The Role of Jewish Intellectuals in U.S. Immigration Law Reform... 8 U.S. Code §1324: Bringing in and harboring certain aliens...
THE JEWING OF AMERICA
8 U.S. Code §1324. Bringing in and harboring certain aliens . . .
(a)Criminal penalties
(1)(A) Any person who--
(i) knowing that a person is an alien, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever such person at a place other than a designated port of entry or place other than as designated by the Commissioner, regardless of whether such alien has received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States and regardless of any future official action which may be taken with respect to such alien;
(ii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise, in furtherance of such violation of law;
(iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
(iv) encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or
(v)(I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or
(II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts,
shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
(B) A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs--
(i) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i) or (v)(I) or in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), or (iv) in which the offense was done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, be fined under Title 18, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both;
(ii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), (iv), or (v)(II), be fined under Title 18, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both;
(iii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) during and in relation to which the person causes serious bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 of Title 18) to, or places in jeopardy the life of, any person, be fined under Title 18, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both; and
(iv) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) resulting in the death of any person, be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, fined under Title 18, or both.
(C) It is not a violation of clauses 1 (ii) or (iii) of subparagraph (A), or of clause (iv) of subparagraph (A) except where a person encourages or induces an alien to come to or enter the United States, for a religious denomination having a bona fide nonprofit, religious organization in the United States, or the agents or officers of such denomination or organization, to encourage, invite, call, allow, or enable an alien who is present in the United States to perform the vocation of a minister or missionary for the denomination or organization in the United States as a volunteer who is not compensated as an employee, notwithstanding the provision of room, board, travel, medical assistance, and other basic living expenses, provided the minister or missionary has been a member of the denomination for at least one year.
(2) Any person who, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever, such alien, regardless of any official action which may later be taken with respect to such alien shall, for each alien in respect to whom a violation of this paragraph occurs--
(A) be fined in accordance with Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; or
(B) in the case of--
(i) an offense committed with the intent or with reason to believe that the alien unlawfully brought into the United States will commit an offense against the United States or any State punishable by imprisonment for more than 1 year,
(ii) an offense done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(iii) an offense in which the alien is not upon arrival immediately brought and presented to an appropriate immigration officer at a designated port of entry,
be fined under Title 18 and shall be imprisoned, in the case of a first or second violation of subparagraph (B)(iii), not more than 10 years, in the case of a first or second violation of subparagraph (B)(i) or (B)(ii), not less than 3 nor more than 10 years, and for any other violation, not less than 5 nor more than 15 years.
(3)(A) Any person who, during any 12-month period, knowingly hires for employment at least 10 individuals with actual knowledge that the individuals are aliens described in subparagraph (B) shall be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both.
(B) An alien described in this subparagraph is an alien who--
(i) is an unauthorized alien (as defined in section 1324a(h)(3) of this title), and
(ii) has been brought into the United States in violation of this subsection.
(4) In the case of a person who has brought aliens into the United States in violation of this subsection, the sentence otherwise provided for may be increased by up to 10 years if--
(A) the offense was part of an ongoing commercial organization or enterprise;
(B) aliens were transported in groups of 10 or more; and
(C)(i) aliens were transported in a manner that endangered their lives; or
(ii) the aliens presented a life-threatening health risk to people in the United States.
(b)Seizure and forfeiture
(1)In general
Any conveyance, including any vessel, vehicle, or aircraft, that has been or is being used in the commission of a violation of subsection (a), the gross proceeds of such violation, and any property traceable to such conveyance or proceeds, shall be seized and subject to forfeiture.
(2)Applicable procedures
Seizures and forfeitures under this subsection shall be governed by the provisions of chapter 46 of Title 18 relating to civil forfeitures, including section 981(d) of such title, except that such duties as are imposed upon the Secretary of the Treasury under the customs laws described in that section shall be performed by such officers, agents, and other persons as may be designated for that purpose by the Attorney General.
(3)Prima facie evidence in determinations of violations
In determining whether a violation of subsection (a) has occurred, any of the following shall be prima facie evidence that an alien involved in the alleged violation had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law:
(A) Records of any judicial or administrative proceeding in which that alien’s status was an issue and in which it was determined that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law.
(B) Official records of the Service or of the Department of State showing that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law.
(C) Testimony, by an immigration officer having personal knowledge of the facts concerning that alien’s status, that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law.
(c)Authority to arrest
No officer or person shall have authority to make any arrests for a violation of any provision of this section except officers and employees of the Service designated by the Attorney General, either individually or as a member of a class, and all other officers whose duty it is to enforce criminal laws.
(d)Admissibility of videotaped witness testimony
Notwithstanding any provision of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the videotaped (or otherwise audiovisually preserved) deposition of a witness to a violation of subsection (a) who has been deported or otherwise expelled from the United States, or is otherwise unable to testify, may be admitted into evidence in an action brought for that violation if the witness was available for cross examination and the deposition otherwise complies with the Federal Rules of Evidence.
(e)Outreach program
The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, as appropriate, shall develop and implement an outreach program to educate the public in the United States and abroad about the penalties for bringing in and harboring aliens in violation of this section.
The Role of Jewish Intellectuals in U.S. Immigration Law Reform
by Kevin MacDonald
IN BRIEF: The role of Jewish activism in the upheavals that have occurred in the West in recent decades continues to be controversial. Here I answer several reputable questions related to Jewish influence, in particular the “default hypothesis” that IQ and concentration in urban areas explain the influence and role of the Jewish community in the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1965 in the United States.
The new era that began after World War II saw the emergence in America of a predominantly Jewish elite that exerted influence on a range of converging issues such as immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture, allowing for a near-unanimous consensus where one least expected it.
Jewish activism in the pro-immigration movement was widespread, ranging from intellectual movements denying the importance of race in human affairs to recruiting and funding anti-restrictionist organizations; by exercising a dominant influence on Congress and the executive, it was a question of overthrowing the objective of an ethnic status quo considered too favourable to the maintenance of a relatively homogeneous white society.
Keywords: Jewish influence – Immigration Act of 1965 – Ethnocentrism – Antisemitism
[Editor’s note: the beginning of the article is skipped to get as quickly as possible to the main subject, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia in opening the floodgates of immigration and miscegenation, the history of which is as follows:
1900 – Birth of Boasian anti-racist anthropology, author Franz Boas, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Germany and left for the USA: his emulators will be mostly Jews.
1924 – First restrictive immigration law, it is based on a principle of quotas proportional to the weight of the ethnic groups already in place, the purpose of the law is to maintain the predominantly white ethnic status quo, the Jews are against this system which blocks both the level of immigration and its ethnic composition.
1952 – Truman establishes the PCiN, the Presidential Commission on Naturalization and Immigration, with Jews predominating, the goal is clearly to blow up the quota system and thus the ethnic status quo, the danger becomes clearer.
1952 – Second law, still of restrictive inspiration: the quota system is opened up to other countries, but the quotas are limited, and the system itself is preserved, a rearguard victory for the restrictionists.
1958 – Kennedy publishes his book A Nation of Immigrants – the book is actually written by a Myer Feldman, a Jewish intellectual.
1961 – First serious breach of the quota system, family unification in American, family reunification works even if the quota has already been reached, moreover, it is cascading: a relative brings a relative who brings a relative...
1965 – The quota system falls, there is only a global quota, governed by the principle of first come, first served.]
1 – The rise of a predominantly Jewish elite in postwar America and its influence on immigration policy.
Regarding Boasian anthropology, as Gelya Frank (1997: 731) has noted, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology, and then among anthropologists of subsequent generations, has been constantly obscured by the official history of the discipline.” Boas and his mostly Jewish students are the originators of anti-race theories and their dominant hold on American university campuses. In 1919, Boas could argue that henceforth “most contemporary anthropological research conducted in the United States was carried out by his students at Columbia University” (in Stocking, 1968:296). In fact, from 1926 onwards, all the major anthropology departments were run by followers of Boas, the vast majority of whom were Jews.
2 – Jewish identity in pursuit of its own interests
The analysis of Jewish influence necessarily involves the recognition of a Jewish identity in pursuit of its own interests as the driving principle of its currents and organizations.
Here, for example, is a small sample of Freud’s views on Jewish identity as a source of the psychoanalytic current (Kevin MacDonald – Culture of Critic [CofC]:111). In a 1931 letter, he described himself as “passionately – fanatically – a Jew.” Elsewhere, he writes that he finds “the attraction of Judaism and the Jews truly irresistible with all its dark powers, all the more powerful because they cannot be grasped by words. He evokes the “unspeakable impulses linked to his identity and the strong awareness of a secretly shared inner identity” (in Gay, 1988: 601).
… Gay (1988: 601) thinks that Freud was driven by a belief that his identity resulted from his phylogenetic inheritance [formed in the course of history as an internal Lamarckian process – and not simply because others considered him to be Jewish]... Freud and his fellow students felt a sense of racial closeness to each other and of a radical otherness with non-Jews (Klein, 1981: 142; see also Gilman, 1993: 12f).
It seems to me that all this testifies to his Jewishness. Regarding his sense of Jewish interest, Freud expressed his messianic hopes that one day an “understanding between Jews and anti-Semites on the basis of psychoanalysis” would materialize (in Gay, 1988: 231), a quote that makes it clear that psychoanalysis was seen by its founder as a means of putting a final end to anti-Semitism. This kind of messianic consideration was common among the Jews of fin-de-siècle Vienna who sought to bring about a “supranational and supra-ethnic” world (Klein, 1981: 29). These intellectuals “thus often disguised as universal humanitarianism their own conception that the Jews were responsible for the fate of humanity in the twentieth century” (Ibid.: 31).
3 – Mixed Marriage [FG: skipped passage, it is a matter of pointing out that Jews avoid mixed marriage more than any other ethnic group in the USA, we know that it is legally discouraged in Israel, see Israel, Citizenship and Blood Protection Laws]
4 – Jewish hypocrisy?
Naturally, everyone will understand that these generous universal principles are subject to adaptation well understood to the context and that there can be no question of applying them without regard for the possible consequences. The ADL [Anti-Defamation League = Jewish assiciation equivalent to Licra] recently condemned Tucker Carlson, a personality in the American media world, for having evoked the fact that American voters were being replaced by immigrants, judging that these remarks were “part of a supremacist position according to which the white race is endangered by an inexorable tide of non-whites, a particularly racist, anti-Semitic and toxic position” (see Moore, 2021). Carlson responded point-blank by denouncing the ADL’s attitude on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the eventual one-state solution. There, as if by chance, it appeared to be simple common sense for the ADL to declare that, given the present realities and the history of historical antagonisms, a one-state solution was doomed to failure. With a prolific birth rate among Palestinians, added to a possible return of refugees and their descendants scattered around the world, Jews would quickly be outnumbered in their own country, in such a situation they would become politically – and even physically – vulnerable. It is therefore unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to subvert its sovereignty and identity on its own soil (ADL, n.d.).
Given the long history of racial tensions in America, the current upsurge in interracial violence, the pre-eminence of critical currents of thought in race theory that spend their time pathologizing white people in the media and the education system, (DiAngelo, 2018; Kendi, 2019), it might seem just as reasonable to think that the white population is also becoming a vulnerable minority.
5 – The role of Jews in the development of U.S. immigration policy
The main purpose of the CofC [Culture of Critique = Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy] is the emergence in the early years of the era that opened up with the end of the Second World War of a new centre-left elite, essentially Jewish, which is gradually taking over the entire media, academic and political field — the latter not only being influenced by the first two, but also by the largesse of a Jewish financial power at its peak. The removal of the former White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite is a theme addressed by Eric Kaufmann in The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (2004) (criticized by MacDonald, 2015–16), and also addressed by David Hollinger (1996: 4) in a note on “the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s.” by the Jews from 1930 to 1960) and in a note on the weight of Jewish influence on the secularization trend of American society and its evolution towards a cosmopolitan ideal (11); Hollinger (1996: 160) points out that “one of the major protagonists of the culture war that raged in the 1940s was a secularized, predominantly Jewish, resolutely center-left intelligentsia, solidly entrenched in the departments of philosophy and social sciences.”
Lipset and Ladd (1971), based on data from a 1969 survey of 60,000 academics, show that the 1960s were a decisive period that saw the rise of a Jewish elite on the campuses of the most prestigious institutions, an elite much more left-wing than the rest of the [non-Jewish] professors. Jews made up about 12 percent of professors in general, but about 25 percent of the youngest professors (under 50) at Ivy League universities, much higher percentages than in previous decades. In addition, 75% of them declared themselves left-wing or “liberal” compared to 40% for non-Jewish professors. Jewish professors approved by a large majority (59.1%) of the radical activism of the students of the 1960s, compared to only 40% among non-Jewish professors. Jewish academics were also more likely to be in favor of relaxing the selection criteria to open up the university to minority professors and students.
Jewish academics were also more widely published than others, indicating greater influence. This is particularly important when we know that the university is a highly hierarchical institution: those who hold the upper hand train the next generation and have the upper hand in the selection of new professors (MacDonald, 2010). For example, Herskovits (1953: 23) noted that “the forty years under Franz Boas’ rule at Columbia University ensured a continuity of teaching that enabled him to form a cohort of students who constituted the hard core of American anthropology, who, having reached maturity, headed all the major departments of their discipline. In turn, they trained students ... which have continued to spread in the same vein.
CofC describes in detail the most significant components of this new centre-left intellectual and academic elite. The analysis of the rise of such a wave cannot be limited to a single issue – even if it is immigration policy, this wave affects a whole set of converging issues of vital importance for public policies and which cannot be addressed separately such as: the civil rights of African-Americans, women’s rights, religion in the public space (Cf. Hollinger secularization of American society), the legitimacy of white racial identity and its interests, cosmopolitanism, foreign policy in the Middle East, and many other topics in addition to immigration.
In reality, all these questions revolved around a central point, race, had a framework for discussion, the media and academic scene, and would lead to an undisputed victory with the enactment of civil rights in 1964 and the liberal immigration laws of 1965.
CofC traces the role of Jewish intellectuals in the radical tidal shift of race-related academic views (Ch. 2) and how Boasian ideology became dominant in the 1965 congressional debates on immigration (Ch. 7); as discussed below, it was during this key period that this racial ideology became dominant in the media (Andrew Joyce, 2019) – at a time when all television channels and Hollywood studios were Jewish-owned, marking a 180-degree turn from what had happened in the 1920s which had instead seen the victory of race-based restrictionist arguments, these arguments were then carried and defended by leading magazines and in mainstream books.
Similarly, Jewish influence was instrumental in the civil rights movement during the critical years 1954-1968 (see below) and in the secularization of American culture: “Jewish civil rights organizations have had a historic role in postwar legislative and executive policy developments” (Ivers, 1995: 2).
The only thing that could seriously challenge an important part of what Cofnas calls “the anti-Jewish narrative” is anything about the role of Jews in repurposing U.S. immigration laws. It is quite logical and legitimate for Cofnas, following Hugh Davis Graham (2003), to place these laws in a broader context, but, as noted above and developed below, this context has been just as influenced by Jewish activism. This is the thesis defended by Graham (2003: 57) who states: “Immigration reform is only the culmination of a long-term work that dates back to the twenties on the part of Jewish organizations that have constantly opposed the logic of ethnic quotas ... Jewish politicians in New York, particularly Governor Herbert Lehman, broke new ground in the 1940s by getting their state to pass anti-discrimination legislation on a crucial issue [because of the national origin provisions of the 1924 law giving preference to immigration from northwestern Europe]. adding “national origin” to the list of inadmissible grounds of discrimination on race, colour and religion.”
Similarly, Otis Graham (2004) noted that “the political core of the nebula in favour of a more flexible immigration regime was made up of ethnic lobbyists... claiming to speak for all the nationalities that had migrated before the National Origins Act of 1924, this core was in fact dominated by Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, deeply concerned about the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism on the continent and in constant search of a safe haven” (see also Graham, 2004: 67).
Thus, any criticism of MacDonald’s work on immigration (CofC: Ch. 7) must consider whether or not Jews had a significant influence on the broader context of which Graham (2003) speaks. However, Cofnas ignores the role of Jewish intellectuals in the upheavals of academic conceptions of race, he ignores the way in which Boasian ideology became dominant in congressional debates, he ignores all the exhibits on Jewish immigration activism between 1890 and 1965 (CofC: 259–293), and he ignores MacDonalds’ synthesis of Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. fifty and sixty (CofC: 255–258).
Precisely, the pieces present in CofC on Jewish activism prior to the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924 were recently corroborated by Daniel Okrent [a Jew]. The Jewish community from Germany, which had already been in America for some time, despite its disgust with its own cousins in southern and eastern Europe, played a major role in keeping immigration legislation favorable to them even when the general public no longer wanted it. For example, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the restrictionists, wrote to a friend during the second presidency of Grover Cleveland (1893-1897, 22nd and 24th President of the United States): “Influences [on Grover Cleveland] were exerted yesterday which I will explain to you at our meeting and which were very difficult to thwart”; he explained to another that “these forces represented neither companies nor political currents (Cf. Okrent, 2019: 72). For Okrent, these were “almost certainly members of the wealthy and influential Jewish community from Germany, such as Jacob Schiff, who had personally expressed a request to Grover Cleveland to block the literacy test” (Ibid). (Before focusing squarely on national origins, restrictionists advocated the idea of a language test as a means of curbing immigration.)
For a quarter of a century, the IRL [Immigration Restriction League], headed by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, had to fight foot by foot against a series of powerful organizations dominated by wealthy Jews in Germany: “The emergence in the 1890s of organized, wealthy, and well-connected Jews who had embraced the immigrant cause represented for Lodge and his followers an opposition like few Boston Brahmins had faced until then”. (Okrent, 2019: 72, 73). [FG: Boston Brahmins = Boston Super Caste, heir to the first settlers].
It was no doubt because of this fierce opposition that, despite public opinion that became increasingly pressing from 1905 onwards, it was necessary to wait until the 1920s for immigration to finally be regulated (Neuringer, 1971: 83).
As Cohen (1972: 40f) reports, the AJCommittee’s efforts against immigration restrictions in the early twentieth century are a glaring example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influence public policy while constituting only the tiny upper layer of their community.
Of all the ethnicities likely to be affected by the 1907 immigration legislation, Jews had the least to gain in terms of the number of potential immigrants, but they were – by far – the largest contributors to the drafting of the legislation (Cohen, 1972: 41); the other immigrant communities were not as organized and demanding, if only because their position on the subject was much more ambivalent (Neuringer, 1971: 83).
In the period that followed, which was to lead to the still relatively innocuous legislation of 1917, following a new assault on Congress by the restrictors who had not disarmed, “only the Jews mobilized” (Cohen, 1972: 49).
It is important to understand that this influence played out when Jewish influence still had nothing to do with what it would be after the Second World War and, a fortiori, with what it would be at the time of the immigration debates of the 1960s, when the old WASP elite was already a shadow of its former self. almost ousted by the new elite.
As for the battle for civil rights, recognized by Hugh Davis Graham (2003) as decisive for the passage of the 1965 immigration laws, Jewish activism played a preponderant role. In the post-World War II period, the entire areopagus of Jewish organizations began to work on African-American issues, including the AJCommittee, the American Jewish Congress (hereafter, AJCongress) and the ADL. “With a professional staff, well-equipped offices, and proven public relations know-how, they had everything they needed to make a difference” (Friedman, 1995: 135). During the 1960s, civil rights groups were two-thirds or three-quarters funded by Jews (Kaufman, 1997: 110): “Their legal and financial support was the source of a whole series of victories in favor of the civil rights movement.” There is little exaggeration in the words of this AJCongress lawyer according to which “Most of these laws were in fact drafted on the premises of the Jewish agencies, by Jews, put on the agenda by Jewish legislators, and passed under pressure from Jewish voters” (Levering-Lewis, 1984: 94). (CC: 256).
It was a multifaceted effort: challenging in court for discrimination in housing, schooling, or public employment, proposing legislation with legislative and executive bodies in the federal and state branches, drafting messages to be disseminated by the media [see also Joyce, 2019], curricula for students and faculty, reshaping of academic discourse. As is often the case when Jews campaign on campuses or in political forums, the preponderance of their involvement is masked (e.g., Svonkin, 1997: 45, 51, 65, 71-72). (CC: 257).
Covering the period from 1945 to 1965, the documents presented in CofC are particularly edifying as to the importance of Jewish activism in creating a favorable context for the questioning of the provisions of the 1924 law on national origins and in the final triumph of the passage of the 1965 law that opened the floodgates of immigration (CC: 273–292). I briefly review these documents here, organizing them by theme and enriching them with the latest research.
Challenging Race Thinking
Jews and their organizations have been at the forefront of the intellectual struggle to deny the importance of racial and ethnic differences in human affairs. Placing themselves in the wheel of success of Boasian anthropology, which had dominated the American Anthropological Association since the 1920s, they would shape the intellectual context that would preside over the success of the 1965 law (CofC: Ch. 2; see above). In fact, “Boasian anthropology was explicitly an anti-racist science in its message and purpose” (Frank, 1997: 741).
As John Higham (1984) noted, the ascendancy gained by these conceptions was crucial in the final victory against restrictionism. Commenting on the 1965 debates, a New York Times reporter remarked that “members of Congress did not want to appear racist” (in Graham, 2004: 92).
Nativism had been “stripped of its intellectual respectability” (Bennett, 1995: 285). It is not surprising, then, that Boasian ideas about race figured prominently in immigration debates between 1945 and 1965.
For example, in a 1951 statement to Congress, AJCongress declared, “The discoveries of science must compel even the most narrow-minded to admit, as they do the law of gravity, that intelligence, morality, and character have no relation whatsoever to geography or place of birth” (AJCongress Statement, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816. 6 March – 9 April 1951, 391).
The statement went on to quote from some of the best-known writings of Boas and his protégé, Princeton professor Ashley Montagu, arguably the most prominent opponent of the concept of race at the time (AJConger Statement, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816. 6 March – 9 April 1951, 402–403).
Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, allowed himself to profess in the period immediately following World War II [in which 70 to 85 million people were killed] that humans are naturally cooperative and devoid of aggression, that there is a universal brotherhood among them (see Shipman, 1994, 159(f).
In 1952, Margaret Mead, another of Boas’s protégés, testified before the Presidential Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (hereafter PCIN) (1953: 92) that “all human beings in all societies have the same potential. … that the most advanced anthropological research shows that all human communities present more or less the same distribution of potentialities.
Another witness stated that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association had unanimously approved the proposition that “all scientific evidence indicates that all peoples are inherently capable of acquiring or adapting to our civilization” (PCIN, 1953: 93).
In 1965, Senator Jacob Javits (Congressional Record 111, 1965: 24469) could calmly announce in the Senate during the debate on the immigration bill that “Both the imperatives of our conscience and sociological theories tell us that immigration, as it is addressed in the national origin quota system, is wrong and has no rational or factual basis, we know well that it is absurd to claim that one man is better than another because of the color of his skin.” The intellectual revolution and its translation into public policies had come to an end (CofC: 253–254).
Moreover, even the anti-restrictionist strategy of Oscar Handlin, the eminent Harvard historian and intellectual discussed in more detail below, integrated the racial revolution into the social sciences in its own way, arguing that “it was possible and necessary to distinguish between the ‘races’ of immigrants seeking admission to the United States” (Handlin, 1952: 4)—but by framing the word “races” in prophylactic quotation marks, in line with Boasian views, thereby undermining any intellectual basis of white ethnocentrism (A Major Priority of the Frankfurt School [CofC: Ch. 5]).
Writing in Commentary (the journal of the AJCommittee), Petersen (1955) quoted a group of predominantly Jewish social scientists whose work, beginning with Horace Kallen’s plea (in 1915 and 1924) for a multicultural and pluralistic society, “constitutes the beginning of academic legitimization of a different immigration policy that may one day have the force of law”(86).
The circle also included Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter, who was instrumental in portraying populists in the West and South (whose support was essential to the restrictionists in 1924 and 1952) as irrational anti-Semites; he condemned their desire to “maintain a homogeneous Yankee civilization” (Hofstadter, 1955: 34) and he developed the “consensual” approach to history, characterized by Nugent (1963: 22) as “having in their sights any popular movement that would claim to threaten the pre-eminence of an intelligentsia or an urban elite, often academic, and the use of concepts from the behavioral sciences.”
The intellectuals of New York were emblematic of this elite (CofC: Ch. 6). For example, the highly influential left-wing Partisan Review was the main showcase for “New York Intellectuals, a group dominated by editors and contributors with Jewish ethnic identities and a deep dislike of American political and cultural institutions” (Cooney, 1986: 225f; Shapiro, 1989; Wisse, 1987) ...
They saw themselves as marginalized reprobates — a modern version of the ostracization of Jews traditionally seen in Gentile culture. “They did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them” (Podhoretz, 1967: 117; emphasis in original). It was so much so that a New York columnist ended up asking (Podhoretz, 1967: 283) if the Partisan Review keyboard had a special key for the term “alienation” (CofC: 216–217).
Finally, Joyce in 2019, reports a campaign mainly initiated by Samuel H. Flowerman, research director of the AJCommittee and affiliated with the Institute for Social Research of the Frankfurt School (see CofC: Ch. 5), to influence public opinion in the American media after World War II. Flowerman co-edited with Max Horkheimer (director of the Institute for Social Research) the highly influential series Studies in Prejudice, published by the AJCommittee. He also built up a network of Jewish intellectuals and social scientists, many of whom held important positions in universities and the media (at a time when Hollywood studios, all American television networks, and influential newspapers [e.g., the New York Times and the Washington Post] were Jewish-owned).
All of his efforts were aimed at dominating American mass communications in order to “overturn the norms of the white in-group – so that it is this white in-group itself that is beginning to exert pressure within itself against the ethnocentrism of its members; it was “a vast Jewish collective enterprise whose sole purpose was to break down the locks of white American public opinion and to alter it altogether” (Joyce, 2019:6, 11; see, for example, Flowerman, 1947).
Organizing Anti-Restriction
Jewish associations organized, directed, financed, and carried out most of the actions of the major anti-restrictionist organizations from 1945 to 1965, including the National Liberal League for Immigration, the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons, the National Commission on Immigration and Citizenship, the Joint Conference on Foreign Legislation, the American Conference on Immigration, and the CPIN. “All of these associations have been working on immigration laws, disseminating information to the public, presenting testimony to Congress, and planning all kinds of activities that will help ... There were no immediate or dramatic results, but the assiduous campaign [of the AJCommittee] in collaboration with like-minded organizations eventually spurred the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to action (Cohen, 1972:373).
Concerning the PCIN [President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization established by Harry Truman on September 4, 1952, executive order 10392]:
The AJCommittee was also heavily involved in the deliberations of the CPIN (established by President Truman), including producing testimony and providing documents to individuals and organizations testifying before the CPIN (Cohen, 1972: 371).
All its recommendations were included in the final report (Cohen, 1972: 371), including those concerning a lower weighting of economic skills as criteria for immigration, the outright abandonment of the system of quotas by nationality, the opening of immigration to all the peoples of the world following a simple “first come, first served” logic, the only deviation from the CPIN report being that it opted for a lower overall level of immigration than that of the which was recommended by the AJCommittee (CofC: 281).
The president of the CPIN was Philip B. Perlman [a Jew], the commission also included a high proportion of Jews, and was headed by Harry N. Rosenfeld (executive director) assisted by Elliot Shirk.
His report was unreservedly approved by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly 12 January 1952: 3). The proceedings were printed in the form of the report Whom We Shall Welcome (PCIN, 1953) with the cooperation of Representative Emanuel Celler [Jew] and with an essay by Oscar Handlin, the Jewish academic activist (see below).
Enlisting non-Jews in the project
Even going back to the battle over the immigration law of 1924, we see that Jewish activists have in fact always explicitly opposed an ethnic status quo in congressional hearings. “At a time when the population of the United States was just over 100 million, [Louis Marshall, an influential lawyer associated with the AJCommittee and head of the anti-restrictionist lobbying forces] said, ‘There is room in this country for ten times its current population’; it advocated the admission of all the peoples of the world without quota limits, with the sole exception of individuals who “were mentally, morally and physically unfit, hostile to organized government, or liable to become public burdens” (CofC: 263).
Graham (2004: 80) notes that the Jewish immigration lobby “aimed not only to open the doors to Jews, but also to diversify flows sufficiently to end the majority status of Western Europeans and thus reduce the risk of a fascist regime.” The driving role of fear and insecurity was specific to the Jewish community, not found in other circles advocating the end of the national origin provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws; such a vision involved changing the ethnic balance of the United States. This apprehension of the Jewish community is clearly reflected in the following:
In 1952, the CPIN observed that if the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo, it was not so much by virtue of the national origin system, as there were already high levels of non-quota immigrants (mainly European refugees from communism), while at the same time, the countries of Northern and Western Europe, they did not fulfill theirs. The report considered that the main obstacle to changing the racial status quo was in fact the limitation of the overall level of immigration.
One would be much more convinced if Celler had advocated a law explicitly reaffirming the ethnic status quo – this is what the laws of 1924 and 1952 did in their preamble, laws he fiercely opposed for more than forty years. Getting rid of the national origin quota system was only a prerequisite for changing the ethnic status quo, Celler was well aware of this. All that would be left for successors to do was to raise the absolute number of immigrants, just as the INCP advocated, and that is what ended up happening.
In another sign of Jewish consensus on the issue, AJCongress, the largest American Jewish organization at the time, testified at the Senate hearings on the 1952 law that while the 1924 legislation had succeeded in preserving the ethnic balance of the United States, “it did not give it any value. There was nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be absurd to believe that we had reached the summit of ethnic perfection in that year” (Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, 6 March – 9 April 1951, 410).
At the same time, Congress Weekly, the newsletter of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origin provisions as based on the “myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial strains” (17 Oct 1955:3) and advocated immigration “on the basis of need and on criteria unrelated to race or national origin” (4 May 1953: 3).
Dr. Israel Goldstein (1952a: 6), president of the AJCongress, wrote that “the system of national quotas had become scandalous ... when all our national experience had confirmed beyond any possible doubt that our strength lies in the diversity of our peoples” (Goldstein, 1952b: 5), a statement that anticipated the current mantra recited
by the American academic, media and political establishment: “Diversity is our greatest strength.”
Great Jewish figures known to the public, such as Oscar Handlin, a historian at Harvard, published pro-immigration books and articles (e.g., The Uprooted [1951/1973]). Handlin’s (1952) article, The Fight for Immigration Has Only Just Begun, appeared in Commentary (published by the AJCommittee) shortly after the Democratic-controlled Congress overruled President Truman’s veto of the restrictive law of 1952 [FG: Truman was a Democrat, but the Democrats were divided into two camps, the one led by the rapporteur of the law Pat McCarran, very restrictionist, and the one led by Emanuel Celler, the Jew author of the anti-restrictionist report of the PCIN, the presidential commission set up by Truman on immigration, Truman, obviously, was on the side of the commission he had set up, hence his veto of the restrictionist law of 1952]
In a comment that was very revealing of the Jewish leadership of the pro-immigration forces and the relative disinterest of other minorities who arrived at the turn of the century (see above Neuringer, 1971: 83) Handlin complained about the apathy of other “hyphenated Americans,” reluctant to join the battle over immigration [FG: “Hyphenated Americans,” for example, African American, Italian-American etc. but precisely, as usual, the Jews demanded a separate treatment by refusing to place a hyphen between Jew and American, so Handlin’s comment is not entirely logical on this point!].
Handlin used a “we” over and over again, as in: “If we can’t beat [Sen. Pat] McCarran and his cronies with their own weapons, we can at least manage to destroy the effectiveness of those weapons.” This “we” betrayed his conviction that the entire Jewish community shared a strong interest in a liberalization of immigration policy and that it had to remain optimistic and combative to ensure that the 1952 law would gradually be blunted in its application until it was finally replaced by a new one. It is this erosion of the 1952 law that is evoked by Graham (2003) and used by Cofnas as the general framework of the 1965 law. [FG: But as we can see, this “general framework” is in fact restricted to Jews]
Handlin unequivocally rejected the idea of an ethnic status quo, believing that it was “illusory [to expect] that the composition of the American population will remain as it is” (Handlin, 1947: 6). He never bothered to respond to the justifications advanced by the restrictionists in 1924, this is how he summed up their position: “The hordes of inferior races, who then poured freely into the country in total disregard of the latest prescriptions of racial hygiene [a reference to the theories of racial difference common among the elites and widely propagated by the popular media in the 1920s], mingled with the Anglo-Saxons, inevitably producing a deterioration of the species” (1951/1973: 257).
Handlin thus deliberately left out the real argument used by the restrictionists in the 1924 congressional debates – that the national origin quota system was fair to all minorities in the country since it maintained the ethnic status quo (CofC: 263), with the underlying idea, perfectly defensible from an evolutionary perspective, that each minority will always seek to defend its own interests in matters of immigration: this is what we observe in the tug-of-war between Palestinians and Jews in Israel over a Palestinian right of return).
Handlin was a key figure in the years leading up to the passage of the 1965 Act. Ngai (2013) highlighted its importance in these terms:
Handlin’s thought was both a reflection and a spur to the evolution of immigration policy in the post-war period. He can be credited with popularizing a new interpretation of American history, one that made immigration the heart of American economic and democratic development. By creating his normative theory of history, he founded the framework for immediate political reform. This theory is none other than what we commonly call “a nation of immigrants” – it has endured for several generations in scholarly and popular discourse, and probably still endures today. (Ngaï, 2013, 62)
His contributions and long-term efforts to repeal the system of migration quotas by origin should not be underestimated. His writings – academic or journalistic – have provided an episteme of reform, a framework and a logic for criticizing the old politics and defining the contours of the new one.
Handlin not only gave voice and legitimacy to Euro-American ethnic minorities as such, he also gave them a central place in American history by arguing that pluralism and what is now called “living together” were the pillars of American democracy. The reform program was thus not only a matter of immediate political interest, it was also a historic mission perceived as the telos of American democracy and Americanism after World War II. (Ngai, 2013, 65)
Nibbling away at the ethnic status quo at the heart of the immigration laws of 1924 and 1952
Until the 1965 law, most of the migrants outside the quota were refugees from communism. These migrants were mostly non-Jews from Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (Graham, 2003: 54), and they had taken advantage of the safety valve offered to them by the “law of the 1920s” – in the event of political or ethnic tension in the country of origin, to assimilate into American culture. (Graham, 2003: 48).
In the 1950s, these European flows that were gradually assimilating were not considered to change the demographic balance of the country – even if they were far-left refugees (also persecuted by the communists): in the twenties, America distrusted the latter like the plague (especially with regard to Jewish immigrants [CofC: Chs. 3 & 7]).
Americans were happy to welcome them because they were seen as asserting the superiority of American culture over communism during the Cold War; for example, the persecution of Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty (who lived in the U.S. embassy in Budapest for 15 years before being exiled) affected Americans immensely, especially Catholics.
Thus, in practice, the migratory flows of the fifties will have been very far from the profile of immigration after 1965. Although immigration in the 1950s reflected a clear shift in attitudes that prevailed in the 1920s, the logic was a far cry from that of post-1965 immigration, where the main rule was that no justification was needed – even the skills needed in the country had only a low priority.
But already in 1961, there had been a law that was a serious departure from the principle of quotas: the Family Unifation Act. The concept was not new, family reunification was at the heart of Jewish concerns about immigration as early as 1924 (Neuringer, 1971: 191)—a point well emphasized by Rep. Francis Walter, the leader of the House restrictionists during the 1952 debates, when speaking of the special role Jewish organizations had played in attempting to promote family reunification rather than special skills as the basis of American immigration policy (Congressional Record 13 March 1952: 2284).
On the subject of family reunification introduced by the immigration legislation of 1961, Bennett (1963: 244) said that “the principle of family reunification has become the ‘open sesame’ of immigration”.
Bennett (1963: 256) also noted that “the indefinite extension of non-quota status for immigrants from countries where they were largely overwhelmed because they were heavily discriminated against and penalized [by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952], added to administrative exemptions, to the ever-broadening interpretation of the statutes, and to the bills being drafted, were sufficient to accelerate and manifestly make inevitable an upheaval in the ethnic landscape of the nation (257).
The 1961 law was tailor-made to increase the number of immigrants because it allowed for the “cascading migration” of family members by allowing family reunification without quota limits [”cascading”: one brings one’s wife, the wife brings her brother, etc.]. “Family preference has been a powerful lever for newcomers that left ‘native’ Americans disarmed and without control over the future of the country – now in the hands of migrants. (Graham, 2004: 91) (Simply because citizens whose families went back more than a generation or two – let alone founding Americans – had few or no close relatives living abroad.)
Hold on Congress and the Executive
Jews were at the forefront of the anti-restrictionist struggle in Congress and played an important role because of their place in the executive branch. In Congress, among the most notable figures were Rep. Celler (also a leader of the anti-restrictionist forces in the 1924 congressional debates) and Sen. Jacob Javits and Herbert Lehman, all prominent members of the ADL. After noting the leadership of Jews in Congress, Graham (2003:57) notes that “less visible, but equally important, was all the work of key advisers to presidential staff and agencies. These included such high-profile political advisers as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfeld in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the White House during Eisenhower’s time, and presidential aide Myer Feldman [who, as noted, was Kennedy’s ghostwriter for the writing of A Nation of Immigrants], assistant secretary of state under Abba Schwartz and assistant attorney general under Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.” Schlei was further the head of the Office of the Attorney General of the Department of Justice from 1962 to 1966 and the most important figure in the drafting of the 1965 immigration bill (New York Times, 2003). Graham (2004:88) also mentions Feldman, Schlei, and Schwarz, as important figures in immigration-related issues during the Kennedy-Johnson administration.
Jewish Consensus on Immigration Policy
Throughout this period, anti-restrictionist attitudes were shared by the vast majority of the organized community—”from believers to atheists, from the extreme right to the extreme left,” to use the words of Judge Simon Rifkind during his congressional hearing in 1948 as a representative of a long list of national and local Jewish groups
Cofnas (2018, 2021) argues that because of their intellectual abilities, Jews have historically been heavily overrepresented on both sides of various issues.
This was absolutely not the case with immigration throughout the critical period that ended in 1965 with the repeal of the national origin provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws – and even long after. I have never found a Jewish organization or personalities at the head of the forces in favor of the laws of 1924 and 1952 – or opposed to the law of 1965 at the time it was promulgated.
Joyce (2021) shows the powerful and ongoing role of Jews in the pro-immigration struggle in the United States in the contemporary period, and, as noted above, that there is still a substantial Jewish consensus on immigration today.
Conclusion
I conclude that the Jews at the head of their organizations were a necessary condition for passing the Immigration Act of 1965. As always, Jewish activism was aimed at elite institutions and political figures, with change ultimately occurring in a top-down manner that did not reflect the attitudes of most Americans.
As Graham (2004: 88) notes, “The question of immigration saw the emergence of a scenario that is now classic in public debate: elite opinion-makers choosing a problem and a liberal political solution, while popular opinion standing up against it, but amorphous and marginalized, was doomed to defeat.
6 – Related questions
Why are Jews leftists?
[FG: skipped passage, it is mainly a question for Kevin MacDonald to counter the explanation given for this fact for Cofnas:
For Cofnas, who is Jewish, Jews are left-wing – despite their money – as eternally oppressed, persecuted, rejected, etc.
For Kevin MacDonald, it’s almost the opposite, the Jews are leftists in the revolutionary sense of the term because they have to reformat the host societies and in particular break up nationalisms and peoples: see all the above in the article]
Is the percentage of Jews in a society essential to the success of their activism?
Cofnas (2021) notes that Western societies like Sweden with a very low percentage of Jews have also opened their doors to immigration and embraced multiculturalism. In addition to the activists he cites (David Schwarz was particularly important), we must also mention the role of the Bonnier family, which has long had a prominent presence in the Swedish media (books, magazines, newspapers, television and film), (Bonnier Group, 2021).
But if you look more closely, the image changes completely.
Eckehart (2017) compiled a list of 17 debates on immigration and minority policy in prominent Swedish newspapers and magazines between 1964 and 1968, comprising a total of 118 articles. Schwarz personally wrote or co-authored 37 of them, or 31% of the total. He is also the one who initiated 12 of the 17 debates.
If we add the other Jewish contributions, we find that what is only a tiny minority in Sweden, less than 1% of the population, was responsible for 46 articles, or 39% of the total. All Jewish contributors were in favor of multiculturalism. Obviously, they were not present on either side of the fence.
In addition, minorities have an advantage in ethnic competition by being more able to mobilize than majorities, i.e., capable of making sacrifices for a cause, for example by donating money, time, and labor (Salter, 2006).
Even a small group with limited resources can exert disproportionate influence when its members are highly mobilized and its opponents, while superior in number, are indifferent.
This is the general lesson that emerges from everything we have presented above about the 1965 immigration law in the United States. In the case of Australia over the past few decades, Isi and Mark Leibler, whose efforts have been supported by wealthy Australian Jews, have had a very large influence on the government on a range of issues, from policy towards Israel to immigration, to restrictions on freedom of expression (Cashman, 2020; Gawenda, 2020; Sanderson, 2021). Sanderson (2013) also describes Walter Lippmann’s effective activism in promoting an official policy of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, motivated, at least in part, by the fear that assimilation would decimate the Jewish community.
Moreover, the influence of minorities is all the more effective when it occurs in individualistic cultures, and Scandinavian societies are the most individualistic cultures in the world (cf. data on historical family and political structure (MacDonald, 2018c, 2019). Individualists are much more likely to see others as individuals rather than members of competing groups, and they are relatively non-ethnocentric (Henrich, 2020; MacDonald, 2019, 2020, 2021).
Moreover, the social cohesion of individualistic culture is ensured by a “foundation of moral values” rather than by identities based on kinship, race, or ethnicity (MacDonald, 2019, 2021) – a foundation under which dissent, for example, from multiculturalist ideology in the contemporary West, leads to guilt and possible sanctions such as ostracism and job loss.
In contemporary Western culture, these moral communities are created top-down by an elite academic and media culture in which Jews are heavily overrepresented (MacDonald, 2002b, 2019). As noted, a major Jewish effort after World War II was to create a culture that relegated white ethnocentrism and the pursuit of its interests to the political and social margins (see also CofC: Ch.5).
In the end, Sweden, as a relatively small Western society with no geopolitical significance, finds itself swept up in the broader trends of the West. Given that the United States has been the undisputed leader of the West since World War II, it is not at all surprising that the trends that began in the United States are viewed in a positive light by Swedish intellectuals and politicians.
This is even more true of Western academic culture, which is international and hierarchical, so that, for example, once the Boasian revolution occurred in elite universities in the United States and became wisdom incarnate there, it was inevitable that it would spread to academic circles throughout the West and with similar consequences for immigration policy.
Thus, Sanderson (2013:7) shows that Boasian ideas about race were “an essential weapon in opening up Australian immigration to non-white minorities,” and he discusses the crucial role of Jewish academics and other activists in promoting opposition to white tradition. In the case of Australian politics, he cites as an example an article by Dan Goldberg (2008), the national editor of the Australian Jewish News, proudly acknowledging that “Jews were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White Australia policy.”
In contrast, in stark contrast to this individualism, Rubenstein (Rubinstein, 1995:7) notes that “politically, the Jewish community is strongly united around a limited number of goals on which there is consensus or near-consensus, including support for Israel, the fight against anti-Semitism, adherence to multiculturalism – which goes hand in hand with the containment of assimilation through teaching in Jewish schools.”
MacDonald (CofC: 294) notes that “the radical change in immigration policy in the Western world occurred at about the same time (1962-1973), and in all countries the changes reflected the attitudes of the elites rather than those of the great mass of citizens. … A recurring theme has been that immigration policy has been formulated by elites who control the media and that efforts have been made by political leaders of all major parties to ward off fear of immigration.”
As noted above citing Graham (2004:88), top-down influence on public policy was central to Jewish immigration activism in the 1960s and has largely spilled over to other public policy issues. The anti-populism and elite control advocated by Jewish intellectuals in previous decades had set a precedent (CofC: Ch. 5).
[…]
7 – In summary
[…]
• There were no Jews or Jewish organizations among the restrictionists or populist movements during the period covered by CofC – a time of great change for the West. Throughout this period, Jewish organizations and activists were uniformly pro-immigration, and Jewish intellectual movements were slamming populism.
• As noted above, “in pre-1960s America... it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find important Jewish intellectuals or activists who would not have been on the left of the political spectrum,” and I note that Cofnas does not know what the power of the Jewish community has focused on. It also ignores the fact that Jewish neoconservatives, by far the most prominent current among American Jewish conservatives, have been pro-immigration and have done everything they can to pull the Republican party to the left on social issues, in line with the wishes of large majorities of American Jewry.
• In the debates on immigration in Sweden in the 1960s, all Jewish contributors favored the multiculturalist position. Similarly, with respect to Australia, there has been a Jewish consensus on multiculturalism and other issues, “particularly support for Israel, combating anti-Semitism, adhering to multiculturalism – which goes hand in hand with stemming assimilation through teaching in Jewish schools” (Rubenstein, 1995: 7).
• In the analysis of the weight of Jewish influence, one cannot limit oneself to a purely statistical analysis and avoid a description of the internal dynamics and motivations of the movements of influence created and dominated by them. On the contrary, understanding the motivations and internal dynamics of these movements should be the priority.
Otherwise, we run the risk, like Cofnas, of missing out on all these areas and ending up with a very deficient vision of Jewish history and activism.
Translation Francis Goumain
* * *
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MacDonald, K. (2004). Understanding Jewish infuence III: Neoconservatism as a Jewish movement. The Occidental Quarterly, 4(2), 7–74. https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v4n2/TOQv4n2MacDonald.pdf. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
MacDonald, K. (2010). Why are professors liberals? The Occidental Quarterly, 10(2), 57–84. http:// www.kevinmacdonald.net/LiberalProfessors-2020.pdf MacDonald, K. (2015). Eric Kaufmann’s The rise and fall of Anglo-America. The Occidental Quarterly, 15(4), 3–42. http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Kaufmann-fnal.pdf; accessed November 7, 2021.
MacDonald, K. (2016). The alt right and the Jews. The Occidental Observer (September 17). http://www. theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/09/17/the-alt-right-and-the-jews/. Accessed 7 Nov 2021
MacDonald, K. (2018a). Reply to Nathan Cofnas. http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/ReplyToCofnas1.pdf. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
MacDonald, K. (2018b). Second reply to Nathan Cofnas, revision of April 18, 2018. http://www.kevin macdonald.net/SecondReplyCofnas.pdf. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
MacDonald, K. (2018c). Familial origins of European individualism. Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 43(1–2), 78–108.
MacDonald, K. (2019). Individualism and the Western liberal tradition: Evolutionary origins, history, and prospects for the future. CreateSpace.
MacDonald, K. (2020). Can Western church infuence explain Western individualism? Comment on “The church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation” by Jonathan F. Schulz et al. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2), 371–391.
MacDonald, K. (2021). Understanding Western uniqueness: A comment on Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest people in the world. Mankind Quarterly, 61(3), 723–766. Marcus, J., & Tar, Z. (1986). The Judaic elements in the teachings of the Frankfurt school. Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 21, 339–353.
Marx, K. (1843/1978). On the Jewish question. In R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. Norton & Company.
Mearsheimer, J., & Walt, S. (2008). The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Moore, T. (2021). Anti-Defamation League calls for Tucker Carlson to be fred. The Hill (April 9). https:// thehill.com/homenews/media/547439-anti-defamation-league-calls-for-tucker-carlson-to-be-fred. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Neuringer, S. M. (1971). American Jewry and United States immigration policy, 1881–1953. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1969. University Microflms. (Reprinted by Arno Press, 1980.)
New York Times (2003; April 23). Norbert A. Schlei, 73, legal advisor in the Kennedy-Johnson era. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/us/norbert-a-schlei-73-legal-adviser-in-kennedy-johns on-era.html. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Ngai, M. M. (2013). Oscar Handlin and immigration policy reform in the 1950s and 1960s. Journal of American Ethnic History, 32(3), 62–67.
Nortley, J. (2021). U.S. Jews have widely difering views on Israel. Pew Research Center. https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-difering-views-on-israel/. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Nugent, W. T. K. (1963). The tolerant populists: Kansas populism and nativism. University of Chicago Press.
Okrent, D. (2019). The guarded gate: Bigotry, eugenics, and the law that kept two generations of Jews, Italians, and other European immigrants out of America. Scribner.
OpenSecrets.org (2021). Who are the biggest donors? https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/ biggest-donors. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Petersen, W. (1955). The “scientifc” basis of our immigration policy. Commentary, 20 (July), 77–86.
PCIN, 1953; See President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization.
Pew Research (2013). A portrait of American Jews. https://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-ameri can-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Philips, B. A. (2013). New demographic perspectives on studying intermarriage in the United States. Contemporary Jewry, 33, 103–119.
Podhoretz, N. (1967). Making it. Random House.
Podhoretz, N. (2010). Why are Jews liberals? Penguin Random House.
President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN). (1953). Whom we shall welcome. From Capo Press.
Raab, E. (1993). Jewish Bulletin (northern California) (February 17).
Raab, E. (1995). Can antisemitism disappear? In J. A. Chanes (Ed.), Antisemitism in America today: Outspoken experts explode the myths. Birch Lane Press.
Raijman, R., Hochman, O., & Davidov, E. (2021). Ethnic majority attitudes toward Jewish and non-Jewish migrants in Israel: The role of perceptions of threat, collective vulnerability, and human values. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 19(2), 407–421. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948. 2021.1889850
Richman, J. (2005). Powerful gun lobby takes aim with frst Jewish leader. Forward (August 19). https:// forward.com/news/2584/powerful-gun-lobby-takes-aim-with-frst-jewish-lea/?gamp. Accessed 7 Nov 2021.
Rothman, S., & Lichter, S. R. (1982). Roots of radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the new left. Oxford University Press.
Rubenfeld, F. (1997). Clément Greenberg: A life. Scribner.
Rubinstein, W. D. (1995). Judaism in Australia. Australian Government Publishing Service.
Rühle, O. (1929). Karl Marx: His life and work, trans. E. & C. Paul. The Viking Press.
Salter, F. (2006). On genetic interests: Family, ethnicity, and humanity in an age of mass migration. Routledge.
Sanderson, B. (2013). The war on white Australia: A case study in the culture of critique. The Occidental Quarterly, 13(1), 3–56.
Sanderson, B. (2021). Mark Leibler: Power broker for Australia’s Jewish plutocracy. The Occidental Quarterly, 21(1), 1–53.
Shapiro, E. S. (1989). Jewishness and the New York intellectuals. Judaism, 38, 282–292.
Shipman, P. (1994). The evolution of racism: Human diferences and the use and abuse of science. Simon & Schuster.
Stocking, G. W. (1968). Race, evolution, and culture: Essays in the history of anthropology. Free Press.
Svonkin, S. (1997). Jews against prejudice: American Jews and the fght for civil liberties. Columbia University Press.
Tichenor, D. J. (2002). Dividing lines: The politics of immigration control in America. Princeton University Press.
Weiss, P. (2021). This is what ‘Jewish democracy’ looks like. Mondoweiss (March 26). https://mondo weiss.net/2021/03/this-is-what-jewish-democracy-looks-like/. Accessed 7 Nov 2007.
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Wrezin, M. (1994). A rebel in defence of tradition: The life and politics of Dwight Macdonald. Basic Books.
Protocol No. 15 – Ruthless Suppression... The Jewdicial System
❝In the most important and fundamental affairs and questions, JUDGES DECIDE AS WE DICTATE TO THEM, see matters in the light wherewith we enfold them for the administration of the GOYIM, of course, through persons who are our tools, though we do not appear to have anything in common with them – by newspaper opinion or by other means…❞
Exclusive: US considered charging Minnesota judges, lawyers in immigration crackdown, sources say
July 16, 20256:32 AM EDT
FBI eyed judges, defense lawyers over virtual hearings for defendants in country illegally, sources say
Status of early-stage probe into judges, defense lawyers remains unclear
Virtual hearings common post-COVID, seen as routine by defense attorneys
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department explored bringing criminal charges against Minnesota judges and defense lawyers who discussed requesting virtual court hearings to protect defendants from being arrested by federal immigration officers, according to five people familiar with the matter.
In February, FBI agents in Minneapolis opened a preliminary inquiry into whether local judges and defense attorneys obstructed immigration enforcement by requesting virtual hearings, and the concept was also pitched to law enforcement officials in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal Justice Department deliberations.
Reuters could not determine whether the probe is ongoing. To date, no judge or lawyer in Minnesota has been charged over the episode.
Two of the people familiar with the discussions said FBI and Justice Department leadership in Washington supported the probe.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
The probe was launched shortly after Emil Bove, the former Acting Deputy Attorney General who has since been nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as an appellate judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, ordered prosecutors in a January 21 memo to pursue potential criminal cases against “state and local actors” for impeding immigration enforcement.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to vote on Bove’s nomination on Thursday, with Democrats expected to oppose it.
The Trump administration has taken aggressive steps against the legal system when its policies have been blocked, lashing out at judges over rulings it disagrees with and seeking to punish law firms and legal organizations that have challenged its policies.
“They’ve been intimidating law firms and lawyers from the beginning,” said Bennett Gershman, a former state prosecutor who teaches law at Pace University. “This is just ... part of the campaign to terrorize, intimidate, frighten people from speaking out.”
EMAIL TRAIL
The Minneapolis probe followed comments made in an email chat maintained by Minnesota defense lawyers on February 6 discussing requesting virtual court hearings for defendants who were living in the U.S. illegally to reduce the risk that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would apprehend them at court, the five people told Reuters.
Fox News reported about the existence of the email chat in March, about a month after the Justice Department started its inquiry.
The DOJ probe that the chat helped spark has not been previously reported.
In the email chain, one defense attorney said judges in the Third Judicial District in Minnesota “proactively” reached out to public defenders and prosecutors to encourage them to request Zoom court hearings on any cases with immigration issues, and that such requests would be granted “liberally,” according to an excerpt of the chat verified to Reuters by an attorney who saw the email messages.
In late April, the Justice Department charged Hannah Dugan, a local elected judge in Milwaukee, for trying to help a migrant evade immigration authorities when he appeared in her courtroom for a hearing. The indictment also alleges she told the defendant’s attorney he could “appear by Zoom” for his future court appearances.
Dugan has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Justice Department previously tried to charge a local Massachusetts judge in Trump’s first term for helping a state court defendant evade arrest by ICE by allowing him to leave through a rear door.
The case was later dropped during the Biden administration.
Virtual hearings became commonplace in courtrooms across America during the COVID pandemic, and still remain a popular option in some states - including Minnesota.
Chris Wellborn, a recent former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that scheduling virtual appearances for clients is a “routine and established procedure” that can help defendants who are balancing multiple jobs or facing child care duties.
“This situation underscores a recurring challenge: the misinterpretation of the vital role a criminal defense attorney plays in upholding constitutional obligations,” he said.
“It is a fundamental duty of all defense lawyers to provide comprehensive advice to their clients regarding all available legal options and pathways.”
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; additional reporting by Ned Parker in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Shri Navaratnam
The Engine of Compulsory Conformity
The BBC, the Bloomsbury Group, the Comintern and the NKVD in the 1930s
Horus . . . Oct 18, 2024
After its first five years in operation, the British Broadcasting Company became the wholly state-controlled British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927. John Reith, the first chief executive, wrote in 1924 of his “high conception of the inherent possibilities of the service” and later asserted that “‘the brute force of monopoly’ was a necessity in British broadcasting.”1 As a preponderance of politicians and civil servants as well as the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association agreed, the grant of the BBC’s first Royal Charter in 1927 and Reith’s ascent to the position of Director-General were virtually unchallenged. The brute force would fare better than the higher conception.
The Company, originally a cartel of radio set manufacturers, had been lucrative for its directors, but the Post Office had sanctioned their privileges for questionable reasons, and after the agreed period of royalties and having established the state enforcement of the licence fee, and under a government less obliging to Marconi and GEC, the Company was reformed into a ‘public corporation’. Reith himself was the leading advocate of the novel concept which, as with David Sarnoff and RCA in the USA, happened to provide him with a personal fief of immense influence. Reith’s “higher conception” consisted in a belief in “democratic aim, not in democratic method”, not aiming to give the public what they wanted, and still less any choice, but rather what he thought best for them.2 The BBC licence fee, originally a device to compel listeners to deliver royalties to the manufacturers’ cartel, served after the BBC’s incorporation to compel them to fund the state broadcaster while all other would-be broadcasters were prohibited.
The Public Corporation
The BBC’s official history describes Reith as desiring an organisation “independent” of the market and of governments.3 This has only ever been the case in the formal sense that the corporation depends directly on the crown instead, but the powers of the crown have for centuries been exercised by the government anyway. As Tom Mills describes, “renewals of the Royal Charter, as well as the appointment of BBC governors and trustees, have formally been made by an Order of the Privy Council” using “the residential powers of the absolutist state which have never been subject to democratic controls” and which are, “in essence, absolutist decrees of the central government, signed-off by the monarch of the day.”4 The government also grants the corporation its licence fee increases.5 The BBC could be deprived of funding or closed by any government that wished to do so, but none ever has; the idea of public corporations were initially embraced by leftists, but the Conservative Party exists to consolidate the gains of their faux-opponents.6
Reith’s BBC consciously strove to present itself as a kind of conglomerated person with whom the public would identify and whom they would trust. In Asa Briggs’ words, early BBC staff wanted “to ensure that people felt—without thinking—that the BBC was theirs.”7 Announcers were soon, by some listeners, “thought of as the BBC, for it was they who mediated between the listeners and the programmes.”8 Announcers were deemed the best placed of all BBC employees “to build up in the public mind a sense of the BBC’s collective personality.” They would represent “[t]he BBC itself” and its own “policy and ideals”.9 An article in the Spectator in 1936 said that “The BBC has a personality of its own, pervasive and unmistakable, and it affects its reactions to public events, to education, to entertainment, and to the arts: it is the foundation of its policy.”10 The Corporation was and is, as with any media organisation, unavoidably biased in whom it recruits, what its editors select to report and omit and how it allocates programme time, but developed the ability to appear objective to many viewers while expressing approval or disapproval by the variation of announcers’, presenters’ and newsreaders’ tones of voice and, in documentaries, the use of background music and lighting.11 The more trusting or unthinking elements of the public are subliminally persuaded by such methods.
Reith was chosen by the BBC’s first board of directors, but as they receded in importance, he grew, and standard histories of the corporation speak of ‘Reithianism’ as its founding ideology. This blurs the reality, but Reith was certainly a formative factor. He was a Presbyterian who served in and supported the Great War.12 His diary and memoirs show that he opposed unionisation at the BBC and in his previous job, had “no particular feelings about Communism”, privately sympathised with Adolf Hitler at times and made occasional favourable remarks about Benito Mussolini, yet in 1939 described himself as a “Gladstonian liberal”.13 He wrote in October 1942 that Winston Churchill was a “bloody swine” and “the greatest menace we’ve ever had” with “country and Empire sacrificed to his megalomania, to his monstrous obstinacy and wrongheadedness.”14 His insistence on formality, elocution and a privileged position for Christianity are commonly said to characterise the BBC during and long after his tenure, but his own political and cultural views do not appear to have become those of the organisation.
Crusading
Reith appears to have concerned himself primarily with broadcasting per se; to control all the BBC’s output he did not attempt, and those he began to disagree with in the 1930s he had also hired and come to rely upon. As Asa Briggs says, “The BBC’s philosophy owed an immense amount to one man: the BBC’s programmes were the work of many men of extremely varied experience and outlook.”15 He describes them as “men and women who ‘believed in broadcasting’ almost as a social and cultural crusade.”16 They also, more or less frankly, saw broadcasting as a means of indoctrination and intended to use it as such. As early as 1925, the leading Fabian Beatrice Webb had written that wireless had “a stupendous influence… over the lives of the people” and “might become… a terrible engine of compulsory conformity… in opinion and culture” but asserted that the BBC’s use of its influence was “eminently right”. Hilda Matheson, after six years at the Corporation, wrote in 1933 that “Broadcasting is a huge agency of standardization, the most powerful the world has ever seen.”17 Labour politician Herbert Morrison, later Home Secretary under Winston Churchill, had from the BBC’s earliest days “demanded that broadcasting… should be publicly owned and controlled.”18 In 1946, Morrison described broadcasting as “at least as powerful a vehicle of ideas as the printing press” and acknowledged that “the body which decides what goes into a broadcasting programme has an enormous power for good and evil over the minds of the nation” and averred that “that power must not fall into the wrong hands”, out of the right ones.19
After it began to be allowed to broadcast ‘controversial’ programmes from 1927, and as it became involved in education, nearly all the department heads and editors Reith’s BBC hired ensured that the political and cultural output was routinely leftist.20 An early producer of ‘controversial’ programming, Lionel Fielden, wrote that “[w]e really believed that broadcasting could revolutionize human opinion.”21 Charles Siepmann, the second Head of Talks, was in his own words “fanatically devoted”; he believed that
“broadcasting was the greatest miracle in human history… everything that any man had ever written down on paper, every note of music that had ever been composed was now universally available. This was what you might call ‘the new age of cultural communism’. And I believed that.”
Siepmann referred to his own “progressive outlook” and “the progressive policies that both Hilda and I were pushing very hard indeed”. He lamented that Reith agonised too earnestly over balance and didn’t share Siepmann’s “very, very sensitive social conscience”. Siepmann remarked that his own “sense of balance” was “to redress the ultra-conservatism of the culture of that time… my theory of balance ‘was subversive in the sense that it was disruptive of the old Conservative clique” and the “Conservative Mind”.22
BBC Education and Talks
The BBC founded several publications, of which Radio Times continues today. Its first and formative editor from 1927 was Eric Maschwitz, son of a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, whose career, like many BBC employees, included spells in broadcasting, the movie and music industries, the intelligence services, and wartime sabotage and terrorism under the Special Operations Executive. The Listener, founded in 1929, was an “educational periodical”, a printer of BBC Talks and a vehicle for the Corporation’s ‘cultural mission’. “By 1935 its circulation had reached 52,000, more than that of the New Statesman and the Spectator combined.”23 Richard Lambert was the first editor, having previously been, with Siepmann, the BBC’s representative on the Council for Adult Education, which the BBC funded to promote socialists including G D H Cole, John Sankey, William Temple and Harold Laski.24 Lambert employed Janet Adam Smith, later of the Fabian New Statesman, and the homosexual Joe Ackerley as assistant editors; his team’s use of The Listener to promote homosexual and communist poets like Cecil Day-Lewis, Wystan Auden, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender and Herbert Read provoked complaints from readers.25 Christopher Isherwood, another favourite poet, was a close associate of the Berlin-based pro-transgender, anti-nationalist activist Magnus Hirschfeld.26
Talks were originally a sub-division of BBC Education (which also included religion and early news operations), but “...in January 1927 the Control Board decided that a separate “Talks Section’ should be formed, quite distinct from education, news, and religion, with Miss Matheson in charge. She remained there until January 1932, leaving a very powerful imprint on the BBC.”27 Matheson was hired personally by Reith, first as an assistant in Education, then as the first Director of Talks in 1927. The BBC’s news operations began at the same time, initially merely repeating press agency reports. According to Kate Murphy, Matheson was “part of London’s cultural and intellectual elite” and “[her] approach to Talks reflected her liberal and progressive viewpoint.”28 She was also a feminist, a lesbian and a Soviet sympathiser who used her position to promote the views of her friends, lovers and comrades, especially members of the subversive Bloomsbury group and the socialist Fabian Society.29 Lionel Fielden was her main producer, also homosexual, anti-imperial and a supporter of Mohandas Gandhi, whom he promoted on BBC radio in India.
According to Asa Briggs, “[t]he early members of the Talks Department introduced to broadcasting some of its most brilliant performers—Harold Nicolson, Vernon Bartlett, Ernest Newman, Stephen King-Hall, Raymond Gram Swing, and John Hilton.”30 Simon Potter adds that “Matheson invited influential and pugnacious figures from the world of politics to speak on air, including Winston Churchill and Harold Nicolson, as well as cultural figures like HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw.”31 John Hilton was “an ardent trade unionist” admired by communists including Guy Burgess with whom he later collaborated at the BBC; both were recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).32 Nicolson, King-Hall, Bartlett and Churchill were all vociferous proponents of an anti-German foreign policy.33 Socialists were consultants as well as guests. “‘I remember best the trinity of EM Forster, Desmond McCarthy and HG Wells,’ Lionel Fielden has written, ‘who all gave us freely of their time and wise counsels, and would sit round our gas fires at Savoy Hill, talking of the problems and possibilities of broadcasting.’” 34 Nicolson was not only a guest but the husband of Matheson’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were central members of the Fabian Society and apologists for the Soviet Union during its most tyrannical period. George Bernard Shaw, also a Fabian socialist and Soviet sympathiser, was a proponent of racial mixing who cursed and derided ‘anti-Semites’ with the same canards used by The Times in 1882: “...Anti-Semitism is the hatred of the lazy, ignorant, fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business.”35 HG Wells, another defender of the Soviets, was given BBC airtime by Matheson to advocate for a world state and the end of nations.36 Matheson’s “pugnacious figures” also included the Marxist and Zionist Harold Laski, the Soviet agent EF Wise, the ‘Red Countess’ of Warwick, the Quaker and socialist Philip Noel-Baker, Ernest Bevin, the militant feminist Viscountess Rhondda and the pro-Soviet ‘pacifist’ and Focus member Norman Angell, as well as John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, EM Forster and others of the Bloomsbury circle. William Beveridge, a Liberal by party though a Fabian socialist in deed, “gave six talks on unemployment in 1931, following on a general series on the same subject.”37
Asa Briggs writes that “[u]nder Hilda Matheson the BBC employed speakers of every persuasion, but this did not save it from charges of ‘leftwing bias’.”38 Briggs, a pro-BBC historian, was perhaps merely re-wording Matheson’s own statement in 1933 that “[a]n impression of left-wing bias is always liable to be created by any agency which voices unfamiliar views… It does not always follow that the ideas themselves are of the left. In practice, they usually hail from every point of the compass.”39 As Ronald Coase said in 1950, “The fact that the Corporation has been criticised by the Right and the Left hardly proves, as many of its supporters contend, that it is impartial; of itself it merely shows that the Corporation has not been consistently at one of the extremes.”40 The Corporation leaned strongly to the left as soon as it began to broadcast opinionated content and was merely occasionally told to cancel one talk or disinvite a particularly aggravating speaker. I find no record of any nationalist or fascist being invited to give talks, and there were not even many Tories. All figures ‘of the right’ invited to speak on the BBC appear to have been anti-German.41 Ian McIntyre refers to Churchill as one of the “mavericks of the right”, a true if understated description in the sense that Churchill’s affectations and associations were vaguely right-wing but his deeds and legacy were the opposite.42 Lord Lloyd, first head of the British Council, an anti-fascist cultural propaganda body spun out of the Foreign Office, who spent the latter half of the 1930s agitating for war against Germany, was regarded within the BBC as of the “extreme right”.43 The BBC ‘balanced’ anti-German Soviet sympathisers with anti-German Soviet collaborators. The war, or the wars, against Germany, both of which Lloyd and Churchill supported, did more than any other events in history to empower the left and socialism, as Neville Chamberlain had predicted and striven to avoid.
Marxists and communists
Matheson’s contumacy toward Reith, especially in regard to criticism from the Daily Mail of her promotion of her comrades, resulted in her resignation. The New Statesman predictably blamed “official and orthodox pressure” which kept out “the expression of new ideas”, though “paid a tribute to the BBC as a whole” which, after all, was still a state monopoly and thus a castle to be held.44 Matheson was succeeded as Director of Talks by another leftist, the “like-minded” Charles Siepmann, of whose spell Briggs writes that “the same charges” of left-wing bias “were frequently repeated, and the Corporation found it desirable to seek ‘rightwing speakers’ who would offset criticism.”45 The dearth of such speakers actually broadcasting suggests that the Corporation went no further than ‘finding them desirable’. Instead, the socialist JB Priestley was given space for a “personal comment”, Winston Churchill warned about the ‘threat’ of Germany, and “An excellent series called Whither Britain?... was broadcast in 1934 (with Wells, Bevin, Shaw, and Lloyd George among the speakers) and this was followed later in the year by a series on The Causes of War (with, among others, Lord Beaverbrook, Norman Angell, Major Douglas—of Social Credit fame—and Aldous Huxley).”46
Eventually Siepmann, like Matheson, was, as Kate Murphy describes, “censured for being too radical”, i.e. “transferred to the role of Director of Regional Relations” in 1935.47 Hilda Matheson objected in the Observer, seeing him as her continuation.48 In Siepmann’s new remit, the largest of the BBC’s regions was BBC North, for which the Programme Director, EAF Harding, on his appointment in 1933, had “raided the Manchester Guardian” for its journalists “and with the full co-operation of WP Crozier, the editor” had drawn upon “the services of a number of the Guardian’s leaderwriters and reporters as North Regional broadcasters.”49 The strongly left-wing Guardian is the newspaper most read at the BBC today, vastly out of proportion to its sales to the public, and the BBC long sought to recruit to the greatest extent possible from among Guardian readers. Under Siepmann, John Coatman had been “deliberately brought in” by Reith for the role of the BBC’s Chief News Editor “as ‘right wing offset’ to ‘balance’ the direction of talks and news” but “showed no sign of doing so”; Coatman “insisted on his own independence as a maker of policy”.50 Richard Maconachie, “a man of conservative views” became Head of Talks in 1936, formally senior to the Director of Talks. According to Ben Harker, “His Director of Talks, Norman Luker, was by contrast a liberal intrigued by the far left” who “was keen to create a platform for a Marxist analysis of the issue” of class and wanted to reorient talks to appeal to the same audience as the anti-fascist Picture Post, edited by Istvan Reich, a Jewish political exile from Hungary, and the Left Book Club run by the Jewish communist publisher Victor Gollancz. Luker was a long-standing friend of the Cambridge Apostle, homosexual, Soviet spy and producer at the BBC, Guy Burgess. The robustness of the “right-wing offset” was evident in the rejection of Luker’s preferred Marxist lecturer, the Cambridge communist don Maurice Dobb; instead Luker had to settle for Arthur Horner, a member of the Communist Party’s central committee and a trade unionist. Dobb had, at any rate, already appeared “periodically” on the BBC earlier in the decade. Horner, in his broadcast in November 1938,
“ranged freely from Marx’s theory of class struggle as the engine of history, through to an explication of the Communist Party’s line on fascism, to a description of the Spanish Civil War as militarized class struggle, and into a justification of the Moscow Trials as revolutionary justice against counter-revolution. His talk, which was published unedited in the BBC’s in-house magazine The Listener, concluded with a familiar Popular Front appeal for what he called ‘the cultural, clerical and professional classes’ – generally the assumed audience for National Programme Talks – to come over to the working class in the struggle against capital and fascism.”51
BBC North
The BBC also issued Marxist propaganda via other avenues. As Ben Harker describes, communists coveted the BBC’s “growing cultural and political influence in the 1930s” which drew upon “its increasing significance in the construction of British identity, notably in its power to fashion the national narrative.”52 Fortunately for them, when the Corporation began to establish regional divisions in 1933, BBC North, the largest, became a “cauldron of Marxist and left-wing mischief” under its first Programme Director, the avowed Marxist EAF Harding.53 The producer Olive Shapley, the folk singer AL Lloyd, the thespian and director Joan Littlewood and her husband the singer and actor Ewan McColl (born Jimmie Miller) were central figures and all were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to Shapley, Harding was also a “comrade”.54 The North producer Geoffrey Bridson was merely a close friend and a sympathiser who didn’t join the party but was introduced to Harding by the Comintern propagandist Claud Cockburn, inventor of the myth of the Cliveden Set.55 Shapley, though she left the party after university (as did Guy Burgess), continued as an agent of the cause, moved to New York in 1941 and interviewed guests like the subversive Eleanor Roosevelt and the singer Paul Robeson, later winner of the Stalin Prize, for the BBC’s Children’s Hour. According to Harker, “It was Harding’s view that all radio was propaganda: broadcasts which failed to give voice to the working class silenced it, those which failed to address structural inequalities shored up the status quo.”56 Harding broadcast propaganda without subtlety. Documentaries like May Day by Bridson simply issued a communist reading of history, one which led inexorably toward The Revolution.57 The North team produced programmes about Chartism that coaxed the listener toward the same conclusion: working Britons had not yet completed their revolution. The Classic Soil, proudly memorialised by the BBC today, was an overt vindication of the 19th century writings of Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto and Capital, read by Ernst Hoffman, an anti-fascist immigrant from Germany.58 Shapley, the producer, later described her own work as “probably the most unfair and biased programme ever put out by the BBC”.59
Soviet espionage
From its founding in 1917, the Soviet Union had engaged in ceaseless attempts to dissolve and undermine Britain and the empire, using the Comintern, espionage, front groups and the assistance of sympathisers.60 As John Costello says, referring to the late 1920s and early 1930s, “Stalin’s lust for obtaining secret intelligence endowed [the] OGPU and its “organs” with unrivaled power, and he stepped up the pressure to expand the penetration of foreign governments. The primary target was Britain—the main adversary, in Stalin’s eyes[.]”61 The OGPU was the successor of the Cheka and predecessor of the NKVD and KGB. The Soviet penetration strategy came to centre upon upper-class students at Cambridge and Oxford who were best-placed to enter the civil service; the infamous ‘Cambridge Five’, and others better concealed, were thus recruited. With some awareness of the threat, the most conservative elements at the Security Service (MI5) held meetings with the BBC in 1935 which “set in motion a system of political vetting” to cover new BBC employees which was “formalised with a written agreement in 1937.”62 The vetting was insufficient; anyway, MI5 itself had employed subversives like Hilda Matheson during the Great War and since.63 The Soviet spy Guy Burgess was appointed as a producer of BBC Talks in June 1936 and was recruited to work for MI6 during his time there.
The intelligence services contained genuine opponents of the left, but the social worlds of their agents, Foreign Office employees and other civil servants, Cambridge Apostles, overt and covert communists, the Bloomsbury group, and upper class homosexuals all appear to have blended together, as is exemplified by Burgess himself. Burgess later made Anthony Blunt, a fellow Apostle, homosexual and Soviet spy, a frequent guest on the BBC, and elevated the already-high status of the bisexual anti-fascist Harold Nicolson at the corporation. Jews were prominent in the same circles. Burgess met the philosophers AJ Ayer and Isaiah Berlin, both later to work in MI6, at a dinner party hosted by Felix Frankfurter.64 Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, was another Apostle; according to Victor’s sister Miriam, Burgess was one of “the many people” whom her mother Rózsika, “assisted or supported by periodic and regular payments” for unclear reasons. Another was the Comintern agent Rudolph Katz.65 Victor Rothschild joined MI5 in 1939 (or before); the following year, Anthony Blunt was recruited on Rothschild’s recommendation.66
The suitability of Cambridge University as the prime location for Soviet recruitment owed much to the concentration of homosexuals among teaching staff and students. The Apostles, who included the amoralist philosopher GE Moore and others of the Bloomsbury group, had in earlier decades become “obsessed by homosexuality”, and several members “pursued what they called ‘the higher sodomy.’”67 “Higher” referred to their disdain for romantic love as well as their general sense of superiority. The Apostles were already a secret society, and homosexuality was actively prohibited in Britain until the 1960s. Some of those who practiced it formed “extensive underground ‘old boy networks’” which “reached out like a cobweb across the pinnacles of the British Establishment, with connections in Whitehall ministries, the universities, the foreign service, the church, and the armed services”; “several of the lines of this web of homosexual influence were spun by Apostles who, by the twenties, had anchored themselves firmly in the upper reaches of Whitehall” and “offered great opportunities to any blackmailer—or spy—who gained admission.” Jack Hewit, a lover of Burgess, first met him at a homosexual party in the War Office in 1936 at which Rudolph Katz was a guest.68 Burgess was extremely promiscuous and engaged in exchanges of love letters with ‘conquests’ to use as compromising material.
John Costello identifies Edward Marsh as “the leading behind-the-scenes string-puller in the interwar years” who “ascended the senior ranks of the civil service while pursuing his avocation as one of London’s leading literary impresarios”. Marsh
“was always ready to pull strings and arrange favors for eligible Cambridge men of intellect, talent, and good looks. Successive generations of Apostles, including Blunt and later Guy Burgess, discovered this to their advantage. The Marsh network included bureaucrats, publishers, parliamentarians, and prominent members of London society. Marsh was longtime personal secretary to Winston Churchill, to whom ‘dear Eddie’ would attach himself like a faithful hound whenever Churchill had a ministry.”69
Much of the same was true at Oxford University, where prominent dons like Maurice Bowra, aware of their closeness to Soviet intelligence agents, referred to themselves as being in the ‘homintern’; Bowra referred to Wadham, his college, as Sodom. During the Second World War he became a frequent guest on the BBC. Marxist members of the homosexual networks based in Cambridge, Oxford and London, including Roger Fulford and Kemball Johnston, attained positions in MI5 where they were able to influence their superiors in favour of members of the Communist Party.70
Popular Front
Though some communists may have been excluded from working at the BBC by MI5’s vetting, the corporation’s programmes were already used to support an effectively pro-Soviet foreign policy long before 1937. Winston Churchill is cited as one of a few right-wing speakers who disprove that the corporation was left-wing, but he exceeded the BBC in its fervour for the anti-German cause. In November 1934, Churchill was invited by the BBC to broadcast a speech in which he forebode the “destruction of the British Empire” and “Teutonic domination” of “our people” unless Britain sought allies to achieve “[p]eace… founded upon preponderance” by “mak[ing] ourselves at least the strongest Air Power in the European world.”71 This was, not by chance, the same demand as that of the civil service faction headed by Robert Vansittart and Warren Fisher that furtively supplied Churchill with false estimates of Britain and Germany’s military strengths.
The week after Churchill’s radio speech, the British arm of Samuel Untermyer’s Anti-Nazi Council was founded, and the following October it held a large demonstration in Hyde Park; the BBC broadcast the speeches by Eleanor Rathbone, Clement Attlee, Walter Citrine, JBS Haldane and Sylvia Pankhurst, all socialists or communists. There was no BBC Talk given by Oswald Mosley to ‘balance’ Churchill and no coverage of demonstrations against communism or hostility toward Germany. The BBC covered the events of the largest such demonstrations, those of the British Union of Fascists, by spotlighting the blackshirts’ eviction of hecklers and invaders. The BUF’s Olympia rally in 1934 occurred at the same time the BBC began to be allowed to create its own news reports. The ludicrous myth of the BUF intentionally causing violent disruption of its own events has endured.
From 1936, BBC Television broadcast selected newsreels from Gaumont and Movietone, the latter being a subsidiary of Wilhelm Fuchs’ Fox Corporation and the former owned by Isidore Ostrer. Ostrer was, according to Nicholas Pronay and Philip Taylor, “the most skilful and clear-minded manipulator of the propaganda potential of the newsreel”; as Gaumont also produced films and owned many cinemas, the effect of his skills was amplified greatly.72 Fuchs and Ostrer were both descended of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. The British film industry and cinemas were largely Jewish-owned through the 1920s and 30s.73 Burgess, before being hired by the BBC, was recruited to work for the Soviet NKVD probably by Arnold Deutsch, a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the founder and owner of Odeon Cinemas and a referee for Arnold’s immigration application.74
The BBC, especially the North division, effectively joined the Popular Front, a Soviet anti-fascist initiative, and thereby aligned with the aims of the international Jewish alliance agitating for regime change in Germany and with organised Jewry in Britain, whose activists secured special privileges. According to Geoffrey Alderman, “An agreement… was reached with the BBC which undertook to submit” to the Board of Deputies of British Jews “the scripts of any programme “of Jewish interest” before the programme was broadcast.” The agreement was part of the Board of Deputies’ Defence Committee’s anti-fascist strategy which also included “intelligence-gathering, media-monitoring and co-operation with the Special Branch.”75 In the spring of 1938, recalling 1881, “a Mansion House Fund and innumerable appeals on behalf of refugees from Austria, Germany and Czecho-Slovakia were broadcast from the BBC and in the British Press.”76
According to William West, “The BBC and its staff… took an essentially Communist line” at the time of the Spanish Civil War which indicates how “the more sinister activities of Burgess and his circle remained unremarked.”77 During the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938, Burgess was the producer responsible for planned anti-German speeches by Harold Nicolson which were cancelled under pressure from the Cabinet Office, which was loyal to Neville Chamberlain, and the Foreign Office under Halifax who was still for peace with Germany at the time.78 Producing ostensibly non-political programmes about the countries of the Mediterranean, Burgess also collaborated with the Marxist academic EH Carr and tried to involve Winston Churchill, of whom he was “a keen supporter” though the latter withdrew in anger at being required to moderate his belligerence.79 According to West, “the line followed by Burgess and EH Carr in the BBC’s Mediterranean series was close to [Anthony] Eden’s…”.80 Eden “had broadcast to the world his welcome” of the Soviet Union to the League of Nations in 1934 and, alongside Churchill, was the most prominent Tory supporter of an alliance with the Soviets; Eden was particularly friendly to Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister, while Churchill liaised more with Ivan Maisky, the ambassador in London to whom he had been introduced by Vansittart.81 In contrast to its pro-Soviet slant, the BBC refused to broadcast or even acknowledge the impassioned radio speech from Verdun by the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King Edward VIII, for peace between Britain, France and Germany in May 1939.82
Propaganda and black operations
As the BBC aligned with Jewish and Soviet policy, it applied its “power to fashion the national narrative” in accordance with the propaganda bodies of the British state, staffed and governed increasingly by anti-fascists, which were used to counter Italian and German (not Soviet) propaganda. The most overt, the British Council, was an initiative of Rex Leeper, head of the Foreign Office’s News Department and payee of the Soviet-aligned Czech government, who introduced Churchill to the Anti-Nazi Council, which Churchill renamed the Focus, in April 1936. The BBC’s Empire Service and foreign language broadcasting were launched to work to the same purpose as the Council. Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, but the propaganda war was underway at least two years earlier when the Focus member Lord Lloyd, another figure of the “extreme right” who sided with the extreme left in foreign policy, became chairman of the Council.83 Anti-fascism and sympathy for the Soviet Union were already embedded institutionally in Britain long before the Anschluss, ‘Munich’ or Kristallnacht.
Section D of MI6 was created in March or April of 1938 “to provide lines of communication for covert anti-Nazi propaganda in neutral countries”, to “organise and equip resistance units, support anti-Nazi groups” and enact “sabotage, covert operations, and subversive propaganda.” Guy Burgess was employed by Section D, the first of a chain of propaganda bodies established by the British state which presented Jewish emigrants from Central Europe as friends of and spokesmen for Britain. Vansittart, Claude Dansey of MI6, Churchill and the Focus had been using the same people for (often fabricated) intelligence and propaganda for some years. As Andrew Lownie describes, “Section D used a series of front organisations, such as the news agency United Correspondents, which produced innocuous but anti-Nazi articles for circulation to newspapers around the world, and Burgess worked with writers such as the Swiss journalist Eugen Lennhof and the Austrian writer Berthe Zuckerkandl-Szeps.”84 In Section D, John Costello says, “Burgess appears to have been the main fount of ideas and principal producer of clandestine programming. In compiling the careful assembly of propaganda talks, variety shows, and hit records, he was assisted by Paul Frischauer, an Austrian refugee, and his wife, who were members of an anti-Hitler group in London.”85 The “radio war” consisted initially of illegally broadcasting Chamberlain speeches into Germany on Radio Luxembourg, owned by Isidore Ostrer and run by Eva Siewert, a Jewish lesbian and Soviet sympathiser.86
The covert counterpart of the British Council and an adjunct of MI6 and the BBC was the Joint Broadcasting Committee, which operated in sufficient secrecy as to be unknown to MI5. According to Lownie, “The JBC was very much a BBC operation. It was run by Hilda Matheson… assisted by Isa Morley, the foreign director of the BBC from 1933 to 1937. Burgess was number three and represented Section D’s interests. In March 1939 Harold Nicolson joined the Board.” Angus Hambro, a Tory MP from an established Jewish banking family, was also a member. “JBC staff were authorised to use BBC studios”, and though “scripts were prepared by JBC staff, many were read by prominent exiles such as the writer Thomas Mann, or later by well-known actors such as Conrad Veidt”, both married to women of Jewish ancestry. Burgess also recruited John Bernal, a Jewish communist and a science don at Cambridge, as well as Edvard Benes, the former Czech Prime Minister and a friend and ally of Stalin, to record speeches for the JBC.87
There was, in retrospect, no chance that BBC and its Talks and News output would ever be anything other than left-wing, pro-Jewish and anti-fascist. Since before it began to broadcast opinion pieces and news, the BBC was populated by “fanatics” like Charles Siepmann and Hilda Matheson who posited the myth of the “ultra-conservatism of the culture” and the “old Conservative clique” as needing redress by their own “progressive policies” and “subversive theory of balance”. Such people never willingly yield institutions of which they have taken control, and instead of facing any threat of being turfed out, they were then and are now confronted only by flaccid or traitorous Tories. The BBC, as Tom Mills says, “is part of a cluster of powerful and largely unaccountable institutions which dominate British society – not just ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’ as Owen Jones suggests, but an integral part of it.” Neither Mills nor Jones, though, would acknowledge that the Establishment was already by the early 1930s partly, and the BBC almost entirely, controlled by socialists, communists, globalists, homosexuals and Jews. Reith and Chamberlain headed the broadcaster and the government but did not prevent their ‘crusading’ subordinates having their own way. While communists and fellow travellers staffed the Corporation and amplified themselves and their comrades, not only were fascists or nationalists entirely excluded, but even the views of those who supported Chamberlain and peace were barely heard. The weakest period for the anti-fascists was in 1938, as Chamberlain’s Cabinet Office actively subdued them; Guy Burgess resigned from the corporation in frustration. Yet after Lord Halifax joined the war party, Chamberlain was isolated in the Cabinet and Parliament and cornered into adopting anti-German policies. The ensuing war enabled Churchill to form not only a government in May 1940, but a new anti-fascist regime which has ever since imposed a false version of history via the BBC and the education system. The ‘maverick of the right’ was the best friend the left have ever had.
1 The Birth of Broadcasting, Asa Briggs, 1961, p180-2. Reith sought to apply the “brute force of monopoly” beyond Britain, as British law alone could not prevent commercial stations broadcasting into Britain from transmitters abroad, which they did through the 1930s. The BBC lobbied via the International Broadcasting Union for the greatest possible restrictions on Radio Luxembourg, Radio Normandie and others, and did so with the support of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, but Radio Luxembourg exceeded the BBC’s listening figures at times and only ceased operations when its facilities were effectively nationalised after Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939. Under Reith, the BBC had only broadcast for a few hours on Sundays and the content was mostly religious while Radio Luxembourg played more dance music. See The Golden Age of Wireless, Asa Briggs, 1965, p92, 360.
2 The Golden Age of Wireless, Asa Briggs, 1965, p433. Briggs is paraphrasing the Labour politician and BBC governor Mary Agnes Hamilton.
4 The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, Tom Mills, p21. See also p5, 23
5 Mills, p25
6 Briggs, Golden Age, p419.
7 Briggs, Birth, p246
8 The BBC, Asa Briggs, 1985, p72. My emphasis.
9 Briggs, Birth, p292
10 British Broadcasting - A Study in Monopoly, Ronald Coase, 1950, p188-9
11 Dolphins are discussed with an approving voice and jolly music; the ‘far right’ is mentioned in an alarming tone with sinister music.
12 The Expense of Glory, Ian McIntyre, 1993, p70
13 McIntyre, p99, 217, 250. ‘The Trumpet of the Night’: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio, Ben Harker, History Workshop Journal, Volume 75, Issue 1, Spring 2013, p82
14 McIntyre, p270
15 Briggs, Golden Age, p57
16 Briggs, Golden Age, p13. Briggs is quoting Hilda Matheson.
17 Briggs, Golden Age, p39
18 Briggs, BBC, p53
19 Coase, Study, p163
20 About lifting the ban on controversial broadcasting, see Coase, Study, p62
21 Briggs, Golden Age, p13. One early element of the “social and cultural crusade” was to expose the public to subversive artists, writers and musicians. In music, as Asa Briggs describes, the BBC chose “the hazardous enterprise of introducing to the British listener Schönberg and Webern as well as Bartok and Stravinsky. In music it was always among the avant-garde…” Briggs, Golden Age, p171-2
22 Charles Siepmann interviewed by Harman Grisewood in 1978. Siepmann was later paid to move to the USA by the Rockefeller Foundation and wrote a paper for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
23 Briggs, BBC, p115
24 Briggs, Golden Age, p219. Harold Laski was the brother of the head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1933 and son of the man who “enlisted” Winston Churchill to campaign for open borders in 1904.
25 McIntyre, p190
26 Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant, 2020, introduction
27 Briggs, Golden Age, p124. “The place of adult education in the BBC’s central organization was never secure. In February 1931 it hived off from the Talks Department and became a separate department under the direction of Siepmann; in February 1932 it became a department of a new Talks Branch when Siepmann replaced Hilda Matheson as Director of Talks; in September 1934 it was fully merged in the Talks Branch, losing its departmental identity. Behind these vicissitudes there were not only personal differences but deeper uncertainties about what exactly was the relationship between talks and organized adult education.” Briggs, Golden Age, p222
28 Behind the Wireless, Kate Murphy, 2016, chapter on Hilda Matheson
29 Harker, p87
30 Briggs, Golden Age, p126
32 The Mask of Treachery, John Costello, 1988, p317-8 and p590
33 Harold Nicolson was the son of Arthur Nicolson, a diplomatic protégé of King Edward VII. Stephen King-Hall was a future Labour MP and publisher of the anti-German London Newsletter which shared an audience with publications of the Focus and the Comintern; he was “a frequent broadcaster”. Briggs, BBC, p119
34 Briggs, Golden Age, p127
35 Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd, 1998, chapter 2, 3. Shaw “was to define fascism as ‘State financed private enterprise’ or ‘Socialism for the benefit of exploiters’. From the 1930s onwards Shaw chose to call himself a communist: ‘that is, I advocate national control of land, capital, and industry for the benefit of us all. Fascists advocate it equally for the benefit of the landlords, capitalists and industrialists.’”
36 Briggs, Golden Age, p126-7. Wells speaking on BBC radio. The Listener praised Wells as a man “who can see the future”; presumably the producers who chose him were prescient too.
37 Briggs, Golden Age, p41
38 Briggs, Golden Age, p141
39 Briggs, Golden Age, p43. Matheson continued: “How is the inevitable fear they provoke to be reconciled with the spirit of open-minded enquiry which is inseparable from all education, from any search after truth?’”
40 Coase, Study, p188-9
41 I have not found any counter-examples.
42 McIntyre, p188
43 Briggs, Golden Age, p470-1
44 Briggs, Golden Age, p43
45 Briggs, Golden Age, p141; Harker, p87
46 Briggs, Golden Age, p143-4. Beaverbrook, the most ‘right-wing’ of these, often dined with the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky, employed the anti-fascist cartoonist David Low and joined the wartime government in May 1940 after Churchill became Prime Minister. He also served in the wartime Cabinet in 1918.
47 Murphy, chapter on Hilda Matheson
48 Mills, p40
49 Briggs, Golden Age, p330
50 Briggs, Golden Age, p118, 147
51 Harker, p87-8
52 Harker, p92
53 Audio Drama Modernism, Tim Crook, 2020, p264
54 Interview with Olive Shapley, 1984, p3-4 and Broadcasting a Life, Olive Shapley, 1996, p37. From the latter, referring to her first meeting with Harding where he asked her to stay behind: “‘When the room was empty apart from the two of us, he extended his hand and said, “Welcome, comrade.” I was never a very devout communist, but I could tell that I was among friends.’”
55 Harker, p89
56 Harker, p90. How exactly the middle-class Shapley interviewing the wealthy Roosevelt gave voice to the working class is unclear.
57 Harker, p92
58 Harker p93. Marx only completed the first volume of Capital by himself.
59 Shapley, Broadcasting, p54. The BBC’s programme index lists Engels as a contributor to the programme.
60 Though they had small resources and were about to engage in war on several fronts, the Bolsheviks commenced espionage against Britain immediately after the coup. Chapter 5, ‘Exporting the Revolution’, of John Costello’s book The Mask of Treachery gives a summary. See also chapters 1-5 of Giles Udy, Labour and the Gulag.
61 Costello, p182
62 Mills, p42. “The practice was maintained for fifty years, abandoned only in 1985 after being exposed by a team of investigative journalists. Much of what is known about political vetting, stems from the revelations at that time and the declassified BBC files that have become available since.”
63 MI5 now names Hilda Matheson as a “lesbian role model”.
64 Stalin’s Englishman, Andrew Lownie, 2015, chapter 5
65 Costello, p299-300. Costello suggests that Burgess worked for the Rothschilds’ own intelligence network as well as MI6 and the NKVD:
“Since private intelligence was an essential element of the Rothschild business operation, what better cover could they give their latest recruit in 1935 than to characterize Burgess as an investment counselor and dispatch him as their private spy to monitor the Anglo-German Fellowship? Information about threats to the House of Rothschild resulting from secret deals between British sympathizers and the Third Reich would more than justify the hundred guineas a month paid to Guy Burgess.
Victor Rothschild had implicit faith in his Cambridge friend because he, like Blunt, knew of Burgess’s true loyalties. But Burgess’s volatile enthusiasms would help persuade his right-wing friends that he had recanted his earlier Marxism. His homosexual appetite would prove an exploitable talent when it came to sharing the bed of a pro-German Tory well placed to pull strings and advance an ambitious young man’s career. Nor should it be forgotten that Rudolph Katz, with his own extensive network of homosexual and Comintern contacts, also contributed to Rothschild’s private intelligence network that, at the time, shared with Stalin a common enemy: Hitler.” Costello, p303-5
66 Lownie, chapter 17; Costello, p369-71
67 Costello, p143
68 Costello, p307-8
69 Costello, p65, 150-1. See also Churchill’s War, volume one, David Irving, 2003, p26-7
70 Costello, p427-30
71 Winston Churchill - the Greatest Briton, Parliament Archives. Churchill - “After he had given his talk in the 1934 Causes of War series there were complaints that he had delivered a ‘gratuitous attack on Germany’, and one writer said that it was ‘in need of far more censorship than Professor Haldane’s’, a talk on the extreme left.’” Briggs, Golden Age, p146
72 ‘An Improper Use of Broadcasting...’, Nicholas Pronay and Philip Taylor, Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 19, Number 3, July 1984, p368
73 Edward Marshall in New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History, edited by Geoffrey Alderman, 2010, p163-8
74 The Defence of the Realm, Christopher Andrew, 2009, p171
76 The Czech Conspiracy, George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, 2003. Rothschild used a speech at Mansion House to invoke “the slow murder of 600,000 people” (German Jewry). It is not clear that even one thousand had yet been murdered in the nearly six years of Hitler’s regime.
77 Truth Betrayed, WJ West, 1989, p40. Burgess’ friend Kim Philby, who worked for MI6 and the NKVD simultaneously, was The Times’ correspondent during the civil war and MI6’s head of undercover operations in Spain and Portugal during the world war. Burgess and Philby both worked for MI6’s propaganda-focused Section D and, like Eric Maschwitz, the sabotage-focused Special Operations Executive in 1939 and 1940. In 1934 Philby had married Litzi Friedmann, a communist from Vienna and an associate of the Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart. By 1941, when Burgess rejoined BBC Talks, the corporation was under the control of Churchill’s government and hired Burgess precisely because he was pro-Soviet.
78 West, p138-40
79 West, p54-7. Burgess recorded his recollection of visiting Churchill’s mansion Chartwell.
80 West, p106
81 According to Chris Bryant, Vansittart was “married but predominantly homosexual”, though Bryant does not give a source. Bryant, chapter 11
82 In November 1938, according to the ambassador to Italy, Eric Drummond, the 7th Earl of Perth, BBC presenters used tone of voice to mock Chamberlain and praise Anthony Eden. West also says that “There had been a number of concerted attacks on Chamberlain by the BBC, usually in the form of selective reporting of speeches and debates.” See West, p166, including note 101.
83 Briggs, BBC, p141; Briggs, Golden Age, p397 to 408
84 Lownie, chapter 13
85 Costello, p331
86 Alderman, New Directions, p165. See also West, p111. Reith had been the leading advocate of the International Broadcasting Union, in the violation of which the BBC now collaborated.
87 Lownie, chapter 13. The JBC had a “strong focus” on “securing British propaganda broadcasts on the American networks.” American networks also had their own plans. “The covert side, where Burgess largely worked, produced programmes for distribution in enemy countries, working with Electra House. Burgess was responsible for a variety of programmes that were recorded on large shellac discs and then smuggled in the diplomatic bag or by agents into Sweden, Liechtenstein and Germany, and broadcast as if they were part of regular transmissions from the German stations themselves.” The ‘Chaos of the Ether’ had gone from a myth to a tactic. About the JBC, see also Murphy, Behind the Wireless, chapter on Hilda Matheson, and West p118, 140.
https://eternalhorus.substack.com/p/the-engine-of-compulsory-conformity
