, libel or sedition. He could not be cowed and was a force in the land.
Lord Northcliffe made himself the adversary of the conspiracy from Russia in two ways. In May 1920 he caused to be printed in The Times the article, previously mentioned, on the Protocols. It was headed, "The Jewish Peril, A Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for Enquiry". It concluded, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"
Then in 1922 Lord Northcliffe visited Palestine, accompanied by a journalist, Mr. J.M.N. Jeffries (whose subsequent book, Palestine: The Reality, remains the classic work of reference for that period). This was. — a combination of a different sort from that formed by the editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian, who wrote their leading article s about Palestine in England and in consultation with the Zionist chieftain, Dr. Weizmann. Lord Northcliffe, on the spot, reached the same conclusion as all other impartial investigators, and wrote, "In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Muslims live there and own it . . . The Jews seemed to be under the impression that all England was devoted to the one cause of Zionism, enthusiastic for it in fact; and I told them that this was not so and to be careful that they do not tire out our people by secret importation of arms to fight 700,000 Arabs. . . There will be trouble in Palestine. . . people dare not tell the Jews the truth here. They have had some from me".
By stating this truth, Lord Northcliffe offended twice; he had already entered the forbidden room by demanding "inquiry" into the origins of the Protocols. Moreover, he was able to publish this truth in the mass-circulation newspapers owned by him, so that he became, to the conspirators, a dangerous man. He encountered one obstacle in the shape of Mr. Wickham Steed, who was editor of The Times and whose championship of Zionism Dr. Weizmann records.
In this contest Lord Northcliffe had an Achilles heel. He particularly wanted to get the truth about Palestine into The Times, but he was not sole proprietor of that paper, only chief proprietor. Thus his own newspapers published his series of articles about Palestine but The Times, in fact, refused to do so. Mr. Wickham Steed" though he had made such large proposals about the future of Palestine, declined to go there, and denied publicity to the anti-Zionist case.
These facts, and all that now follows, are related (again, with surprising candour) in the Official History of The Times (1952). It records that Mr. Wickham Steed "evaded" visiting Palestine when Lord Northcliffe requested him to go there; it also records Mr, Wickham Steed's "inaction" following Lord Northcliffe's telegraphed wish "for a leading article attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism".
In what follows the reader' s attention is particularly directed to dates.
In May 1920 Lord Northcliffe had caused publication of the article about the Protocols in The Times. Early in 1922 he visited Palestine and produced the series of articles above mentioned. On February 26, 1922 he left Palestine, after his request, which was ignored, to. the editor of The Times. He was incensed against the noncompliant editor and had a message, strongly critical of his editorial policy, read to an editorial conference which met on March 2, 1922. Lord Northcliffe wished that Mr. Wickham Steed should resign and was astonished that he remained after this open rebuke. The editor, instead of resigning, decided "to secure a lawyer's opinion on the degree of provocation necessary to constitute unlawful dismissal". For this purpose he consulted Lord Northcliffe's own special legal adviser (March 7, .1922), who informed Mr. Wickham Steed that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal", "incapable of business" and, judging from his appearance, "unlikely to live long" and advised the editor to continue in his post! The editor then went to Pau, in France, to see Lord Northcliffe, in his turn [297] decided that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal" (March 31, 1922), and informed a director of The Times that Lord Northcliffe was "going mad".
The suggestion of madness thus was put out by an editor whom Lord Northcliffe desired to remove and the impressions of others therefore are obviously relevant. On May 3, 1922 Lord Northcliffe attended a farewell luncheon in London for a retiring editor of one of his papers and "was in fine form". On May 11, 1922 he made "an excellent and effective speech" to the Empire Press Union and "most people who had thought him 'abnormal' believed they were mistaken". A few days later Lord Northcliffe telegraphed instruction s to the Managing Director of The Times to arrange for the editor's resignation. This Managing Director saw nothing "abnormal" in such an instruction and was not "in the least anxious about Northcliffe's health ". Another director, who then saw him, "considered him to have quite as good a life risk as his own"; he "noticed nothing unusual in Northcliffe's manner or appearance" (May 24, 1922).
On June 8,1922 Lord Northcliffe, from Boulogne, asked Mr. Wickham Steed to meet him in Paris; they met there on June 11, 1922, and Lord Northcliffe told his visitor that he, Lord Northcliffe, would assume the editorship of The Times. On June 12,1922 the whole party left for Evian-les-Bains, a doctor being secreted on the train, as far as the Swiss frontier, by Mr. Wickham Steed. Arrived in Switzerland "a brilliant French nerve specialist" (unnamed) was summoned and in the evening certified Lord Northcliffe insane. On the strength of this Mr. Wickham Steed cabled instructions to The Times to disregard and not to publish anything received from Lord Northcliffe, and on June 13, 1922 he left, never to see Lord Northcliffe again. On June 18, 1922 Lord Northcliffe returned to London and was in fact removed from all control of, and even communication with his undertakings (especially The Times; his telephone was cut). The manager had police posted at the door to prevent him entering the office of The Times if he were able to reach it. All this, according to the Official History, was on the strength of certification in a foreign country (Switzerland) by an unnamed (French) doctor. On August 14, 1922 Lord Northcliffe died; the cause of death stated was ulcerative endocarditis, and his age was fifty-seven. He was buried, after a service at Westminster Abbey, amid a great array of mourning editors.
Such is the story as I have taken it from the official publication. None of this was known outside a small circle at the time; it only emerged in the Official History after three decades, and if it had all been published in 1922 would presumably have called forth many questions. I doubt if any comparable displacement of a powerful and wealthy man can be adduced, at any rate in such mysterious circumstances.
For the first time, I now appear in this narrative as a personal witness of events. In the 1914-1918 war I was one participant among uncomprehending millions, and only began to see its true shape long afterwards. In 1922 I was for an instant in, though not of the inner circle; looking back, I see myself closeted with Lord [298] Northcliffe (about to die) and quite ignorant of Zionism, Palestine, Protocols or any other matter in which he had raised his voice. My testimony may be of some interest; I cannot myself judge of its value.
I was in 1922 a young man fresh from the war who struggled to find a place in the world and had become a clerk in the office of The Times. I was summoned thence, in that first week of June when Lord Northcliffe was preparing to remove Mr. Wickham Steed and himself assume the editorship of The Times, to go as secretary to Lord Northcliffe who was at Boulogne. I was warned beforehand that he was an unusual man whose every bidding must be quickly done. Possibly for that reason, everything he did seemed to me to be simply the expression of his unusual nature. No suspicion of anything more ever came to me, a week before he was "certified" and, in effect, put in captivity.
I was completely ignorant of "abnormal" conditions, so that the expert might discount my testimony. Anyway, the behaviour I observed was just what I had been told to expect by those who had worked with him for many years. There was one exception to this. Lord Northcliffe was convinced that his life was in danger and several time said this; specifically, he said he had been poisoned. If this is in itself madness, then he was mad, but in that case many victims of poisoning have died of madness, not of what was fed to them. If by any chance it was true, he was not mad. I remember that l thought it feasible that such a man should have dangerous enemies, though at that time I had no inkling at all of any particular hostility he might have incurred. His belief certainly charged him with suspicion of those around him, but if by chance he had reason for it, then again it was not madness; if all this had transpired in the light of day such things could have been thrashed out.
I cannot judge, and can only record what I saw and thought at the time, as a young man who had no more idea of what went on around him than a babe knows the shape of the world. When I returned to London I was questioned about Lord Northcliffe by his brother, Lord Rothermere, and one of his chief associates, Sir George Sutton. The thought of madness must by that time have been in their minds (the "certification" had ensued) and therefore have underlain their questions, but not even then did any such suspicion occur to me, although I had been one of the last people to see him before he was certified and removed from control of his newspapers. I did not know of that when I saw them or for long afterwards. In such secrecy was all this done that, although I continued in the service of The Times for sixteen years, I only learned of the "madness" and "certification" thirty years late , from the Official History. By that time I was able to see what great consequences had flowed from an affair in which I was an uninitiated onlooker at the age of twenty-seven.
Lord Northcliffe therefore was out of circulation, and of the control of his newspapers, during the decisive period preceding the ratification of "the mandate" by the League of Nations, which clinched the Palestinian transaction and bequeathed the effects of it to our present generation: The opposition of a widely-read chain of journals at that period might have changed the whole course of events. After Lord Northcliffe died the possibility of editorials in The Times "attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism" faded. From that time the submission of the press, in the manner described by the Protocols, grew ever more apparent and in time reached the condition which prevails today, when faithful reporting and impartial comment on this question has long been, in suspense.
Lord Northcliffe was removed from control of his newspapers and put under constraint on June 18, 1922; on July 24, 1922 the Council of the League of Nations met in London, secure from any possibility of loud public protest by Lord Northcliffe, to bestow on Britain a "mandate" to remain in Palestine and by arms to install the Zionists there (I describe what events have shown to be the fact; the matter was not so depicted to the public, of course).
This act of "ratifying" the "mandate" was in such circumstances a formality. The real work, of drawing up the document and of ensuring that it received approval, had been done in advance, in the first matter by drafters inspired by Dr. Weizmann and in the second by Dr. Weizmann himself in the ante-chambers of many capitals. The members of Mr. House's "Inquiry" had drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations; Dr. Weizmann, Mr. Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise and their associates had drafted the Balfour Declaration; now the third essential document had to be drafted, one of a kind that history never knew before. Dr. Weizmann pays Lord Curzon (then British Foreign Secretary) the formal compliment of saying that he was "in charge of the actual drafting of the mandate" but adds, "on our side we had the valuable assistance of Mr. Ben V. Cohen. . . one of the ablest draughtsmen in America". Thus a Zionist in America (Mr. Cohen was to play an important part in a much later stage of this process) in fact drafted a document under which "the new world order" was to dictate British policy, the use of British troops and the future of Palestine.
Lord Curzon's part was merely to moderate the terms of the "mandate" if he could, and he did achieve minor modifications, though these had little effect on events in the long run. An able statesman (not a politician) who looked like a Roman emperor, he was "entirely loyal to the policy adopted and meant to stand by the Balfour Declaration" (Dr. Weizmann), but was known personally to disapprove the project which duty required him to further (this might be the reason why he never became Prime Minister, for which office he was highly qualified). He contrived to delete one word from the draft. Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Cohen desired it to begin, "Recognizing the historic rights of the Jews to Palestine. . ." Lord Curzon said, "If you word it like that, I can see Weizmann coming to me every day and saying he has a right to do this, that or the other in Palestine! I won't have it". Thus "historical rights" became "historical connection", a lesser misstatement; Lord Curzon, a scholar certainly did not believe that the Khazars from Russia had any historical connection with the Arabian Peninsula.
Dr. Weizmann, while the draft was thus being prepared, set off on another international tour, to ensure that all members of the Council of the League of Nations would inaugurate "the new world order" by voting for "the Mandate". He called first on the Italian Foreign Minister, one Signor Schanzer, who said the Vatican was worried about the future, under Zionism, of the Room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem. Dr. Weizmann, in the tone habitual among his associates when they spoke of things holy to others, says, "My education in Church history having been deficient, I did not know why the Italians laid such stress on the Room of the Last Supper".*
*By 1950 the Zionists had opened a "Cellar of the Catastrophe" on a lower floor of the same building as a place of pilgrimage for Jews. A legend at the entrance said. "Entrance forbidden to those who have not strong nerves", The Chief Rabbi of South Africa after inspecting this place, wrote. "Everything is being done to develop and foster this new cult of Mount Zion; to provide a substitute for the Wailing Wall and an emotional out let for the religious feelings of the people. There seemed to me to be something un-Jewish in it, something which belonged rather to superstition than to true religions faith, . . . . I tremble to think of the effect of these completely apocryphal stories" (of miraculous cures) "on the simple, pious and superstitious Jews of Yemen, Is there being developed a Jewish Lourdes? I hope not, but the signs are ominous".
Dr. Weizmann was able to reassure Signor Schanzer and left Rome assured of Italian support. After that the thing became a landslide and from that time on the "votes" of the League of Nations (and of the later "United Nations") in vital questions were always arranged beforehand by this method of secret canvassing, lobbying and "irresistible pressure" in general. Dr. Weizmann went on to Berlin and found a famous Jewish minister there, Dr. Walter Rathenau, to be violently opposed to Zionism. He "deplored any attempt to turn the Jews of Germany 'into a foreign body on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg': that was all he could see in Zionism". Dr. Rathenau was murdered soon after this, so that the cause of the emancipated Western Jews was deprived of another notable champion.
By his journeys and visits Dr. Weizmann at last assured himself, in advance of the meeting, of all votes at the Council table save two, those of Spain and Brazil. He then called in London, on the Spanish dignitary who was to represent Spain and said, "Here is Spain's opportunity to repay in part that long-outstanding debt which it owes to the Jews. The evil which your forefathers were guilty of against us you can wipe out in part".
Dr. Weizmann was cautious, twice using the words "in part". His host, whose duty was to contemporary Spain, was being allured with the suggestion which had earlier fascinated Mr. Balfour; that Spain owed some indeterminate "debt" to "the Jews", for all of whom his visitor claimed to speak, and that by wiping out Arab hopes in Palestine he could wipe out (in part) this debt said to have been incurred by Spain. Considered by standards of reason these conversations read like something from the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party. In any case, the Spanish representative promised the vote of Spain and, for full measure, also that of simple, pious and superstitious Jews of Yemen, Is there being developed a Jewish Lourdes? I hope not, but the signs are ominous". Brazil, so that the chain of yesses was complete. Even Dr. Weizmann could not tell whether this happy ending to his visit was the result of his own eloquence or of pressure applied at a higher level (that of the Spanish delegate's superiors in Madrid).
In England, as the moment approached, a last bid was made to avert British embroilment in this enterprise. Lords Sydenham, Islington and Raglan led an attack on "the mandate" in the House of Lords and by a large majority carried their motion for the repeal of the Balfour Declaration. However, the upper house, its earlier powers abolished, by that time could only protest, and Mr. Balfour (soon to become a lord) at once reassured Dr. Weizmann: "What does it matter if a few foolish lords pass such a motion?"
After all this secret preparation the stage was set for the meeting of the League Council in London on July 24, 1922 and "everything went off smoothly when Mr. Balfour introduced the subject of the ratification of the Palestine Mandate". Without any demur Britain was awarded "the mandate" to remain in Palestine and to provide an armed cordon for the Zionists when they arrived there. *
* The "mandates" also bestowed on Britain in respect of Iraq and Transjordan, and to France in respect of Syria, were soon relinquished, these territories becoming independent states. Other countries received "mandates" in respect of various colonial and oceanic territories, which in time and in fact became their possessions. These other "mandates" were from the start fictitious and served in the office of chaperones to tile dubious one which needed respectable company. Of the entire bogus arrangement only the Palestinian "mandate" continued until. the Zionists being numerous enough and sufficiently supplied with arms, it was abandoned and the country left to the invaders then able to take and hold it by force: The later "United Nations", for obvious reasons, did not resurrect the word "Mandate". It found another word, "Trusteeship", for the same idea, which is transparently that of transferring territories from one ownership to another through a sham process of "international law" and legality.
Thus in 1922 the British future was left burdened with an undertaking which had never received public
scrutiny and during the next three decades the growing bills began to pour in. Early in the process America
also was re-involved, although the general public there did not realize this for another thirty years.
President Wilson was dead and his Democratic party was out of office. President Harding was at the White House and the Republican party was back in power. It had been swept back by the wave of popular feeling against the disappointing outcome of the war and of instinctive desire to be free from "entanglements" overseas. The country felt itself well out of the League of Nations and its mysterious activities all over the world.
Then the Republican party led the Republic back in to the embroilments in which the Democratic party first had involved it. Presumably the party-managers, those architects of public misfortune, thought to compete with the other party for the favour of those powerful groups, and the "fluctuating vote" controlled by them, described in Mr. House's diary and novel.
In June 1922, just before the League Council in London bestowed the Palestinian "Mandate" on Britain, the United States Congress passed a joint resolution of both houses, the wording of which was almost identical with that of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Thereafter the Zionist halter was firmly affixed round the neck of American State policy, and though the American voter only realized this, it became immaterial to him which party prevailed at elections.
Next
THE NATIONAL HOME
The fact of Jewish leadership was a supremely important piece of knowledge and the later suppression of it, where public debate would have been sanative, produced immense effects in weakening the West. The formulation of any rational State policy becomes impossible when such major elements of knowledge are excluded from public discussion; it is like playing billiards with twisted cues and elliptical balls. The strength of the conspiracy is shown by its success in this matter (as in the earlier period, of Messrs. Robison, Barruel and Morse) more than by any other thing.
At the time, the facts were available. The British Government's White Paper of 1919 (Russia, No. 1, a Collection of Reports on Bolshevism) quoted the report sent to Mr. Balfour in London in 1918 by the Netherlands Minister at Saint Petersburg, M. Oudendyk: "Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things". The United States Ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, reported similarly: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying. to start a worldwide social revolution". M. Oudendyke's report was deleted from later editions of the British official publication and all such authentic documents of that period are now difficult to obtain. Fortunately for the student, one witness preserved the official record.
This was Mr. Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution. The French edition of his book included the official Bolshevik lists of the membership of the ruling revolutionary bodies (they were omitted from the English edition).
These records show that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians(including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprized 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People's Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919, were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly "Socialist" or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of "opposition" was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Czar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. All the names are given in the original documents reproduced by Mr. Wilton. (In parentheses, the composition of the two short-lived Bolshevik governments outside Russia in 1918-1919, namely those of Hungary and Bavaria, was similar).
Mr. Wilton made a great and thankless effort to tell newspaper readers what went on in Russia (broken, he survived only a few years and died in his fifties). He did hot choose the task of reporting the most momentous event that ever came in any journilist's path of duty; it devolved on him. Educated in Russia, he knew the country and its language perfectly, and was held in high esteem by the Russians and the British Embassy alike. He watched the rioting from the window of The Times office, adjoining the Prefecture where the ministers of the collapsing regime took refuge. Between the advent of the Kerensky government in the spring of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, his duty was to report an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs: the rise of a Jewish regime to despotic supremacy in Russia and to overt control of the world-revolution. At that moment he was made to realize that he would not be allowed faithfully to report the fact.
The secret story is told, with surprising candour, in the Official History of his paper, The Times, published in 1952. It shows the hidden mechanism which operated, as early as 1917, to prevent the truth about the revolution reaching the peoples of the West.
This volume pays tribute to the quality of Mr. Wilton's reporting, and his standing in Russia, before 1917. Then the tone of the references to him abruptly changes. Mr. Wilton's early warnings of what was to come in 1917, says the book, "did not at once affect the policy of the paper, partly because their writer did not command full confidence".
Why, if his earlier work and reputation were so good? The reason transpires. The narrative continues that Mr. Wilton began to complain about the "burking" or suppression of his messages. Then The Times began to publish articles about Russia from men who had little knowledge of that country. As a result the editorial articles about Russia took on the tone, exasperating to Mr. Wilton, with which newspaper-readers became familiar in the following decades: "those who believe in the future of Russia as a free and efficient democracy will watch the vindication of the new regime with patient confidence and earnest sympathy". (Every incident of Mr. Wilton's experience in Moscow, which Colonel Repington was sharing in London, was repeated in my own experience, and in that of other correspondents, in Berlin in 1933-1938).
The "interregnum of five months began, during which a Jewish regime was to take over from Kerensky. At this very moment his newspaper lost "confidence" in Mr. Wilton. Why? The explanation emerges. The Official History of The Times says, "It was not happy for Wilton that one of his messages . . . should spread to Zionist circles, and even into the Foreign Office, the idea that he was an anti-semite" .
"Zionist circles", the reader will observe; not even "Communist circles"; here the working partnership becomes plain. Why should "Zionists" (who wanted the British government to procure them "a homeland" in Palestine) be affronted because a British correspondent in Moscow reported that a Jewish regime was preparing to take over in Russia? Mr. Wilton was reporting the nature of the coming regime; this was his job. In the opinion of "Zionists", this was "anti-semitism", and the mere allegation was enough to destroy "confidence" in him at his head office. How, then, could he have remained "happy" and have retained "confidence". Obviously, only by misreporting events in Russia. In effect, he was expected not to mention the determining fact of the day's news!
When I read this illuminating account I wondered by what route "Zionist circles" had spread to "the Foreign Office", and the Foreign Office to Printing House Square the "idea" that Mr. Wilton was "an antisemite". The researcher, like the lonely prospector, learns to expect little for much toil, but in this case I was startled by the large nugget of truth which I found in The Times Official History thirty-five years after the event. It said that "the head of propaganda at the Foreign Office sent to the Editor a paper by one of his staff" repeating the "allegation", (which apparently was first printed in some Zionist sheet). The Official History revealed even the identity of this assiduous "one".
It was a young Mr. Reginald Leeper, who three decades later (as Sir Reginald) became British Ambassador in Argentina. I then looked to Who's Who for information about Mr. Leeper's career and found that his first recorded employment began (when he was twenty-nine) in 1917: "entered International Bureau, Department of Information in 1917". Mr. Leeper's memorandum about Mr. Wilton was sent to The Times early in May 1917. Therefore, if he entered the Foreign Office on New Year's day of 1917, he had been in it just four months when he conveyed to The Times his "allegation" about the exceptionally qualified Mr. Wilton, of seventeen years service with that paper, and the effect was immediate; the Official History says that Mr. Wilton's despatches thereafter, during the decisive period, either miscarried or "were ignored". (The editor was the same of whom Colonel Repington complained in 1917-1918 and to whom the present writer sent his resignation in 1938 on the same basic principle of reputable journalism.)
Mr. Wilton Struggled on for a time, continually protesting against the "burking" and suppression of his despatches, and then as his last service to truthful journalism put all that he knew into his book. He recognized and recorded the acts which identified the especial nature of the regime: the law against "antisemitism", the anti-Christian measures, the canonization of Judas Iscariot, and the Talmudic fingerprint mockingly left in the death-chamber of the Romanoffs.
The law against "anti-semitism" (which cannot be defined) was in itself a fingerprint. An illegal government, predominantly Jewish, by this measure warned the Russian masses, under pain of death, not to interest themselves in the origins of the revolution. It meant in effect that the Talmud became the law of Russia, and in the subsequent four decades this law has in effect and in growing degree been made part of the structure of the west.
The short-lived anti-Christian deeds of the French phase of the revolution reappeared in more open form. The dynamiting of churches and the installation of an anti-God museum in the Cathedral of Saint Basil were the most ostentatious indications of the nature of the regime, which Mr. Wilton indicated: "Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater". This was plain reporting, and if the report had related to "Ukrainians", for instance, instead of "Jews", none would have objected; the mere act of reporting a fact became the ground for secret denunciation because the fact related to Jews.
The memorial to Judas Iscariot, recorded by Mr. Wilton, was another deliberate intimation to Christendom. If the Jewish rulers merely wanted to bring about an egalitarian society in 1917, there was no relevance in bestowing a halo of heroism on a deed of AD 29; the revolution in Russia cannot be understood at all unless the symbolism of this act is comprehended.
The aspect of a Talmudic vengeance on "the heathen" was unmistakably given to the massacres of hat period. In August 1918 a Jew, Kannegisser, shot a Jew, Uritsky; thereon a Jew, Peters, at the head of the Petrograd Cheka ordered "mass terror" on Russians and another Jew, Zinovieff, demanded that ten million Russians be "annihilated"; the British Government's White Book on Bolshevism (1919) records the massacre of Russian peasants which followed.
By far the most significant act was the form given to the murder of the Romanov family. But for Mr. Wilton this story would never have reached the world, which to this day might believe that the Czar's wife and children ended their lives naturally in "protective" custody.
The Czar acted constitutionally to the end, abdicating at the advice of his ministers (March 5, 1917). Thereafter (during the Kerensky period and its first aftermath) he was relatively well treated for a year as the prisoner at Tobolsk of a Russian commandant and Russian guards. In April 1918, when the Jewish regime had gained control, he was transferred, by order from Moscow, to Ekaterinburg. The Russian guards were then withdrawn and their place inside his prison house was taken by men whose identity has never been established: The local Russians later recalled them as "Letts" (the only foreign-speaking Red soldiers known to them), but they seem to have been brought from Hungary.
The truth only became known through the chance that Ekaterinburg fell to the White armies on July 25, that Mr. Wilton accompanied them, and that their commander, General Diterichs, a famous Russian criminologist, M. Sokoloff, and Mr. Wilton uncovered the buried evidence. When the White troops withdrew Mr. Wilton brought away the proofs; they appear in his book and include many photographs.
The murders had been carried out by order from and in constant consultation with Sverdloff in Moscow; records of telephone conversations between him and the Chekists in Ekaterinburg were found. Among these was a report to him from Ekaterinburg saying "Yesterday a courier left with the documents that interest you". This courier was the chief assassin, Yurovsky, and the investigators believed that the "documents" were the heads of the Romanoffs, as no skulls or skull-bones were found.
The deed was described by witnesses who had not been able to escape, and at least one was a participant. At midnight on July 16 Yurovsky awoke the Czar and his family, took them to a basement room and there shot them. The actual murderers were Yurovsky, his seven unidentified foreign accomplices, one Nikulin from the local Cheka, and two Russians, apparently professional gunmen employed by the Cheka. The victims were the Czar, his wife, ailing son (who was held in his father's arms as he could not walk), four daughters, Russian [278] doctor, manservant, cook and maid. The room was still a shambles, from the shooting and bayoneting, when M. Sokoloff and Mr. Wilton saw it, and his book includes the picture of it.
The circumstances having been determined, the investigators almost despaired of finding the bodies, or their remains; they learned that Yurovsky, before escaping the town, had boasted that "the world will never know what we did with the bodies". However, the earth at length gave up its secret. The bodies had been taken by five lorries to a disused iron pit in the woods, cut up and burned, 150 gallons of petrol being used; one Voikoff of the Urals Cheka (a fellow-passenger of Lenin in the train from Germany) as Commissar of Supplies had supplied 400 lbs. of sulphuric acid for dissolving the bones. The ashes and fragments had been thrown down the shaft, the ice at the bottom having first been smashed so that the mass would sink; then a flooring had been lowered and fixed over the place. When this was removed the search reached its end. On top lay the corpse of a spaniel belonging to one of the princesses; below were fragments of bone and skin, a finger, and many identifiable personal belongings which had escaped destruction. A puzzling find was a small collection of nails, coins, pieces of tinfoil and the like. This looked like the contents of a schoolboy's pockets, and was; the little boy's English tutor, Mr. Sidney Gibbes, identified it. The precautions taken to dispose of the bodies and of other evidence were of the kind that only criminals of long experience in their trade could have devised; they resemble the methods used in gang warfare, during the Prohibition period, in the United States.
These discoveries, becoming known in the outer world, exposed the untruth of Sverdloff's announcement that only the Czar had been "executed" and his family sent to "a place of security". The murderers staged a mock trial of "28 persons on the accusation of having murdered the Czar and his family". Only eight names were published, all of them unknown in connection with the crime, and five persons were said to have been shot, who if they existed at all cannot have had any part in it. The arch-assassin, Sverdloff, was soon afterwards killed in some party dispute and thousands of innocent people died in the indiscriminate massacres which followed. Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk to give enduring fame to his part in the symbolic deed.
The chief reason for recounting the details of the pogrom of the Romanoffs is to point to the "fingerprint" which was left in the room where it was done. One of the assassins, presumably their leader, stayed to exult and put a significant signature on the wall, which was covered with obscene or mocking inscriptions in Hebrew, Magyar and German. Among them was a couplet which deliberately related the deed to the Law of the Torah-Talmud and thus offered it to posterity as an example of the fulfilment of that law, and of Jewish vengeance as understood by the Levites. It was written in German by someone who parodied the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine's lines on the death of Belshazzar, the imaginary potentate whose murder is portrayed in Daniel as God's punishment for an [279] affront offered to Judah:
Belsazar ward aber in selbiger Nacht
Von selbigen Knechten umgebracht.
Belsatsar ward in selbiger Nacht
Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.
No clearer clue to motive and identity was ever left behind. The revolution was not Russian; the eruption was brought about in Russia, but the revolution had its friends in high places everywhere. At this period (1917-1918) the student for the first time is able to establish that leading men began to give that secret support to Communism which they were already giving to its blood brother, Zionism. This happened on both sides of the fighting-line; once the secret, but overriding purposes of the war came into play the distinction between "friend" and "foe" disappeared. The Zionists, though they concentrated "irresistible pressure" on the politicians of London and Washington, long kept their headquarters in Berlin; the Communists obtained decisive support from Germany at one moment and from Germany's enemies the next.
For instance, Germany when the 1914-1918 war began started "sending back to Russia Russians of revolutionary tendencies who were prisoners here, with money and passports, in order that they may stir up trouble at home" (Ambassador Gerard in Berlin to Mr. House). Mr. Robert Wilton says the decision to Foment the revolution in Russia was formally taken at a German and Austrian General Staff meeting at Vienna late in 1915. The German Chief-of-Staff, General Ludendorff, later regretted this: "By sending Lenin to Russia our government assumed. . . a great responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for Russia had to be laid low; but our government should have seen to it that we were not involved in her fall".
That, taken as an isolated case, might be a simple human error: what appeared to be a sound military move produced catastrophic political consequences not foreseen when it was made. But what explanation can be found for American and British politicians, whose foremost military and political principle should have been to sustain Russia and yet who supported the alien revolutionaries who "laid Russia low"?
I have already quoted the editorial about the revolution (". . . a free and efficient democracy . . . the vindication of the new regime . . .") which appeared in The Times of London while its experienced correspondent's despatches were being "ignored" and "confidence" withdrawn from him because the newspaper had received "an allegation" that he was "an anti-semite". On the other side of the Atlantic the true ruler of the Republic, Mr. House was confiding to his diary similar sentiments. For him the alien revolutionaries smuggled into Russia [280] during wartime from the West ("this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America", Mr. Churchill) were honest agrarian reformers: "the Bolshevists appeared to the peace-hungry and land-hungry Russians as the first leaders who made a sincere effort to satisfy their needs" .
Today all know what happened to the Russians' "land-hunger" under Bolshevism. In 1917 the Czars and their ministers for fifty years had been toiling to satisfy this "land-hunger" and by assassination had been thwarted. Apparently Mr. House was ignorant of that. When the revolution was accomplished he instructed the shadow-president: "that literally nothing be done further than that an expression of sympathy be offered for Russia's efforts to weld herself into a virile democracy and to proffer our financial, industrial and moral support in every way possible". *
* It might be significant of the influences which continued to prevail in the entourage of American presidents during the next two generations that President Eisenhower in 1955, from his hospital room in Denver, sent a personal message of congratulations to the Soviet Premier, Bulganin, on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, November 7. The democratic and parliamentary revolution, legitimized by the Czars abdication, occurred in March 1917; November 7 was a day on which the Bolsheviks overthrew the legitimate regime. By 1955 American presidents were habitually warning their people against the menace of "Soviet" or "Communist" (i.e., Bolshevik) aggression [281] brought to Russia) "and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world. . . With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian state and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low . . . Her sufferings are more fearful than modern records hold and she had been robbed of her place among the great nations of the world". (House of Commons, 5 November 1919).
Thus the West, or powerful men in the West, began to range itself with the world-revolution against the Russians, which meant, against all men who abhorred the revolution. Not all the powerful men, or men later to become powerful, lent themselves to this hidden undertaking. At that time Mr. Winston Churchill again stated the nature of the revolution:
"Certainly I dispute the title of the Bolshevists to represent Russia . . . They despise such a mere commonplace as nationality. Their ideal is a worldwide proletarian revolution. The Bolsheviks robbed Russia at one stroke of two most precious things: peace and victory, the victory that was within her grasp and the peace which was her dearest desire. The Germans sent Lenin into Russia with the deliberate intention of working for the downfall of Russia . . . No sooner did Lenin arrive there than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgo,, in Berne and other countries" (the reader will perceive whence the "Russian" revolutionaries were
Mr. Churchill's description remains valid, particularly the phrase, "the most formidable sect in the world", which resembles the phrase used by Bakunin in his attack on Jewish usurpation of the revolution fifty years earlier. The passage quoted from Mr. Churchill's article earlier in this chapter shows that he was equally aware of the identity of this sect.
Thus Dr. Chaim Weizmann's youthful fellow-conspirators from the Talmudic area of Russia triumphed in Russia at the very moment when he triumphed in London and Washington. The only difference between him and them, from the start, was that between "revolutionary-Zionism" and "revolutionary-Communism", as he shows. In his student days in Berlin, Freiburg and Geneva, he had waged many a hot debate about this point of difference, which for those who reject revolution as such is a distinction without meaning. Mr. Balfour's amanuensis, Mrs. Dugdale, portrays the blood-brothers of the revolution in argument during the years when their simultaneous triumph was in preparation:
"Lenin and Trotsky took power in the same week of November 1917 that Jewish nationalism won its recognition. Years before, in Geneva, Trotsky and Weizmann had night after night expounded from rival cafés in the university quarter their opposed political beliefs. Both of them Russian-born. . . . they had swayed the crowds of Jewish students from one side of the street to the other; Leon Trotsky, apostle of Red revolution; Chaim Weizmann, apostle of a tradition unbroken for two thousand years. Now by a most strange coincidence in the same week each of them accomplished the fulfilment of his dream".
In truth, the pincers in which the West was to be gripped had been forged, and each handle was held by one of two groups of revolutionaries "Russian-born" (but not Russian).
For Dr. Weizmann and his associates in London and Washington, the event in Moscow was a passing embarrassment, in one respect. They had based their demand for Palestine on the legend that "a place of refuge" must be found for Jews "persecuted in Russia" (an obvious non sequitur but good enough for "the mob"), and now there was no "persecution in Russia". On the contrary, in Moscow a Jewish regime ruled and "anti-Semitism" was a capital offence. Where, then, were the Jews who needed "a place of refuge"? (This is evidently the reason why Mr. Robert Wilton had to be prevented from reporting the nature of the new regime in Moscow).
Rabbi Elmer Berger says, "The Soviet government even privileged Jews as Jews… at a single stroke, the revolution emancipated those very Jews for whom, previously, no solution other than Zionism would be efficacious, according to Zionist spokesmen. Soviet Jews no longer had need of Palestine, or any other refuge. The lever of the suffering of Russian Jewry, which Herzl had often used in attempts to prise a charter for Palestine from some power, was gone".
That did not deter Dr. Weizmann. At once he informed the Jews that they must not expect any respite:
"Some of our friends. . . are very quick in drawing conclusions as to what will happen to the Zionist movement after the Russian revolution. Now, they say, the greatest stimulus for the Zionist movement has been removed. Russian Jewry is free. . . Nothing can be more superficial and wrong than that. We have never built our Zionist movement on the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere. These sufferings were never the cause of Zionism. The fundamental cause of Zionism was, and is, the ineradicable striving of Jewry to have a home of its own".
Dr. Weizmann spoke truth in untruth. It was true that the organizers of Zionism, in their private hearts, had never in reality built their movement on "the sufferings of our people in Russia or elsewhere"; they were indifferent to any suffering, Jewish or other, caused by Zionism. But they had beyond all dispute used "the sufferings of our people in Russia" as their argument in beleaguering Western politicians, who from Mr. Wilson in 1912 onward repeatedly alluded to it.
In this crucial week, the falsity of the entire contention, though revealed, made no difference, for the British Government, as Mrs. Dugdale recorded, was at length committed. Not even a pretence could be maintained that any Jews needed "a place of refuge" but Mr. Lloyd George had undertaken to conquer Palestine for "the Jews".
The basic fallacy of the enterprise was exposed at the very instant when it was clamped like a millstone round the neck of the West. Although this irreparable flaw in its foundation must cause its ultimate collapse, like that of Sabbatai Zevi's messiahship in l666, the tragi-comedy thenceforth had to be played to its ruinous end.
But for one later event, the undertaking would have died a natural death within a few years and would survive today in the annals merely as Balfour's Folly. This event was the coming of Hitler, which for a while filled the gap left by the collapse of the legend of "persecution in Russia" and produced in some Jews a desire to go even to Palestine. For the Zionists Hitler, had he not arisen, would have needed to be created; a collapsing scheme was made by him to look almost lifelike for some time. The Hitlerist episode belongs to a later chapter in this narrative.
Chapter 33
THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE
At the same moment in 1917 when the two kindred forces from Russia, revolutionary-Communism
and revolutionary-Zionism, emerged into the full open, the third secret purpose of the war, the one of which
they were the instruments, also was revealed. This was the project for a "federation of the world" to take over
"the management of human affairs" and to rule by force. The masses then (as in the Second War, twenty-five years later) were being egged on to destroy a "madman in Berlin" on this very ground, that he sought to rule the world by force. In England Mr. Eden Philpotts (one of many such oracles then and in the next war) thundered:
"You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep its curses only, crowned upon your brow . . ." and that was the universal cry. Yet the secret plan promoted in the West was equally one to "grasp the world by force" and to put new "warlords" over it.
It was merely dressed in other words. What was reactionary Prussian militarism in Germany was one of Mr. House's "advanced ideas" in Washington; what was megalomaniac ambition in the Kaiser was an enlightened concept of "a new world order" in London. The politicians of the West became professional dissimulators. Even Disraeli could not foresee in 1832 ( "The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation") that this would become the definition of political practice in the West in the 20th Century; but this happened when Western political leaders, by supporting Zionism and the world-revolution, yielded to the prompting of Asiatics; their acts took on an Asiatic duplicity in place of native candour.
Strangely, Mr. Woodrow Wilson, the most compliant of them all, at the start rebelled most fretfully against the secret constraints. He tried, as has been shown, to declare that "the causes and objects of the war are obscure", and when this was forbidden by Mr. House, still avowed that the belligerents on both sides pursued "the same" objects. He went further at the very start of his presidency, when he wrote, "It is an in tolerable thing that the government of the Republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should have been captured by interests which are special and not general. We know that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington". Presumably he learned the nature of these "interests" and this "control", and the galling knowledge may have caused his collapse (and that of Mr. Roosevelt in the later generation).
Nevertheless, he was used to launch the plan for setting up "a federation of the world", based on force. The idea was "oozed into his brain" by others; the phrase is used by Mr. House's biographer to describe the method by which Mr. House prompted the actions of other men (and by which his own were prompted). In November 1915, when the American people were still ardent for the president who was keeping them out of the war, Mr. House instructed him:
"We must throw the influence of this nation in behalf of a plan by which international obligations must be kept and maintained and in behalf of some plan by which the peace of the world may be maintained".
This was always the sales-talk: that "the plan" would "maintain world peace". Mr. House had long been discussing the plan with Sir Edward Grey (Mr. Asquith's Foreign Secretary; he became blind in 1914 but in a moment of spiritual clairvoyance used the words which have become truer ever since, "The lights are going out all over Europe"). Sir Edward Grey was captivated by "the plan", and wrote to Mr. House, "International law has hitherto had no sanction; the lesson of this war is that the Powers must bind themselves to give it sanction". "Sanction" was the euphemism used by the dissimulators to avoid alarming the masses by the sound of "war" or "force". The dictionary definition, in such a context, is "a coercive measure", and the only means of coercion between nations is, ultimately, war: no "sanction" can be effective unless it is backed by that threat. Therefore Sir Edward Grey thought war could be ended by making war. He was an incorruptible but apparently deluded man; the originators of the great "idea" knew what they meant (and in our day this also has been revealed).
By 1916 Mr. House had instructed Mr. Wilson as to his duty and in May the president publicly announced support for "the plan" at a meeting of a new body candidly called "The League To Enforce Peace". Mr. Wilson knew nothing of its nature: "it does not appear that Woodrow Wilson studied seriously the programme of the League To Enforce Peace" (Mr. House's Private Papers).
This was a reincarnation of the earlier "League to enforce peace" which (as Lord Robert Cecil had reminded Mr. House) "really became a league to uphold tyranny". In 1916 the name gave away the game; American opinion was not then ready to walk into so obvious a trap. Senator George Wharton Pepper recalls: "A heavily-financed organization aptly entitled 'The League To Enforce Peace' was making our task easier by emphasizing, as its title indicated, that the Covenant" (of the League of Nations) "was intended to be made effective by force. . .Our constant contention, in opposition to theirs, was that the appeal to force was at the best futile and at the worst dangerous. . . I contrasted the certain futility of an appeal to international force with the possible hopefulness of reliance upon international conference, and declared myself favourable to any association of the latter type and unalterably opposed to a league which was based on the former".
The dissimulators soon dropped the name, "The League To Enforce Peace", but the "plan", which produced "The League of Nations", transparently remained the same: it was one to transfer the control of national armies to some super-national committee which could use them for "the management of human affairs" in ways serving its own special ends, and that has continued the motive to the present day. As in the earlier case of Zionism, President Wilson was [285] committed long before the crucial moment (by his public declaration of May 1916) and as soon as America was in the war (April 1917) announced that it was involved in an undertaking to set up "a new international order"; this statement was made at the moment of the first revolution in Russia and of the preparation of the Balfour Declaration.
Thus the three great "plans" moved together into the West, and this was the project which was to crown the work of the other two. Its basic principle was the destruction of nation-states and nationhood so that it gave expression, in modern form, to the ancient conflict between the Old Testament and the New, between the Levitical Law and the Christian message. The Torah-Talmud is the only discoverable, original source of this idea of "destroying nations"; Mr. House thought it almost impossible to trace any "idea" to its fount, but in this case the track can be followed back through the centuries to 500 BC, and it is nowhere obliterated during those twenty-five hundred years. If before that time anybody in the known world had made this "destructive principle" into a code and creed they and it have faded into oblivion. The idea contained in the Torah-Talmud has gone unbroken through all the generations. The New Testament rejects it and speaks of "the deception of nations", not of their destruction. Revelation foretells a day when this process of deception of nations shall end. Those who seek to interpret prophecy might very well see in The League To Enforce Peace, under its successive aliases, the instrument of this "deception", doomed at the end to fail.
Mr. House having decided, and Mr. Wilson having declared, that "a new international order" must be established, Mr. House (according to Mr. Howden) set up a body known as "The Inquiry" to draft a plan. Its head was his brother-in-law, Dr. Sidney Mezes (then president of the College of the City of New York), and its secretary a Mr. Walter Lippmann (then writing for The New Republic). A Dr. Isaiah Bowman (then director of the American Geographical Society) gave "personal advice and assistance".
The group of men placed in charge of The Inquiry therefore was predominantly Jewish (though in this case not Russian-Jewish: this might indicate the true nature of the superior authority indicated by Dr. Kastein's allusion to "a Jewish international") and Jewish inspiration may thus reasonably be seen in the plan which it produced. This (says Mr. Howden) was a draft "Convention for a League of Nations" to which Mr. House put his signature in July 1918: "President Wilson was not, and never pretended to be, the author of the Covenant". Here, then, are the origins of the League of Nations.
The Peace Conference loomed ahead when Mr. House prepared to launch this "new world order", and its first acts pointed to the identity of the controlling-group behind the Western governments. Zionism and Palestine (issues unknown to the masses when the 1914-1918 war began) were found to be high, if not paramount among the matters to be discussed at the conference which ended it.
President Wilson, for this reason, seems to have known moments of exaltation between long periods of despondency. Rabbi Stephen Wise, at his side, depicted the Palestinean undertaking in such terms that the president, entranced, soliloquised, "To think that I, a son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people". While he thus contemplated himself in the mirror of posterity the rabbi beside him compared him with the Persian King Cyrus, who had enabled the exiled Jews of his land to return to Jerusalem". King Cyrus had allowed native Judahites, if they wished, to return to Judah after some fifty years; President Wilson was required to transplant Judaized Chazars from Russia to a land left by the original Jews some eighteen centuries before.
Across the Atlantic Dr. Weizmann made ready for the Peace Conference. He was then evidently one of the most powerful men in the world, a potentate (or emissary of potentates) to whom the "premierdictators" of the West made humble obeisance. At a moment in 1918 when the fate of England was in the balance on the stricken Western Front an audience of the King of England was postponed. Dr. Weizmann complained so imperiously that Mr. Balfour at once restored the appointment; save for the place of meeting, which was Buckingham Palace, Mr. Weizmann seems in fact to have given audience to the monarch. During the Second World War the Soviet dictator Stalin, being urged by the Western leaders to take account of the influence of the Pope, asked brusquely, "How many divisions has the Pope?". Such at least was the anecdote, much retold in clubs and pubs, and to simple folk it seemed to express essential truth in a few words. Dr. Weizmann's case shows how essentially untrue it was. He had not a single soldier, but he and the international he represented were able to obtain capitulations never before won save by conquering armies.
He disdained the capitulants and the scene of his triumphs alike. He wrote to Lady Crewe, "We hate equally anti-semites and philo-semites". Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and the other "friends" were philosemites of the first degree, in Dr. Weizmann's meaning of the word, and excelled themselves in servience to the man who despised them. As to England itself, Dr. Weizmann two decades later, when he contemplated the wild beasts in the Kruger National Park, soliloquised, "It must be a wonderful thing to be an animal on the South African game reserve; much better than being a Jew in Warsaw or even in London".
In 1918 Dr. Weizmann decided to inspect his realm-elect. When he reached Palestine the German attack in France had begun, the depleted British armies were reeling back, and "most of the European troops in Palestine were being withdrawn to reinforce the armies in France". At such a moment he demanded that the foundation stone of a Hebrew University be laid with all public ceremony. Lord Allenby protested that "the Germans are almost at the gates of Paris!" Dr. Weizmann replied that this was "only one episode". Lord Allenby obdured; Dr. Weizmann persisted; Lord Allenby under duress referred to Mr. Balfour and was at once ordered by cable to obey. With great panoply of staff officers, troops and presented arms (disturbed only by the sounds of distant British-Turkish fighting) Dr. Weizmann then held his ceremony on Mount Scopus.
(I remember those days in France. Even half a million more British soldiers there would have transformed the battle; a multitude of lives would have been saved, and the war probably ended sooner. The French and British ordeal in France made a Zionist holiday in Palestine).
When the war at last ended, on November 11, 1918, none other than Dr. Weizmann was at luncheon the sole guest of Mr. Lloyd George, whom he found "reading the Psalms and near to tears". Afterwards the Zionist chieftain watched from historic Ten Downing Street as the prime minister disappeared, borne shoulder high by a mafficking mob towards a Thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey.
Masses and "managers"; did any among the crowd notice the high, domed head, with bearded face and heavy-lidded eyes watching from the window of Ten Downing Street?
Then Dr. Weizmann led a Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919 where "the new world order" was to be set up. He informed the august Council of Ten that "the Jews had been hit harder by the war than any other group"; the politicians of 1919 made no demur to this insult to their millions of dead. However, a remonstrant Jew, Mr. Sylvain Levi of France, at the last moment tried to instil prudence in them. He told them:
First, that Palestine was a small, poor land with an existing population of 600,000 Arabs, and that the Jews, having a higher standard of life than the Arabs, would tend to dispossess them; second, that the Jews who would go to Palestine would be mainly Russian Jews, who were of explosive tendencies; third, that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine would introduce the dangerous principle of Jewish dual loyalties.
These three warnings have been fulfilled to the letter, and were heard with hostility by the Gentile politicians assembled at the Peace Conference of 1919. Mr. Lansing, the American Secretary of State, at once gave M. Lévi his quietus. He asked Dr. Weizmann, "What do you mean by a Jewish national home?" Dr. Weizmann said he meant that, always safeguarding the interests of non-Jews, Palestine would ultimately become "as Jewish as England is English". Mr. Lansing said this absolutely obscure reply was "absolutely clear", the Council of Ten nodded agreement, and M. Levi, like all Jewish remonstrants for twenty-five centuries, was discomfited. (He was only heard at all to maintain a pretence of impartial consideration; Rabbi Wise, disquietened by "the difficulties we had to face in Paris", had already made sure of President Wilson's docility. Approaching the president privately, he said, "Mr. President, World Jewry counts on you in its hour of need and hope", thus excommunicating M. Levi and the Jews who thought like him. Mr. Wilson, placing his hand on the rabbi's shoulder, "quietly and firmly said, 'Have no fear, Palestine will be yours'.")
One other man tried to avert the deed which these men, with frivolity, were preparing. Colonel Lawrence loved Semites, for he had lived with the Arabs and roused them in the desert against their Turkish rulers. He was equally a friend of Jews (Dr. Weizmann says "he has mistakenly been represented as anti-Zionist") and believed that "a Jewish homeland" (in the sense first given to the term, of a cultural centre) could well be incorporated in the united Arab State for which he had worked.
Lawrence saw in Paris that what was intended was to plant Zionist nationalism like a time-bomb among a clutter of weak Arab states, and the realization broke him. Mr. David Garnett, who edited his Letters , says, "Lawrence won his victories without endangering more than a handful of Englishmen and they were won, not to add subject provinces to our empire, but that the Arabs whom he had lived with and loved should be a free people, and that Arab civilization should be reborn".
That was Lawrence's faith during his "Revolt in the Desert", and what the men who sent him to Arabia told him. When the Paris Conference began he was "fully in control of his nerves and quite as normal as most of us" (Mr. J.M. Keynes). He arrived believing in President Wilson's pledge (speech of the Fourteen Points, January 8, 1918), "The nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". He could not know that these words were false, because Mr. Wilson was secretly committed to Zionism, through the men around him.
After Dr. Weizmann's reply to Mr. Lansing, and its approval by the Council of Ten, the betrayal became clear to Lawrence and he showed "the disillusion and the bitterness and the defeat resulting from the Peace Conference; he had complete faith that President Wilson would secure self-determination for the Arab peoples when he went to the Peace Conference; he was completely disillusioned when he returned"(Mr. Garnett). Lawrence himself later wrote, "We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns" (in the desert) "never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we achieved and the new world dawned the old men came out again and took from us our victory and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew . . . I meant to make a new nation, to restore to the world a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts".
Lawrence, who was broken by this experience, was then among the most famous men in the world. Had he joined the dissimulators hardly any rank or honour would have been refused him. He threw up his rank, and away his decorations, and tried from shame even to lose his identity; he enlisted under an assumed name in the lowest rank of the Royal Air Force, where he was later discovered by an assiduous newspaper man. This last phase of his life, and the [289] motor-bicycle accident which ended it, have a suicidal look (resembling the similar phase and end of Mr. James Forrestal after the Second War) and he must be accounted among the martyrs of this story.
The leading public men were agreed to promote the Zionist adventure through the "international world order" which they were about to found, at any cost in honour and human suffering. In nearly all other questions they differed, so that, the war hardly ended, reputations began bursting like bubbles and friendships cracking like plaster, in Paris. Some breach occurred between President Wilson and his "second personality, independent self" (a similar, mysterious estrangement was to sever President Roosevelt and his other self, Mr. Harry Hopkins, at the end of another war).
Mr. House was at his zenith. Prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors and delegates besieged him at the Hotel Crillon; in a single day he gave forty-nine audiences to such high notables. Once the French Prime Minister, M. Clemenceau, called when Mr. Wilson was with Mr. House; the president was required to withdraw while the two great men privately conferred. Perhaps humiliation at last broke Mr. Woodrow Wilson; he was stricken by mortal illness in Paris (as Mr. Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, though Mr. Wilson survived rather longer). Apparently the two never saw or communicated with each other again! Mr. House merely recorded, "My separation from Woodrow Wilson was and is to me a tragic mystery, a mystery that now can never be dispelled for its explanation lies buried with him".
The illusions of power were dissolving. These men were never truly powerful, because they acted as the instruments of others. They already look wraithlike in the annals, and if the squares and boulevards named after them still bear their names, few remember who they were. Mr. Wilson returned to America and soon died. Mr. House before long was lonely and forgotten in the apartment in East 35th Street. Mr. Lloyd George found himself in the political wilderness and was only able to complete the ruin of a once-great Liberal party; within a decade he found himself at the head of four followers. Mr. Balfour, for a few more years, absentmindedly haunted Saint James's Park.
They were not able to accomplish all that their mentors wished. Shaken by the violence of American objections, Mr. Wilson "absolutely declined to accept the French demand for the creation of an international force that should operate under the executive control of the League". The American Constitution (the president suddenly recollected) did not permit of any such surrender of sovereignty.
Thus the worst was averted, in that generation. The secret men, who continued to be powerful when these "premier-dictators" and pliable "administrators" were shorn of their semblance of power, had to wait for the Second World War to get their hands on the armies of the nation-states. Then they achieved their "League to enforce peace" almost (but still not quite) in the fullness of despotic power coveted by them. In 1919 they had to content themselves with a modest first experiment: The League Of Nations.
The United States would not even join it; the masses of America, disquietened by the results of the war and instinctively striving to regain the safe haven of "no foreign entanglements", would have none of it. Britain joined, but under other prime ministers than Mr. Lloyd George would not hand over control of its armies. The way to the kind of "new world order" envisaged by Mr. House and his prompters was blocked for the time being. Nevertheless a way was found, through the League of Nations, to effect one fateful, and possibly fatal breach in British sovereignty.
The authority of this "League of Nations", whatever it amounted to, was used to cover the use of British troops as a bodyguard for the Zionists intending to seize Palestine. The device employed to give this mock-legal air to the deed was called "the mandate", and I have earlier shown where it was born. By means of it the League of Nations was able to install the Zionists from Russia in Arabia, where they revealed the "explosive tendencies" foretold by M. Sylvain Levi in 1919 and apparent to all today, in 1956. This was the sole, enduring accomplishment of the "new world order" set up in 1919 and by the ancient test, Cui bono?, the authorship of this "idea" may be judged.
The story of "The mandate" (and of a man who tried to avert it) therefore forms the next chapter in this narrative.
Chapter 34
THE END OF LORD NORTHCLIFFE
During the three years which followed the Peace Conference of 1919 the way had to be found to keep
British armies in Palestine, make them look as if they performed an honourable duty there, and in fact use
them as cloak for a deed which had the character of an assassination. This problem, of infinite complexity,
was efficiently solved. An impressive picture of the secret manipulation of great governments for a nefarious
purpose emerges from the records; the method of exerting "irresistible pressure upon international politics"
constantly improved with practice. After the Peace Conference had approved the Zionist claim to Palestine (and thereby disowned the mass of emancipated Western Jews, personified by M. Sylvain Levi) the next step was taken at the San Remo Conference of 1920, where the victor powers met to dismember the conquered Turkish Empire. This conference adopted the ingenious deception invented by Dr. Weizmann in 1915 and agreed that Britain should administer Palestine under "a mandate".
Protests against the undertaking then were growing loud, because its true nature was beginning to be realized, but Mr. Balfour assured Dr. Weizmann that "they were regarded as without importance and would certainly not affect policy, which had been definitely set".
Here is the cryptic statement, often to recur later, that policy in this one question must not, cannot and never will alter, so that national interest, honour and all other considerations are irrelevant. I know of no other case where an unalterable tenet of high State policy has been fixed without regard to State interest or consultation of public opinion at any stage. At San Remo Mr. Lloyd George was worried lest "the frost" of peace should set in before the secret purpose was accomplished, and told Dr. Weizmann, "You have no time to waste. Today the world is like the Baltic before a frost. For the moment it is still in motion. But if it gets set, you will have to batter your heads against the ice blocks and wait for a second thaw". Had Mr. Lloyd George said "second war" he would have been correct and possibly that was what he meant by "thaw". In these circumstances the San Remo Conference "confirmed the Balfour Declaration and the decision to give the mandate to Great Britain". After that only one step remained between the Zionists and their goal; the League of Nations had to invent "mandates", bestow on itself the right to bestow mandates, and then "ratify" this Mandate.
That happened in 1922, as will be seen, but during the interval protests against the deed came from every responsible authority or community directly involved. The forces engaged in promoting it were three: the directing Zionists from Russia, the "philo-semites" in high places whom Dr. Weizmann "hated" while he used them, and, among the masses, that body of sentimental liberals scathingly depicted in the Protocols. Against it was ranked authoritative and experienced opinion in such overwhelming measure that, had the question been any other than this one to which the "administrators" were secretly committed, it would have collapsed. The mass of protest was so great that it is enumerated in its parts here for comparison with the summary which follows. It came from (1) the Palestinian Arabs; (2) the Palestinian Jews; (3) the chief Zionist leader in America, as well as' the anti-Zionist Jews of America and England; (4) the British officials and soldiers in Palestine; (5) British and American official investigators; (6) a large body of the press, then still free of occult control in this matter.
(1) The Arabs saw from the start what was in store for them, for they knew the Torah. Dr. Weizmann had told the Peace Conference "The Bible is our mandate", and they knew about "the God of the Jews" and his promises of pogrom and reward: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee . . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7, 1-3).
Thus Zionism, and Western support of it, meant extermination for them under a Law of 2,500 years earlier (and the events of 1948 proved this). In 1945 King Ibn Saoud told President Roosevelt, "You have fought two world wars to discover what we have known for two thousand years" and in 1948 the intention literally to fulfil the above-quoted "statute and commandment" was proved by deed. Significantly, even anti-Zionist Jews could not believe, before it happened, that this literal "fulfilment" was intended. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown correctly cited the above-mentioned passage as the reason for Arab fears and said, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his Bible literally and would not be so cruel to his fellow man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of their historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". Mr. Brown of Chicago did not know the Chazars).
The Arabs in 1920 were not deceived by Mr. Balfour's public pledge (in the Declaration) that their "civil and religious rights" would be protected or by Mr. Wilson's public pledge (the Fourteen Points) that they would have "undoubted security of life" and "absolutely independent opportunity of autonomous development". If they did not know, they guessed that Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson had secretly promised the Zionists Palestine. Knowing the Torah, they equally disbelieved the public statement of Mr. Winston Churchill in 1922 (when he was Colonial Secretary), "Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine.' Phrases have been used such as 'Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English' " (a direct rebuke to Dr. Weizmann) "His Majesty's government regard any such suggestion as impracticable and have no such aim in [293] view. Nor have they at any time contemplated the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine" (in the Second World War, as Prime Minister, and after it as Opposition leader Mr. Churchill gave his support to the process here denied).
(2) The original Jewish community of Palestine (never taken into consideration at any stage in all these proceedings) was violently anti-Zionist. Dr. Weizmann, almost alone among his fellow-Zionists and the Western politicians associated with them, had slight acquaintance with these original Jews, having made one or two brief visits to Palestine; he says most of his fellow-Zionists from Russia were "completely ignorant" of them. At this period in 1919-1922 the Zionist leaders first learned that the Jews of Palestine held them to be "heathen, impious, heartless, ignorant and malevolent". Dr. Weizmann (whose attitude is the familiar one that he was only acting for their good; "we were only anxious to make conditions a little modern and comfortable for them") was "rather horrified to discover how remote from them we remained". He dismisses them as old fogies who, annoyingly, bombarded the Jewish organizations in America with complaints about the Zionists, "quite ninety percent" of their letters being violently hostile. (Typically, Dr. Weizmann learned of the contents of these letters from a British censor, derelict in his duty, who showed them to him). These protests of the native Arabs and native Jews of Palestine were ignored by the politicians of Paris and San Remo.
(3) Mr. Louis Brandeis in 1919 visited the country which then, for twenty years, had formed the object of his revived interest in Judaism. He was at once disillusioned by actual acquaintance with the unknown land and decided that "it would be wrong to encourage immigration". He urged that the World Zionist Organization should be greatly reduced, if not abolished, and that future activity should be restricted to the modest task of building up a "Jewish Homeland" through separate Zionist associations in the various countries. In effect this would have been simply a "cultural centre" in Palestine, consisting perhaps of a university and academies, and of somewhat more numerous farm settlements, with reasonable means of immigration for the small number of Jews who, of their own volition, might wish to go to Palestine.
This meant abandoning the concept of separate Jewish nationhood symbolized by a Jewish State, and was treason. It was (as Dr. Weizmann says) a revival of he old cleavage between "east" and "west"; between "Ostjuden" and emancipated Western Jews; between "Washington" and "Pinsk" (the name of the author of the phrase about "international pressure" was significant, not coincidental).
The Zionists from Russia overthrew Mr. Brandeis as easily as Dr. Herzl in 1903-4. Mr. Brandeis made the proposal summarized above to the Cleveland Congress of American Zionists in 1921. Dr. Weizmann, opposing, insisted on "a national fund" (that is, revenue to be raised by the self-appointed government of a Jewish nation from obligatory tithe-payments by members of the Zionist organization) and "a national budget". Mr. Brandeis's weakness was precisely that of Dr. Herzl in 1903; the great Western governments were committed to the Zionists from Russia. The congress, which if it was in any way "elected" was elected by about one-tenth of the Jews of America, upheld Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Brandeis fell from his high place.
(4) In Palestine the British soldiers and officials saw that an impossible task was to be inflicted on them. They were of a stock that had gained more experience in the administration of overseas territories than any other in history, and experience and instinct alike warned them. They knew how to administer a country justly on behalf of all its native peoples and had often done this. They knew that no country could be justly administered, or even kept quiet, if alien immigrants were to be forced into it and the native peoples compelled to allow this. Their protests, too, began to flow towards London and until the end, thirty years later, were ignored. The Arabs from the start accepted the bitter truth and began (in 1920) to resist by riot, rising and every means at hand; they have never since ceased and obviously will not until their grievance is amended or they are all put in permanent, armed captivity.
(5) As the "front-rank politicians" (Dr. Weizmann's phrase) in London and Washington were resolved at any cost to implant the Zionists in Palestine, without regard to any protest, opinion or counsel whatever, today's student might wonder why President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George sent commissions of investigation to the land bartered about by them. If they hoped to receive encouraging reports (in the manner of Sir Henry Wilson's "mud-months" advice) they were deceived, for these investigators merely confirmed what the Arabs, Jews and British in Palestine all had said. President Wilson's King-Crane Commission (1919) reported that "the Zionist look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine". This commission added, "by various forms of purchase"; the more experienced British officers heard by it correctly informed it that "the Zionist programme could not be carried out except by force of arms". Mr. Lloyd George's Haycraft Commission (1921) reported that the real root of the trouble then starting in Palestine lay in the justified Arab belief that the Zionists intended to dominate in Palestine.
(6) By far the greatest obstacle to the Zionist ambition came from factual reporting in the press of what was happening in Palestine and from editorial comment adverse to Zionism. At any time up to the 1914-1918 war the American and British governments, before they went too far, would have had to reckon with public opinion, accurately informed by the newspapers. The corruption of the press (foretold by the Protocols) began with the censorship introduced during the First World War; the rise of the directing power behind the scenes had been shown by the cases of Colonel Repington, Mr. H.A. Gwynne and Mr. Robert Wilton in 1917-1918; experienced correspondents were driven to resign or to write books because their reports were ignored, burked, or suppressed; an editor who published the faithful report without submission to the censorship was prosecuted.
In 1919-1922 the censorship was ending and the newspapers naturally reverted, in the main, to the earlier practice of true reporting and impartial comment on the facts reported. This re-established the former check on governmental policies, and if it had continued would undoubtedly have thwarted the Zionist project, which could not be maintained if it were open to public scrutiny. Therefore the entire future for the Zionists, at this crucial moment when "the Mandate" still was not "ratified", turned on the suppression of adverse newspaper information and comment. At that very juncture an event occurred which produced that result. By reason of this great effect on the future, and by its own singular nature, the event (denoted in the heading to the present chapter) deserves relation in detail here.
At that stage in the affair England was of paramount importance to. the conspirators (I have shown that Dr. Weizmann and Mr. House both used this word) and in England the energetic Lord Northcliffe was a powerful man. The former Alfred Harmsworth, bulky and wearing a dank Napoleonic forelock, owned the two most widely read daily newspapers, various other journals and periodicals, and in addition was majority proprietor of the most influential newspaper in the world, at that time, The Times of London. Thus he had direct access to millions of people each day and, despite his business acumen, he was by nature a great newspaper editor, courageous, combative and patriotic. He was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in the causes he launched or espoused, but he was independent and unpurchasable. He somewhat resembled Mr. Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick in America, which is to say that he would do many things to increase the circulation of his newspapers, but only within the limits of national interest; he would not peddle blasphemy, obscenity, libel or sedition. He could not be cowed and was a force in the land.
Lord Northcliffe made himself the adversary of the conspiracy from Russia in two ways. In May 1920 he caused to be printed in The Times the article, previously mentioned, on the Protocols. It was headed, "The Jewish Peril, A Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for Enquiry". It concluded, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"
Then in 1922 Lord Northcliffe visited Palestine, accompanied by a journalist, Mr. J.M.N. Jeffries (whose subsequent book, Palestine: The Reality, remains the classic work of reference for that period). This was. — a combination of a different sort from that formed by the editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian, who wrote their leading article s about Palestine in England and in consultation with the Zionist chieftain, Dr. Weizmann. Lord Northcliffe, on the spot, reached the same conclusion as all other impartial investigators, and wrote, "In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Muslims live there and own it . . . The Jews seemed to be under the impression that all England was devoted to the one cause of Zionism, enthusiastic for it in fact; and I told them that this was not so and to be careful that they do not tire out our people by secret importation of arms to fight 700,000 Arabs. . . There will be trouble in Palestine. . . people dare not tell the Jews the truth here. They have had some from me".
By stating this truth, Lord Northcliffe offended twice; he had already entered the forbidden room by demanding "inquiry" into the origins of the Protocols. Moreover, he was able to publish this truth in the mass-circulation newspapers owned by him, so that he became, to the conspirators, a dangerous man. He encountered one obstacle in the shape of Mr. Wickham Steed, who was editor of The Times and whose championship of Zionism Dr. Weizmann records.
In this contest Lord Northcliffe had an Achilles heel. He particularly wanted to get the truth about Palestine into The Times, but he was not sole proprietor of that paper, only chief proprietor. Thus his own newspapers published his series of articles about Palestine but The Times, in fact, refused to do so. Mr. Wickham Steed" though he had made such large proposals about the future of Palestine, declined to go there, and denied publicity to the anti-Zionist case.
These facts, and all that now follows, are related (again, with surprising candour) in the Official History of The Times (1952). It records that Mr. Wickham Steed "evaded" visiting Palestine when Lord Northcliffe requested him to go there; it also records Mr, Wickham Steed's "inaction" following Lord Northcliffe's telegraphed wish "for a leading article attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism".
In what follows the reader' s attention is particularly directed to dates.
In May 1920 Lord Northcliffe had caused publication of the article about the Protocols in The Times. Early in 1922 he visited Palestine and produced the series of articles above mentioned. On February 26, 1922 he left Palestine, after his request, which was ignored, to. the editor of The Times. He was incensed against the noncompliant editor and had a message, strongly critical of his editorial policy, read to an editorial conference which met on March 2, 1922. Lord Northcliffe wished that Mr. Wickham Steed should resign and was astonished that he remained after this open rebuke. The editor, instead of resigning, decided "to secure a lawyer's opinion on the degree of provocation necessary to constitute unlawful dismissal". For this purpose he consulted Lord Northcliffe's own special legal adviser (March 7, .1922), who informed Mr. Wickham Steed that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal", "incapable of business" and, judging from his appearance, "unlikely to live long" and advised the editor to continue in his post! The editor then went to Pau, in France, to see Lord Northcliffe, in his turn [297] decided that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal" (March 31, 1922), and informed a director of The Times that Lord Northcliffe was "going mad".
The suggestion of madness thus was put out by an editor whom Lord Northcliffe desired to remove and the impressions of others therefore are obviously relevant. On May 3, 1922 Lord Northcliffe attended a farewell luncheon in London for a retiring editor of one of his papers and "was in fine form". On May 11, 1922 he made "an excellent and effective speech" to the Empire Press Union and "most people who had thought him 'abnormal' believed they were mistaken". A few days later Lord Northcliffe telegraphed instruction s to the Managing Director of The Times to arrange for the editor's resignation. This Managing Director saw nothing "abnormal" in such an instruction and was not "in the least anxious about Northcliffe's health ". Another director, who then saw him, "considered him to have quite as good a life risk as his own"; he "noticed nothing unusual in Northcliffe's manner or appearance" (May 24, 1922).
On June 8,1922 Lord Northcliffe, from Boulogne, asked Mr. Wickham Steed to meet him in Paris; they met there on June 11, 1922, and Lord Northcliffe told his visitor that he, Lord Northcliffe, would assume the editorship of The Times. On June 12,1922 the whole party left for Evian-les-Bains, a doctor being secreted on the train, as far as the Swiss frontier, by Mr. Wickham Steed. Arrived in Switzerland "a brilliant French nerve specialist" (unnamed) was summoned and in the evening certified Lord Northcliffe insane. On the strength of this Mr. Wickham Steed cabled instructions to The Times to disregard and not to publish anything received from Lord Northcliffe, and on June 13, 1922 he left, never to see Lord Northcliffe again. On June 18, 1922 Lord Northcliffe returned to London and was in fact removed from all control of, and even communication with his undertakings (especially The Times; his telephone was cut). The manager had police posted at the door to prevent him entering the office of The Times if he were able to reach it. All this, according to the Official History, was on the strength of certification in a foreign country (Switzerland) by an unnamed (French) doctor. On August 14, 1922 Lord Northcliffe died; the cause of death stated was ulcerative endocarditis, and his age was fifty-seven. He was buried, after a service at Westminster Abbey, amid a great array of mourning editors.
Such is the story as I have taken it from the official publication. None of this was known outside a small circle at the time; it only emerged in the Official History after three decades, and if it had all been published in 1922 would presumably have called forth many questions. I doubt if any comparable displacement of a powerful and wealthy man can be adduced, at any rate in such mysterious circumstances.
For the first time, I now appear in this narrative as a personal witness of events. In the 1914-1918 war I was one participant among uncomprehending millions, and only began to see its true shape long afterwards. In 1922 I was for an instant in, though not of the inner circle; looking back, I see myself closeted with Lord [298] Northcliffe (about to die) and quite ignorant of Zionism, Palestine, Protocols or any other matter in which he had raised his voice. My testimony may be of some interest; I cannot myself judge of its value.
I was in 1922 a young man fresh from the war who struggled to find a place in the world and had become a clerk in the office of The Times. I was summoned thence, in that first week of June when Lord Northcliffe was preparing to remove Mr. Wickham Steed and himself assume the editorship of The Times, to go as secretary to Lord Northcliffe who was at Boulogne. I was warned beforehand that he was an unusual man whose every bidding must be quickly done. Possibly for that reason, everything he did seemed to me to be simply the expression of his unusual nature. No suspicion of anything more ever came to me, a week before he was "certified" and, in effect, put in captivity.
I was completely ignorant of "abnormal" conditions, so that the expert might discount my testimony. Anyway, the behaviour I observed was just what I had been told to expect by those who had worked with him for many years. There was one exception to this. Lord Northcliffe was convinced that his life was in danger and several time said this; specifically, he said he had been poisoned. If this is in itself madness, then he was mad, but in that case many victims of poisoning have died of madness, not of what was fed to them. If by any chance it was true, he was not mad. I remember that l thought it feasible that such a man should have dangerous enemies, though at that time I had no inkling at all of any particular hostility he might have incurred. His belief certainly charged him with suspicion of those around him, but if by chance he had reason for it, then again it was not madness; if all this had transpired in the light of day such things could have been thrashed out.
I cannot judge, and can only record what I saw and thought at the time, as a young man who had no more idea of what went on around him than a babe knows the shape of the world. When I returned to London I was questioned about Lord Northcliffe by his brother, Lord Rothermere, and one of his chief associates, Sir George Sutton. The thought of madness must by that time have been in their minds (the "certification" had ensued) and therefore have underlain their questions, but not even then did any such suspicion occur to me, although I had been one of the last people to see him before he was certified and removed from control of his newspapers. I did not know of that when I saw them or for long afterwards. In such secrecy was all this done that, although I continued in the service of The Times for sixteen years, I only learned of the "madness" and "certification" thirty years late , from the Official History. By that time I was able to see what great consequences had flowed from an affair in which I was an uninitiated onlooker at the age of twenty-seven.
Lord Northcliffe therefore was out of circulation, and of the control of his newspapers, during the decisive period preceding the ratification of "the mandate" by the League of Nations, which clinched the Palestinian transaction and bequeathed the effects of it to our present generation: The opposition of a widely-read chain of journals at that period might have changed the whole course of events. After Lord Northcliffe died the possibility of editorials in The Times "attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism" faded. From that time the submission of the press, in the manner described by the Protocols, grew ever more apparent and in time reached the condition which prevails today, when faithful reporting and impartial comment on this question has long been, in suspense.
Lord Northcliffe was removed from control of his newspapers and put under constraint on June 18, 1922; on July 24, 1922 the Council of the League of Nations met in London, secure from any possibility of loud public protest by Lord Northcliffe, to bestow on Britain a "mandate" to remain in Palestine and by arms to install the Zionists there (I describe what events have shown to be the fact; the matter was not so depicted to the public, of course).
This act of "ratifying" the "mandate" was in such circumstances a formality. The real work, of drawing up the document and of ensuring that it received approval, had been done in advance, in the first matter by drafters inspired by Dr. Weizmann and in the second by Dr. Weizmann himself in the ante-chambers of many capitals. The members of Mr. House's "Inquiry" had drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations; Dr. Weizmann, Mr. Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise and their associates had drafted the Balfour Declaration; now the third essential document had to be drafted, one of a kind that history never knew before. Dr. Weizmann pays Lord Curzon (then British Foreign Secretary) the formal compliment of saying that he was "in charge of the actual drafting of the mandate" but adds, "on our side we had the valuable assistance of Mr. Ben V. Cohen. . . one of the ablest draughtsmen in America". Thus a Zionist in America (Mr. Cohen was to play an important part in a much later stage of this process) in fact drafted a document under which "the new world order" was to dictate British policy, the use of British troops and the future of Palestine.
Lord Curzon's part was merely to moderate the terms of the "mandate" if he could, and he did achieve minor modifications, though these had little effect on events in the long run. An able statesman (not a politician) who looked like a Roman emperor, he was "entirely loyal to the policy adopted and meant to stand by the Balfour Declaration" (Dr. Weizmann), but was known personally to disapprove the project which duty required him to further (this might be the reason why he never became Prime Minister, for which office he was highly qualified). He contrived to delete one word from the draft. Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Cohen desired it to begin, "Recognizing the historic rights of the Jews to Palestine. . ." Lord Curzon said, "If you word it like that, I can see Weizmann coming to me every day and saying he has a right to do this, that or the other in Palestine! I won't have it". Thus "historical rights" became "historical connection", a lesser misstatement; Lord Curzon, a scholar certainly did not believe that the Khazars from Russia had any historical connection with the Arabian Peninsula.
Dr. Weizmann, while the draft was thus being prepared, set off on another international tour, to ensure that all members of the Council of the League of Nations would inaugurate "the new world order" by voting for "the Mandate". He called first on the Italian Foreign Minister, one Signor Schanzer, who said the Vatican was worried about the future, under Zionism, of the Room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem. Dr. Weizmann, in the tone habitual among his associates when they spoke of things holy to others, says, "My education in Church history having been deficient, I did not know why the Italians laid such stress on the Room of the Last Supper".*
*By 1950 the Zionists had opened a "Cellar of the Catastrophe" on a lower floor of the same building as a place of pilgrimage for Jews. A legend at the entrance said. "Entrance forbidden to those who have not strong nerves", The Chief Rabbi of South Africa after inspecting this place, wrote. "Everything is being done to develop and foster this new cult of Mount Zion; to provide a substitute for the Wailing Wall and an emotional out let for the religious feelings of the people. There seemed to me to be something un-Jewish in it, something which belonged rather to superstition than to true religions faith, . . . . I tremble to think of the effect of these completely apocryphal stories" (of miraculous cures) "on the simple, pious and superstitious Jews of Yemen, Is there being developed a Jewish Lourdes? I hope not, but the signs are ominous".
Dr. Weizmann was able to reassure Signor Schanzer and left Rome assured of Italian support. After that the thing became a landslide and from that time on the "votes" of the League of Nations (and of the later "United Nations") in vital questions were always arranged beforehand by this method of secret canvassing, lobbying and "irresistible pressure" in general. Dr. Weizmann went on to Berlin and found a famous Jewish minister there, Dr. Walter Rathenau, to be violently opposed to Zionism. He "deplored any attempt to turn the Jews of Germany 'into a foreign body on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg': that was all he could see in Zionism". Dr. Rathenau was murdered soon after this, so that the cause of the emancipated Western Jews was deprived of another notable champion.
By his journeys and visits Dr. Weizmann at last assured himself, in advance of the meeting, of all votes at the Council table save two, those of Spain and Brazil. He then called in London, on the Spanish dignitary who was to represent Spain and said, "Here is Spain's opportunity to repay in part that long-outstanding debt which it owes to the Jews. The evil which your forefathers were guilty of against us you can wipe out in part".
Dr. Weizmann was cautious, twice using the words "in part". His host, whose duty was to contemporary Spain, was being allured with the suggestion which had earlier fascinated Mr. Balfour; that Spain owed some indeterminate "debt" to "the Jews", for all of whom his visitor claimed to speak, and that by wiping out Arab hopes in Palestine he could wipe out (in part) this debt said to have been incurred by Spain. Considered by standards of reason these conversations read like something from the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party. In any case, the Spanish representative promised the vote of Spain and, for full measure, also that of simple, pious and superstitious Jews of Yemen, Is there being developed a Jewish Lourdes? I hope not, but the signs are ominous". Brazil, so that the chain of yesses was complete. Even Dr. Weizmann could not tell whether this happy ending to his visit was the result of his own eloquence or of pressure applied at a higher level (that of the Spanish delegate's superiors in Madrid).
In England, as the moment approached, a last bid was made to avert British embroilment in this enterprise. Lords Sydenham, Islington and Raglan led an attack on "the mandate" in the House of Lords and by a large majority carried their motion for the repeal of the Balfour Declaration. However, the upper house, its earlier powers abolished, by that time could only protest, and Mr. Balfour (soon to become a lord) at once reassured Dr. Weizmann: "What does it matter if a few foolish lords pass such a motion?"
After all this secret preparation the stage was set for the meeting of the League Council in London on July 24, 1922 and "everything went off smoothly when Mr. Balfour introduced the subject of the ratification of the Palestine Mandate". Without any demur Britain was awarded "the mandate" to remain in Palestine and to provide an armed cordon for the Zionists when they arrived there. *
* The "mandates" also bestowed on Britain in respect of Iraq and Transjordan, and to France in respect of Syria, were soon relinquished, these territories becoming independent states. Other countries received "mandates" in respect of various colonial and oceanic territories, which in time and in fact became their possessions. These other "mandates" were from the start fictitious and served in the office of chaperones to tile dubious one which needed respectable company. Of the entire bogus arrangement only the Palestinian "mandate" continued until. the Zionists being numerous enough and sufficiently supplied with arms, it was abandoned and the country left to the invaders then able to take and hold it by force: The later "United Nations", for obvious reasons, did not resurrect the word "Mandate". It found another word, "Trusteeship", for the same idea, which is transparently that of transferring territories from one ownership to another through a sham process of "international law" and legality.
President Wilson was dead and his Democratic party was out of office. President Harding was at the White House and the Republican party was back in power. It had been swept back by the wave of popular feeling against the disappointing outcome of the war and of instinctive desire to be free from "entanglements" overseas. The country felt itself well out of the League of Nations and its mysterious activities all over the world.
Then the Republican party led the Republic back in to the embroilments in which the Democratic party first had involved it. Presumably the party-managers, those architects of public misfortune, thought to compete with the other party for the favour of those powerful groups, and the "fluctuating vote" controlled by them, described in Mr. House's diary and novel.
In June 1922, just before the League Council in London bestowed the Palestinian "Mandate" on Britain, the United States Congress passed a joint resolution of both houses, the wording of which was almost identical with that of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Thereafter the Zionist halter was firmly affixed round the neck of American State policy, and though the American voter only realized this, it became immaterial to him which party prevailed at elections.
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THE NATIONAL HOME
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