Critique, mentioned in these columns before (Lobster 8), is a California-based “Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics”. It’s editor, Bob Banner, has had the good taste to reprint pieces from Lobster. Critique’s slogan – now available on T-shirts! – is; Question consensus reality. Well, amen to that. However, the bit of “consensus reality” – and Banner really means consensus history – which seems to be getting questioned most in the California of Mr Banner, is the existence of the Holocaust. Critique is slowly becoming a “Holocaust revisionist” mouthpiece. Bob Banner might just be an anti-Semite, but more probably he just doesn’t know much about the neo-fascists who have taken to rubbing up against him.
In the current issue (1) Banner describes a seminar he attended on “The struggle for the world”, organised by ‘The Anglo-European Fellowship’ sometime last Autumn. The name of the group, so reminiscent of the Anglo-German Fellowship of pre WW2 England, should have set Mr Banner’s alarm bells ringing, but didn’t. Neither, it appears, did the speakers, who included Eric Butler, Ivor Benson, Ron Gostick, David Irving and Eustace Mullins. Let’s unpack this group a little (i.e. make things more complicated).
Butler, the Australian anti-Semite (2) and Irving should be well known. Ron Gostick is the head of Butler’s League of Rights’ Canadian branch and is currently a member of the Canadian affiliate to the World Anti-Communist League.(3) As far back as 1967 Gostick and Butler were referred to as “associates” of the Candour League of Rhodesia.(4) Two of the other ‘associates’ mentioned are of some historical interest. One was Robert Gayre, whose career an the pseudo-intellectual racist right was analysed recently by Kevin Koogan.(5) The other was Major Edgar Bundy. In 1967 Major Bundy – “Major” from his US Air Force days – was director of the Church League of America (CLA), a far-right intelligence operation directed against America’s “subversives” -i.e. the left and the unions.(6) Remove the CLA’s veneer of Christianity (sic) and what is left looks rather like Britain’s Economic League.
The CLA is currently of interest as an early employer of John Rees. Rees edited the CLA’s journal, The National Layman’s Digest in 1969/70 just before he formed his own organisation, National Goals Inc., and his now famous newsletter, Information Digest.(7) Rees, like Information Digest, seems to have been absorbed into Western Goals (8) Rees is a British subject and any information on him in this country before his move to the US would be welcome. Reliable information from the US reports Rees, with our old friend Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave, currently editing the Moonie paper, Washington Times, forming a kind of right-wing Trilateral Commission.
This long digression, to 1967 and back again, is intended to illustrate both the historical continuity and the international nature of these right-wing networks. In 1967 Butler (Australian), Gostick (Canadian) and Bundy (American) are (somehow: I don’t know how) associated with the Candour League of Rhodesia – the latter named after Candour, the journal put out by A.K. Chesterton of National Front and League of Empire Loyalists fame. 20 years later Gostick and Butler turn up in California with Ivor Benson (South African), Ray White (Australian), David Irving (British) and Eustace Mullins (American).
Ivor Benson is a racist apologist/agent for the South African government.(9) Ray White is the managing director of Veritas Publishing, Australia’s leading publisher/distributor of racist and anti-Semitic literature.(10) Eustace Mullins I’ve just come across in the pages of New Age Monitor (11). Mullins, it is reported, is one of the leaders of the Christian Identity Movement (whatever that is: information would be welcome), and author of Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a title which alone almost certainly locates Mullins in the middle of mainstream right-wing crackpot conspiracy theorists.
Stranger and stranger, New Age Monitor describes Mullins as the Theosophical protege of no less than Ezra Pound, and a former correspondent to the English journal, The Social Creditor. What is striking here is the fact that Eric Butler and A.K. Chesterton were both Social Credit adherents at one time.
Which means what? I don’t really know yet. Something is almost visible here, some kind of network of Social Credit people who all ended up as anti-Semites. (Or were they all anti-Semites to begin with?)
None of which would be of more than minor historical interest were it not for the fact that the anti-Semite network of today is thoroughly integrated into the World Anti Communist League (WACL), and WACL does matter.
WACL is a brilliant operation in which hard-core nazis, anti-Semites, war criminals from WW2 and the death-squad politicians of today’s Central and South America are able to associate publicly with the respectable right-wing of the world’s democracies. In Lobster 12 I listed some of the Tory MPs recently associated with the WACL. A similar process has happened in New Zealand where half a dozen or so MPs from the National Party (New Zealand’s equivalent of the Tory Party) have attended WACL functions.(12) (This, I suspect, could be repeated through all the democracies which now have links to WACL, given access to WACL affiliate lists.)
Just how powerful WACL is, or how well integrated it is into the foreign policy/intelligence operations of its affiliate states is impossible to evaluate. I presume it varies from country to country: in Britain, hardly at all; in the U.S……every once in a while there are hints that the lines between WACL and the CIA, for example, are virtually non-existent. Item: WACL’s role as the public “cover” for CIA funding of the Contras. Item: reports that WACL’s General John Singlaub and WACL supporter, ex-DDCIA, Ray Cline accompanied Manila CIA station chief and the CIA’s General Sweitzer on a visit to messers Enrile and Ramos, just before the abortive coup against Mrs Aquino’s government. One need not jump to conclusions: the Americans may have been trying to call the coup off. Either way, the presence of Singlaub and Cline in that kind of company, in those circumstances, is very interesting. (Singlaub’s presence may have had something to do with the fact that the head of the WACL affiliate in the Philippines is one General Luis Villareal, the head of the Philippines’ major intelligence agency, and appointed to that position by Mrs Aquino (13)
At the minimum WACL is a network, long established, with CIA connections from its earliest days (through Ray Cline, for example), which is now virtually global in scope. Any such right-wing network is going to be the witting or unwitting vehicle for the CIA, KCIA et al.
If asked, the current American-dominated leadership of the WACL would probably acknowledge that in the late 1970s there were a number of fascists and anti-Semites within its ranks, but would claim that they have been removed and WACL is squeaky clean again. This would be a lie. WACL has always been a base for ex-nazis and anti-Semites and Anderson and Anderson deserve credit for making this plain in their Inside the League (reviewed in this issue).
The high profile of WACL qua anti-Semitic international since Reagan took office is merely one example of the way the anti-Semitic groups have become emboldened under the Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl axis. Another is the increasing anti-Semitism of the broadcasts from Radio Liberty, the US government-funded anti-Soviet radio station which broadcasts from Munich to the Soviet Union.(14) Much of this anti-Semitic material is coming from Ukrainian emigres working for Liberty.
In Britain it is the Ukrainian community which has provided the backbone of this country’s support for WACL. Until his death last year, the public figurehead of the Ukrainians in exile was Yaroslav Stetso, the self-styled former Prime Minister of the Ukraine. Stetso was head of ABN, the Anti Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, formed after WW2 with British and American intelligence support and funds. What is less widely known is that Stetso’s OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) had worked with the Nazis and participated in the pogroms.(15) This unpleasant fact about Stetso/OUN got buried after WW2 when they were put on the US/UK’s payroll.
ABN (in the shape of Stetso) have been with WACL from its earliest days. It was thus appropriate that Stetso’s death should be remarked on at the 1986 WACL AGM. General Singlaub told that gathering that Stetso’s widow had received a personal message from President Reagan which said, inter alia, that his (Stetso’s) “courage and dedication to liberty will serve as a continuing sense of inspiration to all those striving for freedom and self-determination and an abiding reminder of the timeless struggle of mankind to break the chains of tyranny.” (16)
Puke.
The striking thing about ABN is that it never tried that hard to conceal its anti-Semitism. Publicly associating with people like Eric Butler would have given the game away – had anyone been taking notice.
Butler was one of the main speakers at the Anglo-European Fellowship meeting with which I began this essay. In his account of that meeting Bob Banner described Butler as the author of Red Pattern of World Conquest (the Butler book regularly advertised in Monday World, the Monday Club journal, in the early 1970s), but not as the author of The International Jew, Butler’s post WW2 gloss on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
With Butler at that meeting was David Irving. Irving last came to widespread public attention when he produced a book arguing that Hitler didn’t know anything about the “Final Solution” – it had all been done behind his back by the SS. That this is a spectacularly difficult thesis to hold rationally may explain why Irving has a new position. For on Banner’s account of the meeting, Irving is now claiming to have found a letter from Hitler which says “I want the Jewish problem postponed until after the war”.
Hula hula.
At this point in his report Banner comments: “It’s that kind of information that established historians can’t tolerate for it questions their immediate assumptions and risks their cherished careers.” Mainlining on iconoclasm, junky Banner can’t smell a whole room full of anti-Semitic rats.
One of the things anti-Semite watchers in this country must be waiting for is the arrival of anti-Semitism close to the leadership of the present Thatcherite faction in the Tory Party. When it comes, if it comes, it will be coded. It may have already happened. Just before Christmas Mrs Thatcher expressed her hope for a third term in office to enable her to rid this country of socialism “an alien creed”. This use of “alien” is very curious, for “alien” used to be international (and British) code for “Jew”.(17) Further, one of her senior parliamentary supporters, John Biggs-Davison (now Sir John: she knighted him) recently wrote of Marx and Engels as “false Hebrew prophets”.(18)
What does this mean? Has the American far-right’s obsession with the Wall St Jews-financed-the-Russian-revolution been implanted here? Does Mrs Thatcher read the John Birch Society’s American Opinion? I hardly think so: our Tory Party eats drinks and sleeps with the City of London, and could hardly bring itself to believe in the “Jewish banker conspiracy”. But these remarks are curious, nonetheless. Mrs Thatcher’s equivalents in the US are a pretty dotty bunch. Reagan and Weinberger, and probably others, are waiting for the Old Testament “Apocalypse” to arrive.(19) Why should we expect much more from their British counterparts?
The US has come a long way since the days when Richard Nixon’s choice for the Supreme Court, Judge Carswell, was rejected by Congress, essentially because he was stupid. Among some of the upper echelons of the Republican Party Carswell would be as a giant among pigmies.
An undeniable upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe and America is underway. Yet we have a right-wing Israel, an “ally” of the “West” – i.e. the Americans. Life is complicated still further by the existence of anti-Zionism, and the claims by some Jews that anti-Zionism is simply anti-Semitism in light disguise.(20)
While this is obviously true in some instances (21), is it always true? What are we to make of Jewish anti-Zionists? It will not do to simply dismiss such people – as some Jews do – as ‘self-hating Jews’.
These (barely relevant) thoughts have been provoked by the furore surrounding the Jim Allen play Perdition which didn’t quite make it onto the stage of London’s Royal Court Theatre. What struck me reading some of the recent articles describing the Israeli state’s dickering with some of the most obnoxious, neo-fascist regimes in the post-war world (22) is why anyone should be surprised to discover that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis during WW2. Shits are universal and it would have been remarkable indeed if some Jews hadn’t collaborated: members of almost every other ethnic/national group which encountered the Nazis did. (I have to write “almost every” because I have never heard of gypsies collaborating.)
Writing this section I am acutely conscious that this Lobster is full of material critical of the Israeli state and thus I/the Lobster run the risk of being labelled “anti-Semitic”. Well, so be it. If anyone wants to get into the extremely complicated and superheated area of Nazi-Zionist collaboration, they could try Nazi-Zionist Collaboration, a largish pamphlet produced by BAZO (British Anti-Zionist Organisation) which I was sent some time ago.(23) I know nothing of BAZO but can report that Gill Seidel includes BAZO in a section on “left anti-Semitism” in her recent Holocaust Denial, reviewed in this issue. If BAZO is, in fact, anti-Semitic, it is either well concealed in this pamphlet or I just am not able to “read” anti-Semitism yet. (Or both.)
NOTES
- No.23/24, $8 from PO Box 11368, Santa Rosa, CA, 95406,USA
- See Lobster 12, p32
- Some recent details on Gostick and other Canadian WACL people is in George Martin Manz’s column in Briarpatch (November 1986), Huston House, 2138 McIntyre Street, Regina, Canada.
- Pattern of Prejudice (London) Vol 1 No 5.
- See articles section in this issue.
- On CIA see Danger on the Right, Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein (New York 1964) especially pp144/50. Also index references to Bundy in Derrick Knight Beyond the Pale (CARAF, Leigh, Lancs, 1982)
- Rees has been of intense interest in the US for some time. A Lobster reader said he would send me “some clippings” on Rees, and it turned out to be an inch- thick pile. Rees and his wife, Louise, spent the first half of the seventies as police agents and agents provocateurs inside the American left/anti-war movement. Rees recycled some of the information thus obtained back to the “Red Squads” of American police departments through his newsletter Information Digest.
- Rees was in at ground level with this. See references in Lobster 12 p37.
- See Knight, Beyond the Pale (above, note 6) index references.
- See Freney, Nazis Out of Uniform (details in Lobster 12, p33)
- See review in this issue.
- See CIA threat to New Zealand, the January 1985 issue of the journal of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee, PO Box 18541, Christchurch 9, New Zealand. Price is given as $1 (NZ). With airmail postage, perhaps £2 would cover it. This is very good, the best single document on NZ and current US attempts to undermine its government.
- Dennis Freney in Tribune (Australia) 17 December 1986
- See reviews (articles) section in this issue.
- Inside the League (reviewed in this issue) pp 22-24
- Asian Outlook September 1986, p6
- Used to be? Maybe still is?
- Ruth Levitas ed. The Ideology of the New Right (Oxford 1986) p123
- The Messianic Legacy, Baignet, Leigh and Lincoln, (London 1986) pp188-200. This is the sequel to Holy Blood and Holy Grail and is basically junk but includes one chapter, no.24, which contains a reasonable summary of post-WW2 attempts to “assist” the formation of a united Europe by CIA et al.
- A good example is Bernard Levin’s article in The Times 2 February 1987.
- In the case of Imam, the journal put out by the Iranian embassy in London.
- For example the Niederense article reviewed in this issue.
- Available from George Mitchell, 90 St. John St., Glasgow Cl, £1.50
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