Far back in this book the reader was invited to note that "B'nai B'rith" put out a shoot. B'nai B'rith, until then, might be compared with such groups of other religious affiliation as the Young Men's Christian Association or the Knights of Columbus; its declared objects were the help of the poor, sick and fatherless and good works in general. The little offshoot of 1913, the "Anti-Defamation League", had by 1947 become a secret police of formidable power in America.
In Doublespeak "anti-defamation" means "defamation" and this body lived by calumny, using such terms as anti-Semite, fascist, rabble-rouser, Jew-baiter, Red-baiter, paranoiac, lunatic, madman, reactionary, diehard, bigot and more of the like. The vocabulary is fixed and may be traced back to the attacks on Barruel, Robison and Morse after the French revolution; the true nature of any writer's or newspaper's allegiance may be detected by keeping count of the number of times these trade-mark words are used. The achievement of this organization (usually known as the AD.L.) has been by iteration to make fetishes of them, so that party politicians hasten to deny that they are any of these things. Under this regime reasoned debate became outlawed; there is something of sorcery in this subjugation of two generations of Western men to the mumbo-jumbo of Asiatic conspirators.
When the A.D.L. was born in 1913 it had merely desk-room in the parent B'nai B'rith office and a tiny budget. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown wrote, "Through the intervention of the A.D.L. we have succeeded in muzzling the non-Jewish press to the extent that newspapers in America abstain from pointing out that any person unfavourably referred to is a Jew". In 1948 the Jewish Menorah Journal of New York wrote, "Should but one phrase in a reprinted literary classic reflect unjustly upon Jews, the A.D.L. will promptly belabour the innocent publisher until he bowdlerizes the offending passage. Let one innocent movie-producer incorporate a Jewish prototype, however inoffensive, in his picture and the hue and cry raised by the A.D.L. will make him wish he's never heard of Jews. But when Jews are subtly propagandized into accepting Communist doctrine . . . the A.D.L. remains silent. No word, no warning, no hint of caution, much less exposure and condemnation: although there are men high in the councils of the organization who should know by their own experience how the Communists 'infiltrate'." (The Menorah Journal spoke for the many Jews who were alarmed because the A.D.L. was attacking anti-Communism as anti-Semitism).
These quotations show the growth of the A.D.L.'s power in thirty-five years. It has imposed the law of heresy on the public debate in America. No criticism of Zionism or the world-government plan is allowed to pass without virulent attack; criticism of Communism is only tolerated in the tacit understanding that any war with Communism would lead to the communized world-state; and as to that, "Jerusalem is the capital of the world no less than the capital of Israel" (the Zionist mayor of Jerusalem, 1952).
America has today a few surviving writers who fight on for independent debate and comment. They will discuss any public matter, in the light of traditional American policy and interest, save Zionism, which hardly any of them will touch. I have discussed this with four of the leading ones, who all gave the same answer: it could not be done. The employed ones would lose their posts, if they made the attempt. The independent ones would find no publisher for their books because no reviewer would mention these, save with the epithets enumerated above.
The AD.L., of such small beginnings in 1913, in 1948 had a budget of three million dollars (it is only one of several Jewish organizations pursuing Zionist aims in America at a similar rate of expenditure). The Menorah Journal, discussing "Anti-Defamation Hysteria", said, "Fighting anti-Semitism has been built up into a big business, with annual budgets running into millions of dollars". It said the object was "to continue beating the anti-Semitic drum" and "to scare the pants off prospective contributors" in order to raise funds. It mentioned some of the methods used ("outright business blackmail; if you can't afford to give $10,000 to this cause, you can take your business elsewhere"), and said American Jews were being "stampeded into a state of mass-hysteria by their self-styled defenders".
The Menorah Journal also drew attention to the falsification of news by Jewish news agencies subsidized by the big organizations. It showed that some minor brawl among juveniles in Manhattan had been depicted in "front-page scare headlines which would have led a stranger to believe that a Czarist pogrom was going on" (by these same means the "Czarist pogroms" earlier, and Rabbi Stephen Wise's "reported pogrom in Berlin" in 1933 reached the world). Out of this particular "scare headline" grew a mass-meeting in Madison Garden, where another politician aspiring to presidential office (a Mr. Wendell Willkie at that moment) declared, "The mounting wave of anti-Semitism at home shocks me. . . etc., etc."
"Mass-hysteria" is not only produced among Jews and band-wagon politicians by this method; it produces another kind of mass-hysteria among earnest but uninformed people of the "Liberal" kind: the mass-hysteria of self-righteousness, which is a tempting form of self-indulgence. The late Mr. George Orwell was of those who helped spread "mass-hysteria" in this way. He was a good man, because he did not merely incite others to succour the weak and avenge injustice, but went himself to fight when the Civil War broke out in Spain, then discovering that Communism, when he saw it, was worse than the thing which (as he thought) he set out to destroy. He died before he could go to Palestine and experience any similar enlightenment, so that what he wrote about "anti-Semitism" was but the echo of "anti-defamationist hysteria". It is so good an example of this that I quote it; here a man of goodwill offered, as his own wisdom, phrases which others poured into his ear.
He explored "anti-Semitism in Britain" (1945) and found " a perceptibly anti-Semitic strain in Chaucer". Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. G.K.Chesterton were "literary Jew-baiters". He found passages in Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and others "which if written now would be stigmatized as anti-Semitism" (he was right without knowing it; if written now they would have been stigmatized). Then he suffered what Americans call a pratfall. He said that "offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler, made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade". Thus he extolled one of the A.D.L.'s "Jew-baiters" as a champion of Jews; in America the film of Oliver Twist was banned because of Fagin! This was the work of the A.D.L.; its representative, a Mr. Arnold Forster, announced:
"American movie-distributors refused to become involved in the distribution and exhibition of the motion picture after the A.D.L. and others expressed the fear that the film was harmful; the Rank Organization withdrew the picture in the United States".
Later the picture was released after censorship by the A.D.L.; "seventy two eliminations" were made at its command and a prologue was added assuring beholders that they might accept it as "a filmization of Dickens without anti-Semitic intentions". (In occupied Berlin the A.D.L. ban was final; the British authorities ordered Dickens withdrawn from German eyes).
I was in America at this time and thus saw the fulfillment of a prediction made in a book of 1943, when I wrote that, as the secret censorship was going, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens would one day be defamed as "anti-Semites". I thought to strain probability, to make a point, but it happened in all three cases: a Shakespearean actor-manager visiting New York was ordered not to play The Merchant of Venice, Dickens was banned, and the defamationists put Chaucer on their black-list.
A private organization which can produce such results is obviously powerful; there is nothing comparable in the world. Mr. Vincent Sheehan wrote in 1949, "There is scarcely a voice in the United States that dares raise itself for the rights, any rights, of the Arabs; any slight criticism of the Zionist high command is immediately labeled as anti-Semitic". Miss Dorothy Thompson, whose picture and articles at that time were published everyday in hundreds of newspapers, similarly protested. Mr. Sheehan's popularity with book-reviewers immediately slumped; Miss Thompson's portrait and writings are seldom seen in the American press today.
How is the oracle worked? By what means has America (and the entire West) been brought to the state that no public man aspires to office, or editor feels secure at his desk, until he has brought out his prayer-mat and prostrated himself to Zion? How have presidents and prime ministers been led to compete for the approval of this faction like bridesmaids for the bride's bouquet? Why do leading men suffer themselves to be paraded at hundred-dollar-a-plate banquets for Zion, or to be herded on to Zionist platforms to receive "plaques" for services rendered?
The power of money and the prospect of votes have demonstrably been potent lures, but in my judgment by far the strongest weapon is this power to control published information; to lay stress on what a faction wants and to exclude from it all that the faction dislikes, and so to be able to give any selected person a "good" or a "bad" press. This is in fact control of "the mob". In today's language it is "the technique of propaganda and the approach to the masses", as Dr. Weizmann said, but it is an ancient, Asiatic art and was described, on a famous occasion, by Saint Matthew and Saint Mark: "The chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude. . The chief priests moved the people . ."
In forty years the A.D.L. perfected a machine for persuading the multitude. It is a method of thought-control of which the subject-mass is unconscious and its ability to destroy any who cry out is great. One of the first to be politically destroyed was the head of the Congressional Committee charged to watch over sedition (the Un-American Activities Committee). The Protocols of 1905 foretold that the nation-states would not be allowed to "contend with sedition" by treating it as crime and this "forecast" also was fulfilled. Mr. Martin Dies relates that he was required by the secret inquisition to restrict the definition of "subversion" to "fascism", and to equate "fascism" with "anti-Semitism". "Subversion", had these importuners had their way with him, would have been any kind of resistance to "the destructive principle", not the subverting of the nation-state. He would not yield, but was driven out of political life by defamation.
The A.D.L. (and the American Jewish Committee) "set out to make the American people aware of anti-Semitism". It informed Jews that "25 out of every 100 Americans are infected with anti-Semitism", and that another 50 might develop the disease. By 1945 it was carrying out "a high-powered educational program, geared to reach every man, woman and child" in America through the press, radio, advertising, children's comic books and school books, lectures, films, "churches" and trade unions. This programme included "219 broadcasts a day", full-page advertisements in 397 newspapers, poster advertising in 130 cities, and "persuasions" subtly incorporated in the printed matter on blotters, matchbox covers, and envelopes. The entire national press ("1900 dailies with a 43,000,000 circulation") and the provincial, Negro, foreign-language and labour newspapers were kept supplied with, "and used", its material in the form of "news, background material, cartoons and comic strips". In addition, the A.D.L. in 1945 distributed "more than 330,000 copies of important books carrying our message to libraries and other institutions", furnished authors with "material and complete ideas", and circulated nine million pamphlets "all tailored to fit the audiences to which they are directed". It found "comic books" to be a particularly effective way of reaching the minds of young people, soldiers, sailors and airmen, and circulated "millions of copies" of propaganda in this form. Its organization consisted of the national headquarters, public relations committees in 150 cities, eleven regional offices, and "2,000 key men in 1,000 cities".
The name of the body which supplied this mass of suggestive material never reached the public. During the 1940's the system of "syndicated writers" in New York or Washington enveloped the entire American press. One such writer's column may appear in a thousand newspapers each day; editors like this system, which saves them the cost of employing their own writers, for its cheapness. Through a few dozen such writers the entire stream of information can be tinctured at its source (the method foretold in the Protocols). By all these means a generation has been reared in America (and this applies equally to England) which has been deprived of authentic information about, and independent comment on, the nature of Zionism, its original connection with Communism, the infestation of administrations and capture of "administrators", and the relationship of all this to the ultimate world-government project.
The opposition to this creeping control was strong at first and was gradually crushed during two decades (I have given examples in England) by various methods, including the purchase of newspapers, but chiefly by unremitting and organized pressure, persuasive or menacing. In America a newspaper which prints reports or comment unacceptable to the A.D.L. may expect to receive a visit from its representatives. Threats to withdraw advertising are frequently made. The corps of "syndicated" writers joins in the attack on any individual writer or broadcaster who becomes troublesome; many American commentators have been driven from the publishers' lists or "off the air" in this way.
