Uncovering
The Forces For War
by
Conrad K. Grieb
[Part 4]
EXAMINER BOOKS
P. O. Box 144-Station Y
NEW YORK 21, N. Y.
Copyright. 1947
ANONYMITY
“So you see, my dear Coningsby, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” — Coningsby (page 233, Century Edition, 1903) by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield.
(First published in 1844)
VI
Contents
Foreword
1. British-American Rapprochement 1
2. British-German Cleavage 7
3. “Roping in America” — 1917 15
4. Twenty Years Armistice 27
5. “Roping in America” — 1941 49
6. Other Influences 73
7. Conclusions 89
Appendices:
No. I President Lincoln and the International Bankers of His Day 91
No. II British Concentration Camps In the Boer War 93
No. III The War in South Africa, by J. A. Hobson 95
No. IV Democracy and Social Instability, by J. Middleton Murry 99
No. V Winston Churchill in India 101
No. VI Winston Churchill on War 101
No VII Walter Rathenau Predicted Germany Today 103
No. VIII Austria Before Hitler, by Dr. Joseph Eberle 104
No. IX Danzig and The Corridor, by W. H. Dawson 106
No. X Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith 107
No. XI Theodore Herzl Confutes Nathan Ohrbach 108
Bibliography 110
Index 112
Books For Collateral Reading 117
VII
“One does not need to be endowed with an abnormally vivid imagination in order to foresee that for us to guarantee Germany’s Eastern frontier would be an act of sheer criminal lunacy.” — R. W. Walmsley, London Economist, 14th Nov. 1931 (p. 914).
Sir Walter Layton, M.A., C.B.E., Editor of The Economist, commented on the letter above as follows:
“We are apt to judge, when we look into the East Europe settlement, that its terms are inequitable and they ought not to be perpetuated even if they could be.” (Page 899.)
VIII
CHAPTER SIX
Other Influences
“By the proper handling of their invention, Nineteenth Century Money, the London merchants managed to regulate and to limit the imports and exports of every country in the world. Beyond that they even controlled and directed the development of business, of industry and of production in every quarter of the globe. And by their wise handling of their tremendous international power the London merchants achieved the reasonably smooth development of the rapidly growing world economy in the age of steam and electricity.”
“This was England’s Service to the world, and this is the service she must resume and continue to render in any reasonably constituted world. There is no other nation that can pretend to render that service. It was the breakdown of this service that brought misery, unrest and war into the world.” (Sarpedon, England’s Service, pages 120-121.)
The beginning of the war gave expression to feelings of satisfaction in many quarters. In the Zionist Review (London), October 26, 1939, David Ben-Gurion wrote (Jewry’s Tasks, page 7):
“Our entire fate is bound up with that of Great Britain. Her war is our war.”
The American Hebrew, The National Weekly of Jewish affairs, expressed its views in its Editorial Interpretations of Current Events on July 24, 1942, as follows:
“It may seem a far cry from the Philippines and the war to the peacefully developing movement for better understanding between Christians and Jews in the United States. But is it? Whenever an American or Philippino fell at Bataan or Corregidor or any of the now historic spots where MacArthur’s men put up their remarkable fight, their survivors could have said with truth: the real reason that boy went to his death was because Hitler’s anti-Semitic movement succeeded in Germany”
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See Appendix VI.
[Page 73]
But nine years previously the Jews had greeted enthusiastically the holy war on which they themselves were embarked, according to Samuel Untermeyer (see page 38).
It would appear that Mr. Untermeyer and Mr. Baruch have been the joint chiefs of staff of some kind of a supernational war planning board. Mr. Baruch seemed to know what he was talking about when he told General George C. Marshall in 1938: *
“We are going to lick that fellow Hitler. He isn’t going to get away with it.” (As reported in the New York Times, May 25, 1944.)
Samuel Untermeyer and Bernard Baruch did a great deal to promote among the Jewish people enthusiasm for an American war against Germany.
Rev. John Haynes Holmes, a staunch supporter of “the peacefully developing movement for a better understanding between Christians and Jews,” wrote in Opinion (September, 1940), an influential journal of Jewish life and letters edited by Hungarian-born Rabbi Stephen S. Wise:
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General Marshall, now Secretary of State, told Manuel de Goes Monteiro (former War Minister of Brazil) in 1939 that the United States was planning to enter the war beside England. Monteiro said, in levelling this sensational charge at the new Secretary of State, that Marshall conferred with high Brazilian officials and asked for and got a pledge of Brazilian cooperation. Monteiro returned to the United States with Marshall and the ground work for the cooperation was laid in Washington. A second visit by Monteiro in 1940 completed the plans. (From text of broadcast by Prescott Robinson, 8:00 A.M., January 9, 1947, as supplied by Radio Station WOR.)
[Page 74]
“And now the Jews are actually clamoring for war again, under the insane delusion that this new war can bring any different or better results than the last war! If the Jews know what is good for them, to say nothing of what is good for Europe and the world, they will do everything in their power to stop this war, and especially to keep America out of it. If this war goes on, with Jews doing their part to foment it and feed it and idealize it, Europe will be plunged a decade hence into a horror of anti-Semitism which will make Hitler’s pogroms look like a Sunday School kindergarten. If America gets into this war and is fooled again, our wealth wasted and the lives of our boys thrown away the second time for no result save that of utterly wrecking our civilization and ending democracy forever, then a wave of anti-Semitism, already started in this country, will sweep the land with horror. Disillusioned and desperate Americans are in no way different from disillusioned and desperate Germans. They will seek a scapegoat for their own folly just as quickly and infallibly. I can hear now the cries which will be lifted a decade hence, if we go into this war today. ‘The Jews did it! They took us into the war because they hated Hitler. They own the newspapers. They run the movies. They control the banks. The Jews did it. Down with the Jews.’”
Some further influences of World Finance are worthy of note here. Jeffery Mark, an English writer on monetary affairs, says:
“Hitler in effect has declared a tentative war against international finance and all foreign loaned capital, and it is certain that a large amount of the opposition generated against his manifestly sincere internal reconstruction policy in Germany is due to this fact. France is working hand in hand with international finance, using the catspaw of the League of Nations to tighten her stranglehold on Germany through the financial control of the surrounding nations, and a servile and finance-suborned press has been deliberate in its efforts to discredit Germany throughout the world by the dragging of red herrings of all shapes and smells across the trail. The policy of the Nazis is instinctively rather than factually in opposition to international finance, but the seeds of a conflict of tremendous dimensions are already sown; and it looks as if the powers of usury will force Great Britain to join France in an effort to crush Germany today, just as they forced her to fight a battle for usury, in combination with Germany against the Continental System of Napoleon in the last century.” (MODERN IDOLATRY, page 222.)
[Page 75]
A British diplomat has written, I cannot place the source:
“Britain has no eternal friends; Britain has only eternal interests.”
But Mr. F. A. Voigt, probably the greatest living journalist interpreting British policy, and editor of the Nineteenth Century and After, wrote in that publication in September 1943:
“England has no one permanent foe in Europe, for none of her vital interests conflict with the interests of any European power. Her only foe is that power, or that coalition of powers, which may endeavor to dominate Europe. Against that foe she must always be ready, always strong, and always have allies. As her foe varies, so her allies vary. The foe of yesterday may be the ally of tomorrow and the ally of yesterday the foe of tomorrow.”
Truly the VAMPIRE OF THE CONTINENT.
There is much evidence that the control of the issuance of money has been an important factor in American politics and diplomacy from the time of Alexander Hamilton to the formation of the Federal Reserve Banking System in 1913. It is interesting to note that Paul M. Warburg, a German-born Jew, with international banking connections, had much influence in its formation. Mr. Warburg is the author of a two-volume work entitled, THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM, ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH. Lincoln secured Congressional permission to issue money based on the work and wealth of the nation. His assassination followed*
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See Appendix I
[Page 76]
Robert J. Scrutton, in his book, A PEOPLES RUNNYMEDE, writes an enlightening chapter entitled “The Peace We Lost.” We quote in part:
It is hypocrisy to condemn economic or military aggressors or dictators, no matter how ruthless they may be in their commercial or military war, if we will not remove the economic causes of the aggression or the condition which give rise to dictatorships.
The nations which were in the category of the “have nots” were treated as we treat our unemployed. “Our economic policy has no provision for exchanging goods and services without the use of money, but as the system cannot give you money we must withhold the goods you need. We are sorry for your condition, but bear your troubles peacefully; any attempt at violence to obtain a sufficiency of food, warmth and shelter will be crushed by the forces of law and order.” This is the only implication we can give to Mr. Eden’s words on September 20, 1937, after Germany and other countries had asked for assistance in solving their food problems:
“I am afraid no modification of the British or any other preferential system can provide an adequate remedy for the difficulties of those countries which, by maintaining exchange control, find themselves at a disadvantage in obtaining imports of raw materials and other things which they require. For as the Committee’s report clearly shows, the principal difficulties of these countries arises not in obtaining raw materials, whether from colonial areas or elsewhere, but in paying for those raw materials.”
The great commercial nations — America, Great Britain and France — had lent, and were willing to continue lending, money to foreign countries so that they could buy their goods. But Italy had learned her lesson by past experience and refused to entangle herself in debt. She occasionally ignored orthodoxy and fed her people by exchanging abroad her industrial products for the food she could not produce herself. Russian also offended against the commercial powers by exchanging goods for goods. They were condemned by the world’s economic experts. Barter was not accepted as legitimate trade. It did not gather interest. (Italics ours — Ed.) Trade was trade, in the opinion of the money power, only when men stood at ports entering cargoes into ledgers headed “Imports and Exports.” Barter only fed people. (Italics ours — Ed.)
[Page 77]
Germany, like Italy and Russia before, was trying to escape the entanglements of world debt. England was quite willing to lend money to buy raw materials, but they insisted upon exchanging goods for goods. They would not be drawn into the system of increasing debt, booms and slumps. The Time (London) has since said that Germany’s barter system made her an aggressor in the world market.* She was trying to break the credit ring of the money monopolists by the force of economic sanity-and that was unforgivable. She was acting like a worker who went on strike against a system which deprived him of adequate food supplies though he was quite willing to exchange his labour to pay for them.
——————–
* From The Times (London), October 11 and 12 and November 13, 1940:
One of the fundamental causes of this war has been the unrelaxing efforts of Germany since 1918 to secure wide enough foreign markets to straighten her finances at the very time when all her competitors were forced by their own debts to adopt exactly the same course. Continuous friction was inevitable.
Germany adopted a new monetary policy after which, The Times says, “Germany ceased to experience any serious financial difficulty.”
In this country the people suffer the burdens of heavy and increasing taxation, but in Germany, says The Times:
“Nothing is ever heard of the necessity of increasing taxation, compulsory savings, or the issue of enormous public war loans. Quite the contrary. Recently an important tax was abolished. Public savings bank deposits touch new monthly records again and again. Money is so plentiful that the interest rate on the Reich loans could recently be reduced from 4 1/2 to 4 per cent.”*
We are told, “These changes may well call for drastic readjustments in our established conventions. A hidebound persistence in methods and doctrines which were sound fifty years ago may easily prove as costly in the financial and economic field of actual war. It might not lose the war; it would certainly lose the peace.”
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* The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Banking System long ago discovered this. It makes a difference who does it — a people governing themselves or a small minority ruling over them. — Ed.
[Page 78]
In 1937 Hitler had said:
“Germany will enter into no more obligations to pay for her goods imports than she is capable of fulfilling. The German Government thus takes the standpoint of the respectable merchant, who keeps his orders in harmony with his power to pay.”
He said:
“We laugh at the time when our national economists held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a State Bank; and more especially we laugh at the theory that its value was guaranteed thereby. We have instead come to learn that the value of a currency lies in the productive capacity of a nation.”
The world financial monopoly stood aghast. If Germany succeeded in her plan of economic penetration, other nations might follow her example. The whole world would then exchange goods for goods on a basis of equality and good fellowship! No one would want to borrow, and the financial pyramid of debt, from the apex of which Almighty Finance ruled the world, would collapse! Humanity would be well fed, but the financiers would lose their power.
The politicians said the barter system of Germany and other people was sure to fail. It had to fail to prove orthodoxy right.
In 1933 one third of America’s cotton crop had been ploughed into the earth. In other parts of the world two-thirds of the rubber plantations were allowed to go to waste. Many countries wanted cotton and rubber but had no money with which to buy it. They were willing to exchange goods for these commodities, but direct trade (upon which High Finance could not exact its toll of debt and interest) was not satisfactory, so the planters tottered into bankruptcy, whilst Germany, with characteristic thoroughness, used substitutes for cotton and produced synthetic rubber. When denied oil she produced it from coal.
[Page 79]
If the German monetary experiment had been allowed to develop on the basis of a friendly exchange of goods it would have provided the world with useful information to assist it in solving its commercial problems. What may have been a laudable effort on the part of Germany has become a world war — a war of ideas in which Hitler strives to form a European economic monopoly opposed to the financial monopolies of the world, and does not hesitate to use every means to gain his goal of world economic power.
About this time other nations began to break through the money ring. Germany not only threatened the markets of the great trading nations but she had set an example which other countries were not slow to follow. First Russia had incurred hostility for refusing to pay her debts. Now Germany was incurring hostility for refusing to contract new ones.
Before Germany began her economic policy the onetime Allies had been glaring at each other with fear and suspicion; everyone was afraid of someone else — an unknown foe — but now they had found their enemy.
Statesmen began to prepare the public mind for war. No mention was made of the real causes of the crisis, the bitter scramble for world markets, the trickery, and the inhuman methods used to obtain spheres of influence for surplus investments and for increasing the burden of world debt. Statesmen were again preparing to sacrifice the youth of their country on the bloody altar of Mammon. As in peace, so in war. Humanity must be sacrificed to save a worthless economic system.
Once again the peoples were told that if they destroyed the leader of the German nation all would be well with the world. Germany worshipped its leader. Britain trusted its Government. Both peoples believed their leaders would save the world. It was a tragedy of faith in men. One nation has to fight for a new economic and political system and is willing to use any means to get them; the others to preserve old ones — but the solution lies in neither.
[Page 80]
Once again men, women, and children are being mown down in bloody swathes because the ports and granaries of some nations are glutted with goods and others empty. Surely the wrath of God will descend upon the statesmen who will not give humanity a secure place in the world where they can be fed and clothed, and live without fear, but by their practices must aggravate each other, and each generation strew the fruitful earth with the corpses of their children.
On public platforms politicians talked empty words. Rarely was it suggested that the surplus food might be distributed amongst their own people. Instead they were preparing to fight other nations to make them buy it. One cannot blame the politicians who got their economics from text-books which have never been changed for over a hundred years. They had been taught to think in terms of economics, not in terms of human need. They talked moral platitudes but never seriously thought of linking economics with moral justice.
Ludwell Denny, in America Conquers Britain, indicates the irony of a situation which impoverishes the exporting nation and produces war abroad:
“It seems to mean that if we work very hard, we can send more wealth abroad and thus acquire more capital abroad, and thus possibly receive still more capital abroad, and so on, generation after generation without finding any way whereby we, or our children, or our children’s children can benefit greatly by our increased productivity.”
“According to this theory, our own standard of living must remain the same as though we had never produced all this ‘surplus’ wealth. The complacency with which this theory is accepted is amazing.”
[Page 81]
Under the existing system, the impossibility of sharing out the raw materials and resources of the world in accordance with the needs of the people of each nation, the impossibility of the people of any country being able to purchase and enjoy the wealth they are able to produce, would seem too obvious even to question.
If a nation cannot sell its goods to its own people then it must try to sell them abroad; if this cannot be done then the people will find themselves without jobs until the “surplus” goods are sold, and suffer poverty in the midst of their abundance. They must fight for foreign markets as it is impossible for all nations to increase their exports and to decrease their imports at the same time, so there can never be peace. Our statesmen do not tell us this simple truth.
Behind the alleged motives of dictators, national pride and honour, racial and religious antipathies, external dangers, and the sedulous fostering in consequence of human pugnacity and quarrelsomeness which produce war, economic causes of a much more humble and sordid nature are always at work. But the people are led to believe that they fight to preserve national honour. Yet what honour can any nation possess when its very life depends on a ruthless economic expansion where all decent human values and the well being of the peoples of other nations are forgotten?
To gain a foreign market means the loss of that market to another nation. The nation which loses its foreign market suffers a trade depression. The standard of living of its people must be lowered in order to undercut the prices of other nations in the world market. What honour is there to a victorious commercial nation whose success has brought disaster and misery to millions of people in another country? (End of quote.)
[Page 82]
Karl von Wiegand reports from Madrid on the Potsdam Conference (New York Journal American, August 5, 1945). His article is entitled “Potsdam Planted, Seeds of War.”;
“After stating that the German nation and people will not be destroyed” . . . the three peace makers . . . “proceed with what can scarcely be interpreted as other than Germany’s destruction . . . Germany will be practically destroyed economically . . . Once America’s second best foreign trade customer and Britain’s third best, but also a large exporter and formidable rival of the two countries for foreign markets, Germany, it is decreed, will be destroyed and removed root and branch, both as customer and as competitor.”
The errors of the Treaty of Versailles are to be repeated. At this point we refer the reader to T. St. John Gaffney’s report on England prior to 1914 on page 13 and to Arthur Bryant’s report after the last peace on page 35. The similarity of the periods covered by these reports is striking. It would appear that the same influences making the previous peace are at work again.
“Will it never end? Or is there a curse on us all: on all our pacts, treaties and covenants?” asks William B. Orton in his book, TWENTY YEARS ARMISTICE (see page 28).
Evidently the curse has not been removed.
Von Wiegand continues:
“Before the war the Germans were one of the three countries in Europe who had the highest standard of wages, living and social security. In keeping with the Morgenthau Plan, Germany will . . . be reduced mainly to an agricultural state, doomed to poverty, and the German people condemned to long years of virtual serfdom to the victors under ‘reparations.’ It is no mere figure of speech to say that the Potsdam document implies that they are stripped to their very undergarments. All this is to be part of the ‘re-education’ of the Germans into Democrats with abhorrence of dictatorship, love of liberty and appreciation of the ideal and principles of western democracy, as exemplified before their eyes by the victors.”
[Page 83]
We have now completed this survey.
The three undercover forces for war, British World Empire, World Finance, and their constant companion, Organized World Jewry, are ubiquitous and their actions clothed in anonymity. But somewhere there are individuals who are the motivating forces in these activities. The affable Jew, active in business everywhere and the smiling companion of local groups taking time out for a midmorning cup of coffee, is the only person remotely connected with any of these three great international institutions that the average American citizen ever meets in the flesh. He is disarming in his attitude which says in effect, “See, I am no different from you, am I?” Were he an individual he would be right. But he is not an individual. He does not stand alone and unsupported, as the great body of American citizenry must do. Actually, he is a watchman for the racial group into which he is born. By birth, by breeding and culture, he is a member of a great world-girdling super-organization, whose purpose it is to protect him in his desire to do as he chooses, and to promote the aspirations common to his racial group, without criticism or restraint from people who are forever barred by birth from the benefits of these great international protective associations. A New York City telephone book of any date will list between one and two columns of Jewish organizations and another half a column of Hebrew groups. Do not be misled that this is only in New York. Like a web, the threads of this protective fabric cover the whole land and spreads over beyond the seas. The individual American has so far been helpless before this organized super-state.
The late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, American Zionist and adviser of Woodrow Wilson during his presidential years, lent his great abilities in the development of Jewish organization.
[Page 84]
“Let us all recognize that we Jews are a distinct natonality of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station or shade of belief, is necessarily a member,” wrote Justice Brandeis in his book, THE JEWISH PROBLEM — HOW TO SOLVE IT. Here, with superb simplicity and directness, the late Supreme Court Justice gives us the source of the strength of Jewish organization — a common racial spirit. No one can quarrel with such a spirit when devoted to the development of a national culture. But unfortunately there are many who have been led to believe, that perhaps because of its internationalism, the Jewish spirit is antagonistic to other national cultures and tends to smother all but its own. Mr. Brandeis continues:
“Organize! Organize! Organize! until every Jew in America must stand up and be counted — counted among us — or prove himself, wittingly or unwittingly, of the few who are against their own people.”
There have been Jews who have sought to oppose this separateness, perhaps, in what has now been proven to be the vain hope of absorption. The Jews have generally opposed their disappearance by absorption and no racial group appears to have been able to accomplish it without a deterioration in its own stock and an abasement of its cultural spirit.
Rabbi Morris Lazaron addressing a Jewish meeting in St. Louis early in 1938, declared:
“There is no room in this country for any race, Italian, Russian, Polish or Jewish, to set itself up as a private community and build a wall around itself”
Promptly, Hungarian-born Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, ever on the alert, in his journal, Opinion, replied in the issue of March, 1938, with a scathing editorial entitled A JEWISH TRAITOR, from which we quote:
[Page 85]
“The Jewish apostle of Christian-Jewish good-will stands exposed in the nakedness of his bitter and unyielding anti-Jewishness. If there were such a thing as a decent public opinion in America, Rabbi Morris Lazaron of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation would nevermore be permitted to stand before a Jewish meeting. Let him good-will all he chooses, but let him not stand up and pretend to be a Jew. He is a reviler of his people. He is a betrayer of its hopes. He is a destroyer of its ideals. One must needs pity a traitor, but the place of a Jewish traitor is not in the pulpit of a Jewish congregation.”
The worthy Rabbi, evidently, is seeking to forestall any defection of the Jewish laity from the dominance of their “high priests.” However, it is not likely that many Jews would want to forego the security and protection of their organizations in exchange for unorganized American individuality.
Rabbi Wise once startled the American people when he was reported as saying (late 1938) that he had been a Jew for six thousand years and an American for but sixty years. Steeped in six thousand years of Jewish experience and history he knows well what he is doing in attacking any suggestion of the dissolution of the Jewish community. From within this racial group, into which one must be born, Jewish ideas pour forth into the tolerant and unorganized Christian world, susceptible and naive, influencing the American people in their thoughts and in their deeds.
This is how it is done.
Commenting on the “educational” work of the Anti-Defamation League, its national director, Richard E. Gutstadt, stated: [1]
“I think the report submitted speaks for itself. The program of education which we have slowly and arduously developed, covers every media for improving the human mind. I say, without any desire to have it appear that the League is immodest, that in the several fields which have engaged the League’s attention for enlightening the public mind, we have developed the outstanding agencies of America by general recognition.”
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From A TRIAL ON TRIAL, page 63.
[Page 86]
“We have the greatest speakers bureau ever organized in this country, admittedly from the words of the leaders of the professional forums; we have the outstanding radio program in all the history of American radio — the transcription program I refer to. We have the most effective book placement bureau in the entire nation, and that is upon the authority of educators. Our fact-finding department’s accomplishments are well known to you and need not be detailed.” [2]
Nathan Ohrbach, National Chairman, Joint Appeal of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in a long letter of appeal asking for contributions to a $4,000,000.00 fund required to carry out a program for the “preservation of the Jewish Community,” described the program as:
“. . . a gigantic undertaking that requires facilities, strongly constructed, built up over a period of ten years of special techniques and experience in defense work. . . .”
“This is a high-powered educational program, geared to reach every man, woman and child; a program through the press; over the radio; through advertising; comic books; speakers; community service; movies; churches; labor; and special groups; a program that expands in accordance with expanded needs. . . .”
(Evidently the needs have expanded — the Jewish Telegraph Agency reports a $6,000,000.00 budget for 1947, up 50 per cent from 1946.)
“In the field of radio we have averaged more than 65,000 individual station broadcasts a year, averaging more than 216 individual station broadcasts a day. . . .”
“Our series of 26 full-page ads now running in 367 newspapers. representing a total dollar value of advertising space estimated at $691,520.00. This campaign is now appearing as a series of twelve posters on 1,000 billboards being displayed in 130 cities and valued at $250,000.00. It has been readapted on 16,000 car cards. . . .”
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2. See Appendix X for the details.
[Page 87]
“The general press — 1,900 dailies with a 43,000,000 circulation — the rural press, the foreign language press, the Negro press, the labor press — with 10,000,000 readers —receive and use material from this division. . . .”
“More than 330,000 copies of important books. were distributed to libraries” . . . and “more than 9,000,000 pamphlets. . . .”
“We presented the most noted names on the lecture platform to a total listening audience of more than 30,000,000 people (7, 200 audiences reported — Ed.). . . .”
“We have received the cooperation of the leading comic publishers and comic book writers in the adaptation of our material, and have been successful in assisting in the production and distribution of millions of copies (40,000,000 reported — Ed.). . . .”
“The Community Service Division consists of a central staff, over 150 public relations committees in as many cities, eleven regional offices, 2,000 key men in 1,000 cities. This division is a clearing house for information and service for the national organizations and community groups. maintaining constant contact between Jewish communities.” (complete report also published by Chicago Jewish Sentinel, September 5, 1945).
Upton Close, in his newsletter CLOSER-UPS of August 27, 1945, speaks of Nathan Ohrbach’s tremendous program “as one no nation worthy of the name could allow to be prosecuted within its body without understanding more about it. You can well see what a diabolical tool it could make for any political ism or power group. There is nothing so beautiful to cloak politics in, as religious tolerance.”
[Page 88]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Conclusions
“We fought the war of 1776 for independence. We fought the Civil War to free the slaves. We fought the War of 1918 to make the world safe for democracy. We fought this war to lose everything we had gained from the other three.” (The late General George Patton, quoted from speech before the Senate, by the Hon. William Langer, Senator from North Dakota, April 18, 1946.)
The material assembled between these covers is available to anyone who will look for it, but it will take a great deal of looking. The English source books, which had no American editions, are collectors items. The American source books occasionally turn up on the used book stalls, but so infrequently that a constant watch must be kept. Douglas Reed, British author of INSANITY FAIR and DISGRACE ABOUNDING, has written of his experience with American publishers (see page 40). What of the newspapers — the great circulation press of America?
John Swinton, an editor of note, before the war of 1914, at an annual dinner of the American Press Association, passed judgment on the New York press as follows:
“There is no such thing as an independent press in America, if we except that of little country towns. You know this and I know it. Not a man among you dares to utter his honest opinion. Were you to utter it, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week so that I may keep my honest opinion out of the newspaper for which I write. You too are paid similar salaries for similar servies. Were I to permit that a single edition of my newspaper contained an honest opinion, my occupation — like Othello’s — would be gone in less than twenty-four hours. The man who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinion would soon be on the streets in search of another job. It is the duty of a New York journalist to lie, to distort, to revile, to toady at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or what amounts to the same thing, his salary. We are the tools and the vassals of the rich behind the scenes. We are marionettes. These men pull the strings and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our capacities are all the property of these men — we are intellectual prostitutes.” (As quoted by T. St. John Gaffney in BREAKING THE SILENCE, page 4.)
[Page 89]
That was the circulation press of New York City before 1914.
It is the circulation press of America today.
Americans view the passing scene through the eyes, so to speak, of the great international influences shaping the destiny of the world. Wearied by the intense struggle to make a living, they are soothed into comfortable mental lethargy by the triple daily anodynes; the radio, the newspaper, and the cinema. In the nobility of their tolerance, they have allowed themselves to be educated into ignorance of what actually is going on in the world. They have had their sensibilities so dulled that they have not been able to realize that they and their country are pawns of the UNDER COVER FORCES FOR WAR.
[Page 90]