Obama May Censor ’Net In Effort to Shut Down ‘Conspiracy Theorists’
By Victor Thorn
Big Brother is running scared, and it’s the double-edged sword of technology that pursues him. Most certainly science can be used to control, but just as powerfully it can be utilized to expose. That’s why the moneyed elite have historically been so horrified of allowing information to be freely released to the masses, and why they so desperately try to conceal it.
The great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once propounded, “Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy—censorship. When any government or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression.”
In January 2008 Barack Obama’s information and technology czar, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, wrote that the following may result under “imaginable conditions”: (a) government might ban conspiracy theorizing, and (b) government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.
Potentially, Obama’s Big Brother representative fully believes that ideas that run contrary to the government’s official “holy dogma” may be eliminated or levied with financial penalties. Considering that government is, in reality, our employee, the absurdity of this situation is obvious. Imagine a housekeeper demanding that her employer be only permitted to think certain thoughts. She would immediately be fired. Yet a crypto-Orwellian Zionist such as Sunstein seeks to impose such conditions on potentially everyone who uses the Internet.
Government isn’t the only culprit. Earlier this month, Google threatened to shut down operations in China due to China’s censorship policies. Yet, in a Jan. 13 letter to Chinese Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, author Michael Hoffman related how Google has engaged in the overt censorship of material related to Holocaust revisionism. Hoffman wrote that these data have been “censored by Google strictly on the basis that they contradicted the official American version of what transpired during World War II.”
In a Jan. 16 interview, Hoffman told this writer: “How ironic that Google, with its self-righteous motto of ‘Do no evil,’ poses as a champion against Chinese censorship. But at the same time it acts as a censor to protect the American and Israeli version of history.” Hoffman also pointed out how Deborah Lipstadt, who coincidentally coined the term “holocaust denier,” has had a great deal of influence on Google’s top brass.
Similarly, YouTube—which is owned by Google— announced on Dec. 11, 2008, that they had entered into an ominous partnership.
“YouTube has reached out to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its expertise in dealing with hate on the Internet. The league is now a contributor to YouTube’s newly launched Abuse & Safety Center.”
What makes this situation so heavy-handed is that two-thirds of all online videos are streamed via YouTube, while Google is undoubtedly the world’s largest search engine. In this capacity, Google holds a stranglehold on what computer users see and don’t see. Plus, more often than not, the suppressed data relate to such topics as Israel’s role in 9-11, the facts and myths of the Holocaust, Israeli war crimes and other “taboo” subjects.
Equally complicit in this arrangement are Jewish-controlled media sources that paint Google as a righteous proponent of free speech. A fitting illustration can be found in a Jan. 14 article for New-York-based Bloomberg, wherein Edwin Chen and Indira Lakshmanan quote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Google’s decision to no longer tolerate censorship of its search engine should serve as an example to businesses and governments,” Mrs. Pelosi reportedly said.
These reporters also added, “Google briefed the Obama administration before it took action [against Chinese leaders].”
With Sunstein, the ADL and the Google triad of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jonathan Rosenberg at the helm, Big Brother assuredly frowns with disapproval at what’s considered “hate speech,” and cooperates in flushing it down the Memory Hole.
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
The 45 Questions Most Frequently Asked About the Jews With the Answers by Pelley
The 45 Questions Most Frequently Asked About the Jews
With the Answers by Pelley
Copyright 1939 by William Dudley Pelley
CONTENTS
1. Why did God create such a difference between Jew and Gentile, so that the Jew is at once recognized, no matter what race he lives among?
2. How did the Jews come to have such strange traditions setting them apart, racially and religiously, from the Gentiles?
3. Should we say that Jews are members of a race, or followers of a religion?
4. If the Jew is the follower of a religion, why does it cause him so much inconvenience or harassment, as against the followers of other religions?
5. What is the Talmud?
6. Is the Talmud a single book?
7. Are the two Talmuds alike?
8. How did the Babylonian Talmud come to be written, if the Jerusalem Talmud was already in existence?
9. Are the two Talmuds the holy books of the Jews?
10. What does the term Rabbi mean?
11. Is a Rabbi and a Jewish priest one and the same?
12. Why did the Destruction of the Temple destroy the Israelite priestly caste?
13. What was the Ark of the Covenant?
14. Is there any difference between the Jehovah of the Jews, and the Divine Father spoken of by Jesus and as worshipped by the Christians?
15. What is the difference between a Jewish Temple and a Synagogue … and isn't the synagogue the Jewish Church?
16. Are the modern Jews and the ancient Israelites one and the same people?
17. Were there no Jews in the world prior to the coming of Jacob's sons to Egypt?
18. Was there really an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob?
19. Did not Christ's words confirm that there was an Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
20. Why does the Old Testament refer to the early Hebrews as Israelites?
21. Have we any other accounts than those of the Old Testament on the advent and adventures of the Hebrews in Egypt?
22. Were the Children of Israel persecuted by the Egyptians?
23. Was Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea while the favored Hebrews passed over to Midian unscathed?
24. Is the Exodus story a myth?
25. Did Moses write the first five books of the Old Testament?
26. Why do we call the Jews "Semites"?
27. Have the Jews the right to designate Palestine as their Homeland?
28. Why were the Jews carried captive to Babylon?
29. Why do today's Jews make such an ungodly pother about returning to Palestine as a race?
30. How many Jews are there in the whole world today?
31. What is the Jewish Sanhedrin?
32. Is the Sanhedrin still in active existence?
33. Do Jews actually believe that the day is coming when they are going to be supreme masters over all the other races and peoples of earth?
34. Are the Jews a united people for the achievement of a world messiahship?
35. How do Sephardic Jews differ from Ashkenazic Jews?
36. To which branch of Jews did Jesus Christ belong?
37. Why did the Jews deny Christ?
38. Why does the Bible, as the "Inspired Word of God," persistently represent Christ as being a Jew?
39. What was Ebionitism?
40. Isn't the Bible the Inspired Word of God?
41. What is the Vulgate?
42. How can we condemn or persecute people who cannot help having been born into the Jewish race?
43. What is to be the future of the Jews when this present paroxysm of anti-Semitism has run its course?
44. Why jump on all the Jews, just because some of them misbehave? Aren't there any good Jews?
45. Is it true that all Jews are Communists?
ASSUME that you are a normal American citizen, born and raised in this one-time Land of the Free, educated in its public schools, and a member of some Christian denomination — Catholic or Protestant. You are as good as you can be, and probably no worse than circumstances allow. You are undoubtedly married and possibly have children. You pay your bills as best you can, and subscribe to a policy of "Live and Let Live!" If you have sympathies, they usually go to the underdog in a contest, and if you have a pet peeve, it's being hoaxed or bamboozled. In other words, you're a 99 percent American, trying as best you can to get along and stay out of jail; you like to see fights carried on in a sporting manner and don't especially enjoy the realization that someone thinks of you, or treats you, as a "sap." . . . Very good!
You look about you in this Land of the Free — that isn't as free as it was in your boyhood — and observe that your country, your State, and perhaps your city or neighborhood, also contain a quota of human beings who are commonly labeled Jews. They are people whom you know you must watch in any business deal, for their trickery is so proverbial that the word "Jew" is often used as verb as well as noun. When your neighbor comes to you and tells you that his partner "Jewed" him out of last year's profits, you know at once what he means. He means that he was cheated. No one has maliciously originated this use of the word Jew. It has simply come about through long experience of "your kind" of folks in dealing with Israelites. But you know other things about Jews.
You know that as a people they have definite characteristics that forever mark them out as being Jews. Some have enormous hooked noses. Others have a queer rubbery look about the eyes. Some you can pick out because of the vulgarity of their dress or the lewd way in which they display and wear expensive jewelry. Commonly you recognize them by the manner in which they talk. That they have no reserve, no respect for other people's privacies, and little stability of character — being arrogant and insolent one moment and fawning and wailing the next — is something you've probably observed subconsciously. Furthermore, they are great people to hive up, or gang together. In our great cities, they prefer to live close to one another to such an extent that we call their localities of abode, "Ghettos."
But there is this strange item about these Jews: from the time that you were first able to walk and talk, or know anything about religion or history, you have had it dinned into your consciousness that this strange folk — as a race — were special favorites of the Almighty.
The popular term designating them has been "God's Chosen People."
God, it seems, back over the ages, for no particularly good reason that you've been able to figure out in logic, took an eccentric divine fancy to this especial breed of humans. You don't know exactly why God should have done so. You don't see many characteristics in them today that should have prompted God to make such a choice. All the same, tradition has informed you that God once promised the whole earth and all the peoples in it, to the seed of Abraham, and to cap the whole business, you were further informed that the universal Savior of all mankind — the Christ, born in the Bethlehem Manger and crucified on Calvary for the sins of the world — was likewise a Jew.
It stacks up to you, if you have ever given thought to it at all, that if it hadn't been for the Jews, the world would have had no Christ. You don't know a whole lot about the authenticity of the business; again, I say, that's what you've keen told.
Lately you've been told a lot of other things, and chiefly they concern one race of people abroad who were our recent enemies in the World War. The Germans! You've been told that all of a sudden the Germans have arisen under their Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and "persecuted" the Jews — persecuted them frightfully. In fact, this persecution amounts to kicking them out of Germany. After living in that country for generations, they've had to pull up stakes, give up their homes and friends, and flee from the wrath of the Terrible Nazis. Of course it has been represented to you, that the Jews were by no means guilty of doing anything to Hitler, his followers, or the German people as a whole, meriting such inhuman treatment. The Germans, almost overnight, decided that they simply didn't like the Jews, and didn't want them around. So they rose up and clubbed and maimed and hounded the poor Israelites, who had to flee to foreign countries before such pagan violence.
And while such unfair and unsporting treatment has been going on in Germany, a lot of other Old-World nations have taken their cue from Hitler and decided it would be nice to seize the opportunity to resort to some inhuman violence on their own Jews as well. People who don't want to see Communism come in their country, want a scapegoat for it and blame it on the Jews. So other nations follow Germany's lead and join in giving the Jew a good kick in the pants.
Of course the Jew wants some place to flee to, therefore he asks permission to come over here into the United States. A halfcrazy Jewish boy shoots a Nazi official in Paris, and the German people riot and treat the Jews roughly, ending up by fining the whole race — or such part of it as lives in Germany — something like $400,000,000 for the mischief.
You feel that such treatment is a bit unfair, and yet when the Jew asks permission to come over here to the United States, you wonder how on earth the country is going to take on any more liabilities. We have something like 12 million unemployed already, and only about so much work to go around. If ungodly numbers of refugee Jews come over here, somebody must support them. If they apply for work and support themselves, it means that an equal number of native American Gentiles must relinquish their present jobs and either go on Relief or join the bread line.
Nevertheless, it looks as though the attitude of the Roosevelt Administration is to let them come in. It seems the humane thing to do.
But gradually it has likewise been occurring to you, that the attitude of even the Federal Administration is changing. Instead of Christian Gentile people being put in key government jobs, the big places in Washington are being filled by Jews. You hear that Morgenthau is a Jew, Madam Perkins is a Jewess, Judge Brandeis is a Jew, Felix Frankfurter — who has just gone upon the Supreme Court Bench — is another Jew. In fact something like 275 of the biggest and most vital positions in the Washington government, are filled by Jews. You hear that Jews control or own 65 percent of the nation's industries. You know that the movies are owned and run by Jews. As for the Relief agencies, since the Administration has had to meet the problem of aid to the unemployed they are everywhere staffed by Jews and most of them Communist Jews at that.
All of a sudden, all over the earth, it seems, everybody is becoming Jew-conscious. Jews are everywhere. They are into everything. If you hear of a great vice ring being broken up in New York, Chicago or San Francisco — always it is Jews that are reported as having been arrested. Is a great arson ring run to earth? Again the perpetrators are Jews. Is the white slave trade attacked? Again Jews are nabbed for having engaged in it. Does Dewey make a great pother about busting up the rackets in New York? Get behind the Gentile names being used by the racketeers, and always the true names of the culprits are Jewish.
Jews are into crime, it seems, even as they are into business. You turn on the radio of a Sunday afternoon and dial into Father Coughlin. He is thundering from his Royal Oak pulpit against the International Bankers. But they all have Jewish names. What on earth is making the whole world seem to go crazy simultaneously against the Jews?
Some Sunday evening you read a bitter tirade in the papers against the Jews, or some spirited defense of the Jews, and you suddenly bethink to ask yourself —
Just how much do you know about the Jews, or the Jewish Question, anyway?
Whom can you go to, to ask truthful particulars about the Jews, and get the real low-down on why they may be persecuted from the poles to the equator?
All at once it seems as if there were about a hundred questions you'd like to ask about the Jews — why they act as they do, why they always stir up such animosity against themselves in whatever land they settle, why they exhibit such buttinsky manners that rile other races and make them retaliate, what the real Jewish situation is throughout the earth. and what's to be the end of it.
Well, my friend, average and normal American that you are, this little booklet is put into your hands, anticipating your questions and answering them candidly, honestly, without undue bias, and in the intense patriotic desire to preserve the welfare of this, our mutual country, against inequitable encroachments by minorities especially minorities with a different moral code.
You may feel the desire to combat some of the answers, and others you will probably want more enlightenment upon. But in the main, if you do further checking, you'll discover to your amazement that the answers are quite accurate. They have been compiled, not as any sort of Nazi propaganda, but by the officials of an American patriotic movement, after years of being interrogated on the public platform and in private interviews precisely in the manner set forth in this handbook.
The true purpose of this handbook, therefore, is to open your eyes to what's going on around you, and what an unhallowed menace to the peace, prosperity, and longevity of your country, this influx of overseas Israelites may be.
If you want more information on any of these answers, you can get it — pressed down and overflowing, in such detail as to stupefy you. There is now a vast and equitably authenticated literature on this most vital of all issues to the non-Jewish peoples of the earth. And it is yours for the acquiring.
However, to the first question. What is it that people most want to know about the Jews —
1. Why did God create such a difference between Jew and Gentile, so that the Jew is at once recognized, no matter what race he lives among?
Answer — God did not create any essential difference between Jew and Gentile. The difference between Jew and Gentile is a man-made thing entirely. It has arisen from the fact that over the generations the priests, scribes, and rabbis of the Jews have compiled a great mass of racial and religious instruction which the Jewish baby imbibes with its mother's milk. This racial and religious instruction impresses upon each new Jewish child, from the moment it first begins to understand the Hebrew tongue that it has been born into a race that is "different" from the other races of mankind, that it has been born into a "better" race, and that by comparison with the people of the Jewish race, the people of all the other races are likened to mere cattle and animals. However — unfortunately — while the people of the Jewish race are "better," at the same time they are fewer in number. So, being the smarter and yet in the minority, the members of the Jewish race suffer "persecution" — which comes from naught else than the jealousy of the more populous races, who are resentful that the "better" and "smarter" Jews best them at every turn. Such is the psychology in which the Jewish child is reared, and after a time he builds a defense mechanism against the results of it. He looks at the members of all other races as his "enemies" and is in a state of subconscious antagonism with them. God has had nothing to do with it. It is a case of race psychology that has gained such a terrific momentum up through the ages that no one Jew can arrest or change it.
2. How did the Jews come to have such strange traditions setting them apart, racially and religiously, from the Gentiles?
Answer — When Moses led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, he is traditionally credited with having introduced a strange custom for the perpetuation of his One-God religious ideas and the priesthood that was intended to keep them alive in the hearts of the Israelites. He laid it down as a law that the first-born son of every Hebrew family should be dedicated to the priestly calling, also that one-tenth of the resources of every family should be donated for the upkeep of such priesthood. Now for one boy out of every family to be qualified as a priest, or "cohen" — from which so many modern Jews get the surname Cohen — meant that over a long period of time the numbers of priests must become prodigious. There were so many of them, in fact, that they came to be recognized as a caste, called Levites. Incidentally from Levites we get the many variations or names such as Levi, or Levy, that designate today's Jews. These formidable numbers of priests came eventually to make the Hebrews the worst priest-ridden people on the face of the earth. They had to be supported, and anything that in any way threatened their priestly jobs, met with swift and fierce opposition. The only way that they could preserve these jobs, was by enforcing a rigid solidarity and racial consciousness among the masses, and binding them tight to the priestly counsel. The only way such solidarity and racial consciousness could be created and maintained in turn, was to so interpret religion — or what passed for religion — that the populace could not perform the simplest acts of daily life without having the priestly interpretation of it, and making the people feel that such priests were indispensable. This was accomplished by training the people to think that they were "different," and thus creating the barrier between them and members of other races in consequence. As the priests were likewise the only learned men, and in charge of the Israelite traditions, they could interject into those traditions what they pleased — if it only impressed upon their people a sense of the priestly importance, that they — the Israelites — were the truly great people and those beloved of the Creator, and that the priests were unchallenged leaders over them. Today we would term such monopoly a racket, because basically it was built on priestly gain and power. In other words, whatever enhanced the racial and spiritual solidarity of this people, enhanced the influence and indispensability of the priestly caste. So in teaching the Israelites to think that they were "different" and "better" the priests were feathering their own nests and making their jobs sure-fire and profitable. So Israelite — and later Jewish — traditions became what they are today. It is ingrained into the Jew to think himself "different," and "better," and the priest-rabbi now has such a hold over him that he cannot be a Jew without acknowledging the priest-rabbi influence in the most trivial of his daily acts.
3. Should we say that Jews are members of a race or followers of a religion?
Answer — The Jews, according to blood-tests made in English laboratories, belong to one of the divisions of the oriental or yellow-branch of the human family. Biologically, or anthropologically, they are not a race unto themselves — as the Finns, the Britons, the Latins, or the Negroes. Strange to relate, and contrary to popular notion, the Jew has no physical characteristics but his basic Mongoloid stock to mark him out as to which division of the species he belongs. The great hooked nose or "schnozzle" of the Ashkenazic Jew, is a feature that he acquired by cross-breeding over untold generations with the Assyrians. So the Jews of today are orientals who have been kept politically intact throughout the earth by a clan consciousness derived from the peculiarities of their common Mosaic faith. Jews have crossbred with other races to such an extent that there is almost no such thing today as a pure-blooded Jew. Anthropologically the Jew is a racial hybrid, wherever we find him. That is why he no longer welds together politically or sets up a strictly Jewish nation. It is the more nearly correct thing to say that the Jew is the follower of a religion — and a particularly formalized and debased religion at that — and any claim to membership in a "race" is spurious.
4. If the Jew is the follower of a religion, why does it cause him so much inconvenience or harassment as against the followers of other religions?
Answer — Strictly speaking, it does not. There are hundreds of religions being practiced in the world today, and the devotees of each are quite as fanatical and defensive of their tenets of faith as the Jew — speaking now of the orthodox Jew. What seems to be inconvenience and harassment resulting to the Jew from his religion, visited upon him of course by other races and devotees of other faiths, is the debased character of his concepts in regard to God and humanity that are not religious so much as theological. Here again a plethora of priests is responsible. Having, as we might put it, nothing else to occupy their time, and being insistent on making themselves indispensable to this particular people, these priests have "laid down the law" to a minute detail that in the estimate of other religionists is little short of ridiculous. For instance, it is a religious "sin" for a Jewish family to have butter on the table if they also have lard. So many white hairs must be counted on a cow's pelt in order to truthfully call the beast a "white" cow — such absurdities became priestly designations. There is no act of the strictly orthodox Jew's life, from the instant he awakens in the morning till he closes his eyes at night, that his priests have not prescribed for him as to what is right and what is wrong, what is "sin" and what is "keeping the law." As a result, his religion has lost all its spontaneous spirituality. And a theology without inherent spirituality soon begins to present a blunted or distorted moral code. This in time becomes no code at all. Finally when the psychopathy of this plethora of priests begins to tell the Israelites that it is altogether "moral" for him to lie and cheat and steal — if it be done to a human being who is not an Israelite — the devotees of such an unmoral or non-spiritual cult are bound to land in plenty of social trouble with their neighbors. And such atrocious tenets are precisely what the Talmuds, or Jewish rabbinical writings, DO teach — although it is not our intent to swell this little book with the authenticating Talmudic quotations. The latter can be procured in a special booklet giving these atrocious quotations and naught else.
5. What is the Talmud?
Answer — The Talmud is the name given to the fundamental code of the Jewish civil and canonical law as compiled by various rabbis, or schools of theological writers, after and since the destruction of the first Temple at Jerusalem. It comprises the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna is the canonical text, the Gemara is the commentary or complement to the text.
6. Is the Talmud a single book?
Answer — No, there are two Talmuds. There is the one called the "Talmud of the Occidentals" — sometimes referred to as the Jerusalem or Palestine Talmud, which was closed at Tiberius. Then there is the Babylonian Talmud. But the Babylonian Talmud has nothing to do with the Captivity of the Jews in Babylon. It gets its name from the fact that it was compiled by Rabbi Ashe, president of the Academy of Sora in Babylon, about 400 years after Christ. The Jerusalem Talmud is the older book, originating in Tiberius, in the school of Johanan, who died A.D. 179.
7. Are the two Talmuds alike?
Answer — No! The Babylonian Talmud, compiled some time in the fifth century after Christ, is nearly four times as voluminous as the Jerusalem Talmud. The latter extends over 30 treatises of the Mishna only. The Babylonian Talmud covers 36 treatises but the Gemara or commentaries fill 2,947 folio leaves — nearly 3,000 pages.
8. How did the Babylonian Talmud come to be written, if the Jerusalem Talmud was already in existence?
Answer — Both the Mishna and Palestine Gemaras had, despite the comparatively brief time that had elapsed since their compilation in A.D. 179, suffered greatly, partly by corruption, that had crept into their texts through faulty traditions, partly through the new decisions arrived at independently in the different younger schools of rabbis — of which there flourished many in different parts of the Dispersion after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus the Roman, in 70 A.D. At times these decisions were contradictory. To put an end to disputes and the general theological confusion resulting from them, which threatened a complete religious chaos, Rabbi Ashe, aided by his disciple and friend Rab Abina, commenced the cyclopean task of collecting anew the enormous mass of material which by that time had accumulated. It took him, with the assistance of ten secretaries, no less than 30 years, and many years were spent by him in the revision of the work.
9. Are the two Talmuds the holy books of the Jews?
Answer — No! Strictly speaking, the Biblical Old Testament is the holy book of the Jews, the same as it is one-half of the Holy Book of the Christians, the New Testament being the other half for the Christians. To get the more correct idea of the relationship of the Talmuds to the Old Testament, we might put it that the Talmuds bear the same relation to the Old Testament that the Constitution of the United States does to the Christian religion as practiced or professed by American Christians. The Old Testament gives the background and supposedly sacred history and social code of all Israelites; the Talmuds are the compilations of the commentaries of the rabbis and learned scribes of this people, interpreting this background, history, and code for the daily conduct of Judaists and the application of their Faith to the worldly circumstance.
10. What does the term Rabbi mean?
Answer — In Jewish history and literature, Rabbi is the noun "Rab" with a pronominal suffix, and in Biblical Hebrew it means "great man, distinguished for age, rank, office, or skill." Since Biblical times, and in popular parlance, it has been used as a title indicating sundry degrees by its several terminations, but generally speaking it means Master Teacher, or Doctor of the Law.
11. Is a Rabbi and a Jewish priest one and the same?
Answer — Absolutely not! Up to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, in 70 A.D., and the scattering of the Jews throughout the earth, the priests were the officials, dignitaries, and sacred attaches of the Temple and its ceremonials. After the Temple was destroyed, the Hebraic law was kept alive in the hearts of orthodox Jews by district teachers, who merely expounded the canonical law. In other words, the difference between a Jewish priest and a rabbi might be likened to the difference between an ordained clergyman or priest of the Christian religion and a Professor of Theology in a theological seminary.
12. Why did the Destruction of the Temple destroy the Israelite priestly caste?
Answer — Because Israelite priests, strictly speaking, were personal attendants on a literal Jehovah, who, when in contact with the earthly world and His Chosen People, was assumed to be somehow attached mystically to the Ark of the Covenant. This Ark of the Covenant was carried by four men before the Israelitish hosts into battle on long pole-handles, and because Jehovah was popularly represented as being connected therewith, He literally "went before His people into battle." Sometimes the Lord God was thus captured by His puny mortal enemies — or enemies of the Israelites, and that wasn't so good. It always gave the Israelites a horrible funk to have their Lord God captured by their enemies. When the Israelites had finally conquered Canaan and had no more battles to fight, they required some place to put the Lord God. So they erected the Temple — which all good Christian Masons make such a pother about today — and stored the Ark of the Covenant, with the Lord God, in the Holy of Holies. Only the very Top-Boss priests went in and held powwow with the Lord God in the Holy of Holies. So, when the Temple was destroyed — or rather the Second Temple erected by the Jews on the return from the Babylonian Captivity — there was no place for the Ark of the Covenant or the Lord God, therefore no Holy of Holies, therefore no possibility of personal attendants, therefore no priests excepting as they were designated as such by courtesy title. The Lord God escaped His coffer in the Holy of Holies and presumably went back to heaven. The Ark, after many vicissitudes — and being hidden hither and yon among the cities of Asia Minor — is now credited with reposing in a sealed room in the basement of the British Museum. For political-racial reasons it is not permitted to be exhibited or examined.
13. What was the Ark of the Covenant?
Answer — The word Ark literally means: a chest or coffer for the safekeeping of any valuable thing; a depository. The Ark of the Covenant, in the synagogue or Temple of the Jews, was the chest or vessel in which the Tables of the Law were preserved. This was a small chest or coffer, three feet nine inches in length, two feet three inches in breadth, and the same in height, in which were contained the various sacred articles. It was made of shittum wood, overlaid inside and out with gold, and was covered by the Mercy Seat, called also the Propitiatory — that is, the lid or cover of propitiation. Thus, in the language of Hebrew Scripture, those sins which are forgiven are said to be covered. The orthodox Jew will scoff at the non-Jewish implication that the Lord God Himself dwelt in or near such a box, but that was the general acceptance by the populace.
14. Is there any difference between the Jehovah of the Jews and the Divine Father of Jesus as worshiped by the Christians?
Answer — There is a difference so vast as to render them practically two different personages. The word Jehovah is the modern English rendering of the Hebrew term for the Midian tribal deity, Yahvah. Moses, after he had murdered two Egyptians for their treatment of an Israelite, fled to Midian, a district across the Red Sea, south of the Land of Goshen. There he married a Midian wife and became a sheepherder. Jehovah or Yahvah was the neighborhood god of the Midianites whom Moses seized upon, and utilized, in his later politico-racial exploits back among the Egyptians. Moses claimed that this little tribal god, with all his provincial hates and lusts, was the One Lord God of all the universe. This last could only be interviewed by Moses in person, or by Aaron or his Levites when Moses wasn't around. Christ came, and got Himself hated unto crucifixion, by standing this narrow and fallacious notion of the deity on its head. Christ said that the Lord God was Universal Spirit, and that man needed no paid priest or elaborate temple ceremonials to commune with Him. This threatened the whole basic foundation of Judaism, since it counseled the masses that priests were dispensable.
Furthermore, Christ taught that the Lord God was the Father of all mankind, Jew and Gentile alike. This was insufferable to the Israelites, who had a personal monopoly on the Creator, He being their original tribal deity and they being His particular devotees. In the Ebionitic attempts to reconcile the two identities, however, early church fathers mixed the two deities hopelessly, and filled the Bible full of contradictions and paradoxes. See answer to Question 38: Who were the Ebionites?
15. What is the difference between a Jewish Temple and a Synagogue — and isn't the synagogue the Jewish Church?
Answer — The Lord God, having mystical connections with the Ark of the Covenant, could only be at the great Temple at Jerusalem, or wherever the Ark of the Covenant was, and the High Priest was handy to attend Him. There was but one Jewish Temple and that was at Jerusalem. But scattered throughout ancient Palestine, particularly after the Dispersion, were meeting-houses where the cantors did the sacred chantings on the Sabbath, and the rabbis expounded the canonical law. These were labeled Synagogues — or Community Houses. A synagogue, strictly speaking, was not a church as we Christians think today of our dedicated edifices; it was a public gathering place. Hence going into the Synagogue to teach, no more made Christ a Jew than it would make you or me a Catholic — presuming that you're a Protestant as I am — to deliver a lecture on Pure Foods in a parochial hall in Racine, Wisconsin.
16. Are the modern Jews and the ancient Israelites one and the same people?
Answer — For all practical working purposes, yes! But in the same sense that we might answer the parallel question: Are the modern Americans and the ancient Pilgrim Fathers — who landed on Plymouth Rock and started the settlement of New England — one and the same people? According to the Old Testament, which is purely a transcript of tradition and legend and not much besides, the Israelites in Egypt were divided into Twelve Tribes.
Each tribe comprised the descendants of a son of Jacob, or acknowledged tribal allegiance to one of his sons, who thereby became the tribal patriarch. Among these Twelve Tribes was one known as the Tribe of Judah. After the conquering of Canaan — exactly as this same people tried to "conquer" Germany in the past generation but was stopped by Hitler, or is now "conquering" the United States under Roosevelt — the Tribe of Judah was allotted the area of land that included the City of David, or what we know today as Jerusalem. This possession of the capital city within their particular territory, gave the Tribe of Judah a particular prominence over the other tribes. Because the Temple and the priestly caste likewise exercised functions within their allotted territory, the Tribe of Judah became the more race-and-theology conscious. And the members of this Tribe "carried on" the more fanatically and zealously in preserving the legends, traditions, and literature of all the tribes, after the city's and temple's destruction. It is the progeny of this one tribe of Israelites, the Tribe of Judah, that we identify as today's Jews. The members of the other tribes of Israelites have largely disappeared from the world's face.
17: Were there no Jews in the world before the coming of Jacob's sons to Egypt?
Answer — There have always been the same elements among all populations of the earth that we identify today as Judaists. The very ancient Egyptian and Sumerian chronicles refer to them as the People of Set, or "Spirit of Disorder in Governments." No matter what conditions they found politically or socially in the lands wherein they were received, they always wanted them changed, to conform to their own eccentric notions. The Egyptians seem to have referred to them as the "Set-un" Set being the god of Darkness and Destruction, and ''un'' being the suffix meaning "people." We derive our modern word Satan from this source. When Joseph escaped from his brethren, and went down into Egypt to work himself into the good graces of Pharaoh, and his brothers later followed him and "multiplied," this racial element was designated strictly among Pharaoh's subjects as the Tribe of the Habiru. From the term "Habiru" the term "Hebrew" comes down to us. But Jews as we know them today were not so called till after the "conquering" or "overrunning" of Canaan and its capital city of Jerusalem, and the allotting of the land whereon it stood to the Tribe of Judah. The word Jew is a sort of slang contraction of Judaist or member of the specific Tribe of Judah, only we spell it J-e-w instead of the terser J-u.
18. Was there really an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob?
Answer — We do not know! We have only tradition and legend to account for them. The Old Testament says such persons existed, but the contents of the Old Testament were passed down by word of mouth through a hundred generations before they became written on scrolls of sheepskin as a permanent literary record. At the time of the destruction of the first Temple and the Captivity, most of the records were destroyed. When the Jews came back from the Captivity and had completed the Second Temple, rebuilding it in tawdry form upon the ruins of the first Temple, Ezra the High Priest came running wildly to his compatriots one morning and proclaimed that he had "found" the ancient records miraculously intact down behind the altar in the Holy of Holies. Unbiased common sense tends to the conclusion that there was nothing mysterious or miraculous about it. Ezra rewrote the legends and traditions of his people from memory, naturally altering them to make the members of the Tribe of Judah the "big shots" of such chronicles. It is still this narrative reported by Ezra as thus "restored," that our Old Testament version of the Egyptian episode comes from.
19. Did not Christ's words confirm that there was an Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
Answer — None of us know accurately what Christ's real words were. He never left a scrap of paper or parchment penned by Himself personally. All accounts of His words were purported as taken down by His disciples or followers, but even their original manuscripts were lost, and all that we have to go by, are copies of copies. How these were altered, edited, augmented, deleted, and transformed, is described in the answer to Question 40 further on: What is the Vulgate?
20. Why does the Old Testament refer to the early Hebrews as Israelites?
Answer — Because, before the coming of the legendary Moses, they were followers of the same worship as their neighbors, the Egyptians. That is, they were worshipers of Isis, goddess of life and fecundity, co-deity with the Sun. The word Israel should be broken down into three syllables: Is-Ra-El. "Is" stands for Isis; "Ra" means the name of the god of the sun, represented like Horus — with the head of a hawk and bearing the disk of the sun atop it. "El" means "high Lord" or that which is over all, as expressed by the modern word Elevated. "Ites" means those who follow or belong to. So Israelites, translating literally, were "those who followed or belonged to the High Deities Ra and Isis." Moses is popularly supposed to have changed all that, when he introduced his Midian tribal deity Yahvah to the people of the Habiru. Today the word Israelites clings to the Jews merely as a symbol for their identification as one-time worshipers of the sun.
21. Have we any other accounts than those of the Old Testament on the advent and adventures of the Hebrews in Egypt?
Answer — Yes! Lord Breasted and others have recovered scores of papyrus scrolls and other records in very ancient Egyptian tombs along the Nile. These have been translated from time to time, but modern Jews do their best to discourage such translations and suppress printed copies of them, because they brutally contradict the pro-Jewish accounts in the Old Testament.
22. Were the Children of Israel persecuted by the Egyptians?
Answer — Undoubtedly! — but in the same manner that the Nazis of today are persecuting the Jews of the Fatherland, and from similar causations. The Children of Israel were not "persecuted" until they had overrun the land of Egypt, corrupted the Pharaohan court and Egyptian institutions, introduced — or tried to introduce — an ancient version of the NRA into Egyptian politics and economics, and subverted and debased pure-blooded Egyptian subjects. Finally Moses undertook to get them out, precisely as many an international Jewish or Zionist leader is trying to get the Jews out of Germany today but meeting with poor success because such an exodus means taking so much wealth — or as the Israelites expressed it, "spoils" — out of the country. When Pharaoh finally gave his consent to the departure of the Hebrews, he discovered to his consternation that they had taken with them vast amounts of portable valuables, and he chased after them with a force of chariots to recover this loot.
23. Was Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea while the favored Hebrews passed over to Midian unscathed?
Answer — He could not have been, unless his royal body was recovered, because his fairly well-authenticated mummy is preserved today in the British Museum.
24. Is the Exodus story a myth?
Answer — No, but it appears to be a complete subversion of what actually took place. The debasing influence of the Habiru or People of Set became so great, that from time to time severe pogroms occurred. The Egyptians would gladly have let the Habiru depart, had the latter been willing to go empty-handed. But taking their property, much of it gotten as dishonestly as the New-Deal Jews of today have gotten their fortunes by exploitation or open graft, represented a severe economic problem. In the Scriptures as written by Jews, however, and thence handed to us for acceptance, all this hocus-pocus is glorified and blessed by the benedictions of Yahvah. As for the Chosen-People notion's being fallacious, we have the statement of a Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy of London, who declared quite frankly: "We the Jews invented the myth of being God's Chosen People!" Later, Dr. Levy died a very sudden and mysterious death. You can draw your own conclusions.
25. Did Moses write the first five books of the Old Testament?
Answer — He could not have done so. At the time of Moses, 1,440 years before Christ, the Hebrews possessed no language of their own in which to write it. At the most, he would have had to write in Egyptian hieroglyphics or picture-graphs. Not till the Hebrews came into contact with the Phoenician peoples after settlement in the Land of Canaan, did they appropriate the strange block-letter alphabetical system that we recognize as the Hebrew of today. Even so, it contained no vowels for many generations. Try to write a page of this booklet in English, but leave out all the vowels, and see how accurately you get the exact sense of what is meant. P-T might stand for pat, pet, pit, pot, or put. How would you know which of these five words I might mean, were the vowels not used? So how can we tell what Moses, or any other ancient teacher or "law-giver" said literally?
26. Why do we call the Jews "Semites"?
Answer — Because the forebears of the Habiru in Egypt were credited with having come from Arabia and the Arabian peninsula. This district, said legend, was allotted to Shem, a son of Noah, upon descent from the mythical Ark. The habitat of the Habiru was likewise described by some authorities as comprising Abyssinia, Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria. From the name Shem, we get the term "Semites" or probably, "Shemites." But the Arabs, and some Persians, are likewise designated as Semites — without having a drop of Jewish blood in them. It is strictly a territorial designation, as today we term all people Americans who dwell within the territorial confines of the United States.
27. Have the Jews the right to designate Palestine as their Homeland?
Answer — No more and no less than either the Arabs or Syrians.
When the Habiru were chased out of Egypt by Pharaoh's charioteers, they "wandered" for forty years in the Wilderness — a district no bigger than our State of Connecticut — and then under Joshua "cased" the Land of Canaan, as bandits "case" a bank they intend to rob today. In other words, they got the lay of the land, and then proceeded to attack the Canaanites and take their property and real estate away from them with the avowed encouragement of the petty Midian Yahvah. Ultimately they succeeded in this pillage and sabotage, and parceled out the conquered territory among the Tribes. David became eventually their greatest political-warrior king, and his illegitimate son, Solomon, their most voluptuous ruler. After Solomon's death, the tribal territories were divided under the rule of his two sons. One son succeeded to rulership over the lands of the Tribes of Judah and Beniamin, and this coalition came to he known as the Southern Kingdom; the other son succeeded to the rulership of the remaining tribes north of Jerusalem, known as the Northern Kingdom.
28. Why were the Jews carried captive to Babylon?
Answer — Because Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian monarch, became utterly outraged over the manner in which the Hebrews to the southwest of his country and capital were preying upon his caravans and trade routes to Egypt. In 585 B.C. he sent an army down into Palestine, defeated the Judaists, and carried them off to Babylon, razing Solomon's Temple and leaving Jerusalem a waste. The distance that the Judaists were transported was only a couple of hundred miles, however. Remember, that the size of all Palestine is only 75 miles wide by 193 miles long — about the same territorial coverage as the State of Massachusetts. The duration of this Captivity is usually reckoned as 70 years, although, strictly speaking, it lasted only 56 years. A great part of the remaining Northern Tribes had previously been taken captive to Assyria for similar maraudings.
29. Why do today's Jews make such an ungodly pother about returning to Palestine as a race?
Answer — Most of it is lachrymose propaganda. The Jews do not want to return to Palestine. In the first place, a country only 75 miles wide and 193 miles long couldn't contain them. In the second place, they wouldn't be happy living with one another, having to endure one another, and being without Gentiles to exploit. History has proven this; it is no particular libel. The true reasons why the Jews are making such a clamor over having Palestine "returned" to them, is the presence of the stupendous mineral and chemical wealth in the Dead Sea, which would go to them along with the presentation, and the fact that in Palestine they would be in a strategic position to introduce Jewish-Communist Russia down to the Suez Canal and thereby sever a major artery between the British Isles and India. This would inflict a mortal wound to the British Commonwealth of Nations. Material gain is usually the real basis of any project over which the Jew waxes sentimental!
30. How many Jews are there in the whole world today?
Answer — Jewish populations are usually deceptive when given in the census figures, because Jews are forever trying to hide their Jewish nationality or race. Furthermore, when Jewish authorities compile a strictly Jewish census, they count males who have attained to their majorities only. As the average human family of any race customarily consists of five persons, we are safe in multiplying whatever figures the Jews give us of their numbers by five, or adding four times the original figure. Gentiles do not possess an accurate count of all the Jews in all the countries of the earth, but 80 millions — men, women, and children — would not be a wild estimate. Doubtless it is nearer a hundred millions, considering that the earth holds 2 billion inhabitants. That there are something like 25 million Jews, males and of age, within the civilized countries of the earth is a sound possibility. Of these, some 12,046,648 are in the United States at the present time. Only ten years ago, the figure, from Jewish sources, was set at 4,228,029. In other words, Jews in the United States have increased by 7,818,619 since 1927 — an average of something like 15,000 a week! Fully half the world's Jews would seem to be within the United States at the present time. And arrangements are being completed under the American Jewish leaders and the Roosevelt Administration to bring the rest here as swiftly as it can be managed!
31. What is the Jewish Sanhedrin?
Answer — It is — or was — the supreme international council of the Jews, established at the time of the Maccabees, probably under John Hyrcanus. It consisted of 71 members, and was presided over by the Nasi — or "prince" — at whose side stood the Ab-Beth-Din, or "Father of the Tribunal." Its members represented the different castes and classes of Hebrew society. There were priests, elders — that is, heads of families — men of age and experience, scribes or doctors of law, and others exalted by eminent learning — the sole condition of acceptance into this assembly. The presidency was usually conferred upon the High Priest, if he were sufficiently erudite, otherwise "he who excels all others in wisdom." The limits of its jurisdiction are not known with certainty but the supreme decision over life and death was exclusively in its hands. With the exception of Sabbath and feast days, it met daily. After the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, it finally established itself, after many migrations, in Babylon. During the Middle Age, we find, it met in Constantinople.
32. Is the Sanhedrin still in active existence?
Answer — Gentiles who have made a deep study of the Jewish Question and international organizations and activities of Jews, have ample evidence for believing so. But the Jews seem to have reasons for keeping its existence a secret till their fancied or anticipated reestablishment of their material kingdom over the earth is accomplished.
33. Do Jews actually believe that the day is coming when they are going to be supreme masters over all the other races and peoples of earth?
Answer — Orthodox Jews most certainly do! Apostate Jews are cynical about the whole business, but are by no means averse to looting all Gentiles and obtaining their wealth as they may discern opportunity. This unhallowed business in action is the world-wide movement known as Communism. Gentiles and the world's laboring classes are the instruments utilized to get this accomplished. But most Jews seem to have altered their notions about such dominance by modern Israel's coming about through the appearance of one man, a messiah, or anointed leader. They now interpret the ancient prophecies, that "the Jews as a race shall be the world messiah" and make the world over into one united kingdom with a single great Jew as supreme dictator. See the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Talmud is literally loaded with such interpretations, too. The orthodox Jews consider the matter idealistically. The apostate, or atheistic Jews, are riding along perfectly content to profit from the gains of Jewry as a whole, and despoiling the modern Egyptians with zest, whenever and wherever they are permitted the chance.
34. Are the Jews a united people for the achievement of a world messiahship?
Answer — They most certainly are not! They are guilty of quite as much racial discontent, brawling, and general psychopathy among themselves as against the Gentiles. And this state of things has always been true. From the return from the Captivity, down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the scattering of the Jews throughout the nations of the earth, the average length of reign of the Jewish kings — and one Jewish queen, Alexandria — was no longer than two years. Jews can't agree on rulers, even among themselves. Yet they think themselves capable of ruling all the other nations, comprising millions upon millions of Gentiles. The perpetual cry of their leaders, from Rabbi Ashe to Rabbi Wise, has forever been: "Stop your fighting and get together!" But the Jew can't "get together," not even with his own breed. The phobia of "being different" has bitten into him too deeply. The only thing that really drives the Jews into any sort of unity is persecution or violence directed against all classes of them as a people. Then they coalesce like sheep in a fold, all packed together and wailing to high heaven — only sheep don't wail. Only Jews wail. And how they wail!
35. How do Sephardic Jews differ from Ashkenazic Jews?
Answer — The Sephardim are the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin — Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and later Dutch and English Jews — who have diluted their Jewish blood with these Latin and Nordic races by cross-marrying to such an extent that Gentile characteristics predominate. They can usually be identified only by Jewish names — if they have not changed them — or by the Jewish temperament as it exercises in times of crisis or vicissitude. Sephardic men have clean-chiseled Grecian profiles and lips. Sephardic women are dark-eyed and strikingly beautiful. The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, are the Russian, Polish, or German Jews — in other words, Mongoloid Jews — who were swept into Asia and Europe when the Assyrian king "scattered" the Northern Tribes and replaced them with Gallic peoples brought down by him from the Danube Valley. The Ashkenazic Jews are possessed of the "schnozzle" nose, derived from Assyrian interbreedings, the small round head on the thick neck, and the gross and vulgar mannerisms making them so offensive to Gentiles of reserve and Christians of refinement. When the Ashkenazim crossed their Mediterranean Hebrew or Sumerian with the Russian, Polish, or German tongues, they got a hybrid vernacular that is called Yiddish. Generally speaking, it can be said that the great mass of the Sephardim are orthodox Jews, and the great mass of the Ashkenazim are apostate Jews. The Sephardim uniformly hold that Judaists constitute the devotees of a religion; the Ashkenazim uniformly hold that the Judaists are a race or political unit. The Sephardim believe in gaining ascendancy over the non-Jewish races by strategy and peaceful penetration; the more or less apostate Ashkenazim believe in going straight to their ascendancy by crack-down and violence. Thereby do we witness Communism being mainly supported and advanced by Ashkenazic Jews, while the Sephardim behold it in an increasing alarm, sensing that the world's Gentiles may eventually penalize or exterminate all Jews for the lusts, hatreds, and atrocities of the Communistic Ashkenazim, and they find themselves included.
36. To which branch of Jews did Jesus Christ belong?
Answer — Jesus Christ belonged to neither branch! Shocking as it becomes to modern Christians, an examination of the evidence now coming to light reveals that Jesus Christ was not a Jew or any other kind of an Israelite! This, of course, strikes at the very core and heart of present Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, sooner or later, Aryan Christians have got to face the facts. It takes a whole volume in itself to present these facts, but such a volume is available. In the first place, the only true Jews are descendants of the Tribe of Judah, and even if Biblical bases be taken for argument, the New Testament says in a score of places that He emphatically did not come from that tribe. Christ was a Galilean and a Nazarene. Galilee got its name from the Gauls, brought down by the Assyrian king when he denuded the northern kingdom of Hebrews. The proper spelling of the word should be Gaulilee. Over and over, too, the New Testament writings speak of "Galilee of the Gentiles" ... The genealogies of Christ in the two New Testament Gospels do not determine the matter, since they do not agree, and since they do not agree, neither one of them can be established as authentic. Moreover, Jews reckoned genealogies through the father, always. Christians are confronted by the dilemma that if they make a tenet of their faith that Mary conceived Christ by the Holy Ghost, then she did not conceive Christ by Joseph her husband; and if she did not do the latter, then the Hebrew genealogies, tracing Jesus' ancestry back to David and Abraham, are fabrications. Jesus did not speak the prevalent Jewish tongue of the period; He conversed in what was a Gentile language. At no place did He Himself confirm that He was a Jew, and the words before Pilate, "Thou sayest!" were merely a colloquialism, not of acquiescence to Pilate's remark but of the thought: "You're doing the talking, I'm keeping quiet!" This great question about the Jewishness or non-Jewishness of Jesus, manifestly cannot be handled in a handbook of this size. If you are interested to read the complete attestments of his Gentile blood and background, send to the publishers of this booklet for the
lengthier volume.
37. Why did the Jews deny Christ?
Answer — Because He would not subscribe to the tenet that their little Midianite tribal deity, Yahvah, could possibly be the Great Creator of the Universe and the author of all living things, or that such a Great Creator had a Chosen People, or that the Hebrew religion as the Sanhedrin propounded it, was a true religion, or that the Jews as such were due to inherit the earth and rulership over all its institutions. No man who thus struck at the roots of Judaism, could possibly be their long looked-for Messiah. Furthermore, Christ was the outstanding "Jew-Baiter" of His day. He called the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites and whited sepulchers, and indicted the Sanhedrin to the teeth of its big shots as being "of the Synagogue of Satan." In other words, by not being willing to "play the Jew game" to other nations and races, Christ was identified as an "enemy" of the Jews; and the Jews know of but one way in which to treat their enemies: Kill them!
38. Why does the Bible, as the "Inspired Word of God," persistently represent Christ as being a Jew?
Answer — Because the Biblical manuscripts, comprising the Old and New Testaments as we know them today, were written under Jewish auspices, by writers striving to reconcile the prophecies of the Hebraic Old Testament with the astounding and not-controllable spread of the new Christianity. Obviously, if Christianity continued to grow and strengthen, in time it would supersede and exterminate Judaism altogether. So the Judaists got busy and worked out a clever ruse that, in practice, came to be called Ebionitism. They "tied into" the aggressive and expanding new religion by preaching that Christianity was the outgrowth of Judaism. Because Christianity was built upon a blanket castigation of everything Judaistic, to be an utter Christian one had to go through the same process and first be a Judaist. After one had first acknowledged everything Judaistic, including the priority of authority of the law of Moses, the authenticity of the Hebrew prophets and prophecies, and the whole patriarchal background of Judaism, then one was ready to take the next step into Christianity. Thus, one of the most important tenets of this atrocious subversion was to make the text impress upon the would-be convert's mind that even Jesus Himself was born a Jew. Therefore if there hadn't been any Jews, there wouldn't have been any Jesus, and if there hadn't been any Jesus, there wouldn't have been any Christian religion. This subversion and rewriting of the sacred text was carried to so bold a point that in one place it is crassly and satanically stated that . . . "salvation is of the Jews!" Salvation is nothing of the sort. Salvation is of the Christ, and the Holy Spirit! To explain the point in the modern scene, it is like saying that after a few hundred years the German Jews will get together and subvert the whole Nazi program in history by giving it out that Hitler was a Jew — because he lived, operated, and instructed in German-Jewish Germany — and that one couldn't become a good Nazi without first subscribing to the tenets of predatory Jewry, because otherwise what would Nazism have had, to be different from or agitate against?
39. What was Ebionitism?
Answer — The subversive instructors, sent out by the Jerusalem authorities to imbed such notions in the minds of early Christian converts, were called Ebionites. It was their job and commission to make the very Judaism against which Christ inveighed, the foundation and background of the new Christian theology. Christ must be made to say that He came "to fulfil the law of Moses." Thereby the law of Moses became quite as essential to the new religion as did Christ. And so on, throughout a hundred scriptural passages. Again, we can compare it to the Jews of a hundred years hence making Hitler to say "I came to fulfil the law of Karl Marx!" These Ebionites had their headquarters in the Greek city of Pella, so that they would not be openly recognized as subversive missionaries for the Jerusalem Sanhedrinists. And it was in, or near, Pella that the New Testament manuscripts were compiled. The Apostle Paul once cut up an awful shindy about the mischief of Ebionitism, and said that the Doctrine of the Trinity had nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. It was a clean-cut departure from it. Yet when the Gospels came to be translated into other languages for our modern world, the New Testament Gospels were dyed dripping wet with the subvertings and deceptions of Ebionitism. Christian people today who say, "Yes, I know the Jews crucified Christ, and I know He said some atrocious things against them; also I know that Jews are practically wrecking our United States with their crazy incompetence — all the same we have to remember that they are God's Chosen People, " — these are but modern Ebionites, acquiescing to the very doctrine that the Sanhedrin went to much trouble and expense to promulgate and get incorporated into the Christian's "holy" books.
40. Isn't the Bible the Inspired Word of God?
Answer — No! Not literally considered! It cannot be such, because it holds too many contradictions and paradoxes in its present form, and a Perfect Creator could not indite a contradictory or paradoxical book. This view is confirmed by no less an authority than St. Jerome. About the year 370 A. D. he translated the whole Bible into Latin. Damascus, who was Pope at that time, had asked him to attempt such translation. Jerome, in a letter to Damascus, reported on his work in connection with the new version. He wrote that "it would be a dangerous presumption" to attempt to issue a Bible which would reproduce the correct text, since the existing copies of the original documents were scattered all over the world and no two of them were alike! Jerome was now called to judge between them. If he did so, and produced a Bible, it would be so unlike anything currently passing for the Bible, that he would be dubbed a forger and fabricator. He would be charged with having altered words and sentences, having omitted something here or inserted something there, or trying to "improve" on originals elsewhere. And then he added a remark that strikes a body blow at all who hold today's Bible to be the unadulterated Word of God: "Even those who condemn me as an impious forger must admit that we can no longer speak of such a thing as Truth, where there are variations in that which is said to be true." In his letter, Jerome went on to state how the many discrepancies between the copies of the original text can be explained. Some copyists, he said, were deliberate criminal forgers. Others were conceited enough to attempt to improve on the text, but in their inexperience only succeeded in impairing it. Still others dozed while they copied, and so left out, misread or misplaced words and passages. To say that God nevertheless caused Absolute Truth to result from all this, is to rationalize an absurdity.
41. What is the Vulgate?
Answer — The Vulgate is the Bible that St. Jerome produced, none-the-less, when he went ahead as Damascus directed and "cleaned up" prevalent "Holy" Writ after his own notions and erudition. But he did precisely what he lamented that others had done before him. He followed his own personal opinion, altered words and passages, made omissions, and wrote into it such stuff as suited his caprice. Maybe God was using St. Jerome as editor. But if He did, then assuredly God showed Himself as naught but a Papist of the period. Then, by decree of the Council of Trent, it was declared that the Vulgate contained the inspired Word of God. Jerome, of course, was a top-notch Ebionite. Everything in the New Testament rested four-square upon the Old. The Jews were still God's Chosen People. Jesus was a Jew. One could not subscribe to being a good Christian without first subscribing to being a good Judaist and accepting all the patriarchal fol-de-rol — much of it unmoral and obscene — which Christianity appeared to exterminate and supplant. So the Jews today profit. And the modern rabbi cries to the anti-Semite battling for survival of his precious Christianity: "If you repudiate us, you repudiate the Savior whom we gave you!"
The insolence of it!
42. How can we condemn or persecute people who cannot help having been born into the Jewish race?
Answer — We should consider that we are neither condemning nor persecuting, when we look squarely at the Jewish Enigma in modern society, recognize its fundamentals for what they are, and declare that after due discrimination, we do not want them further materialized in a country which recognizes the Christian moral code as all that epitomizes true spiritual greatness. Disapproving of the Jew and his mischievous background, moving to harness him from subverting Christian institutions or debasing Christian culture, is not persecution, excepting as the Jew himself seizes upon that ruse to blunt the edge of the resistance sent against him. That a child is born to Jewish parents is neither here nor there. Children are likewise born to parents who are burglars, counterfeiters, and highwaymen. Is that any reason why we should not raise up authorities to put a stop to robbery, counterfeiting, or thuggery? If one is metaphysically inclined, it is probably true that a given child is born to Jewish parents because "like attracts like" and children are born to parents toward whom they have karmic adjustments to work out. If one is strictly orthodox in his beliefs, a Jewish child, born with Jewish blood in his veins, and reared in a Jewish persecution-complex from infancy, must stand elementally with his people till the two great antithetical philosophies of Judaism and Christianity move to a crisis and one bests the other for good and all. This Jewish child, as it grows, has ample opportunity to discern wherein the conduct or ethics of its people are right or wrong. If it disapproves, then it can live its own life righteously. That is its prerogative in Free Will. But again, condemnation or persecution in regard to the Jew is no more than the disapproval and legal restraint that society throws around any individual whose ways do not work for the universal good. Let us not be Ebionites in this item, either. If we want a clean country to live in, we've got to be willing to do our parts toward its constant sanitation.
43. What is to be the future of the Jews when this present paroxysm of anti-Semitism has run its course?
Answer — The Jew as an unruly and wilful race-child, is going to be made by the more sedate parental races to submit himself to wholesome discipline, get over his obsession that God loves him more than his Gentile neighbor, stop the glorification of personal and racial dishonesties, and take his place in world society as a chastened and penitent citizen. He is to have branded into his eternal consciousness that being classed as a Jew is tantamount to being classed as an immature or fledgling Spirit, with much to learn culturally and esoterically before he may call himself a true worldly resident — thereby consulting his own good as much as the good of his associates. Probably thousands will lose their present lives in the process, but that will all be part of the general education. Let us waste no lacrimose sentimentality over these great elemental issues between distinctive blocs of the human race. They are set in movement to teach the mass populace something which it very much requires to know permanently.
44. Why jump on all the Jews, just because some of them misbehave? Aren't there any good Jews?
Answer — To judge as between good and bad, we must first have a standard. When the question is put: "Aren't there any good Jews?" the implication is strong that Jews judged by the Christian moral standard and Christian social ethics, are meant. But on the other hand, the Jew himself doesn't use — but repudiates — the Christian moral standard and Christian social ethics. To be a "good" Jew, to himself, he must be a very Judaistic Jew — meaning a Jew who follows literally the instructings of the two Talmuds and generally considers the Christians as having been put on earth for Jewish exploitation or human drudgery.
To be a "good" Jew to his Christian neighbor, he must, in the sense of doctrine and logic, be a "bad" Jew to the orthodox Talmudist. So a good Jew is a bad Jew to the Talmudist, and a bad Jew to the Talmudist is a good Jew to the Christian. If we want to ask: "Are there not some Jews that obey the laws, conduct themselves decorously, and do not lie, cheat, or steal?" it is possible that they exist as individuals. But it is the damning indictment of this race and its ethics that they thereby prove themselves exceptions to the racial rule. The Jew is, first of all, himself! As Christianity is the antithesis or opposite of Judaism, so the Jew must forever be something "different" from the Christian Gentile. We have to look upon him as a Jew, racially and theologically, and say: "There may be some Jews who are a little less Jewish than their fellows." But we are herein considering Jews as a race, not as individuals. The moment the Jew starts being too "good" according to the Christian's standard, he ceases being a Jew. But his rabbi will soon get after him if he doesn't watch out!
45. Is it true that all Jews are Communists?
Answer — In fairness to our Jewish citizens, no! No more than all Americans, by the very fact of being Americans, are necessarily good patriots. It has been repeatedly said, not without truth, that Communism itself is Jewish. By that is meant that the system known as Communism was conceived by a Jew — Karl Heinrich Mordecai, alias Marx — and since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 has been uniformly promoted and propagandized by Jews. We find the foul egg which later hatched into Communism described in the correspondence between Marx and Baruch Levy:
"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own messiah. It will attain world domination by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, by the annihilation of monarchy which has always been the support of individualism, and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this new world order, the Children of Israel, who are scattered over the world, will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition; and this will more particularly be the case if they succeed in getting the working masses under their control. The governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will, through the victory of the proletariat, fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property, and everywhere to make use of the resources of the State. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which it is said, that when the Messianic time has come, the Jews will have the property of the whole world in their hands."
From this scheme, the main mass of the world's Jews have, of course, not dissented. The Jew, Marx, went ahead with his Scientific Socialism , and found the Ashkenazic Jews uniformly sympathetic and endorsive of what he proposed to accomplish. You will note therefore, that when Communism first came into post-war Russia, not only were Lenin and Trotsky both Ashkenazic Jews, but of 504 commissars at the head of the Politburo running Bolshevia, 496 of them were Ashkenazic Hebrews, and the other eight renegade white Russians or Armenians. That's the way Communism works in practice and why we have the reasonable right to say that Communism is Jewish — or Ashkenazic World Jewry in Action. The Sephardim, in the main, believe more in gaining their ends over the Gentiles by strategy and political maneuvers. They are horrified, more or less, at what aroused Gentiles may do to all Jews for developing the nightmare of Communism, and in many cases work as they can to lay or defeat it. At the same time, they do not want to go so far in defeating it that they join openly with Gentiles or destroy Jewish racial gains to the moment.
THESE 45 Questions, of course, by no means comprise all the interrogations which can be projected regarding the people known as Jews. But they are the 45 Questions that are most constantly asked by common folk, seeking to know why the Jews meet with trouble everywhere they take up residence. In course of time there may be a second booklet gotten out, answering questions of importance that have been omitted for lack of space or overlooked.
What has been printed herein, however, should be sufficient to give the average American a fair working knowledge of the background of the Jewish Problem.
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!"
http://iamthewitness.com
With the Answers by Pelley
Copyright 1939 by William Dudley Pelley
CONTENTS
1. Why did God create such a difference between Jew and Gentile, so that the Jew is at once recognized, no matter what race he lives among?
2. How did the Jews come to have such strange traditions setting them apart, racially and religiously, from the Gentiles?
3. Should we say that Jews are members of a race, or followers of a religion?
4. If the Jew is the follower of a religion, why does it cause him so much inconvenience or harassment, as against the followers of other religions?
5. What is the Talmud?
6. Is the Talmud a single book?
7. Are the two Talmuds alike?
8. How did the Babylonian Talmud come to be written, if the Jerusalem Talmud was already in existence?
9. Are the two Talmuds the holy books of the Jews?
10. What does the term Rabbi mean?
11. Is a Rabbi and a Jewish priest one and the same?
12. Why did the Destruction of the Temple destroy the Israelite priestly caste?
13. What was the Ark of the Covenant?
14. Is there any difference between the Jehovah of the Jews, and the Divine Father spoken of by Jesus and as worshipped by the Christians?
15. What is the difference between a Jewish Temple and a Synagogue … and isn't the synagogue the Jewish Church?
16. Are the modern Jews and the ancient Israelites one and the same people?
17. Were there no Jews in the world prior to the coming of Jacob's sons to Egypt?
18. Was there really an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob?
19. Did not Christ's words confirm that there was an Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
20. Why does the Old Testament refer to the early Hebrews as Israelites?
21. Have we any other accounts than those of the Old Testament on the advent and adventures of the Hebrews in Egypt?
22. Were the Children of Israel persecuted by the Egyptians?
23. Was Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea while the favored Hebrews passed over to Midian unscathed?
24. Is the Exodus story a myth?
25. Did Moses write the first five books of the Old Testament?
26. Why do we call the Jews "Semites"?
27. Have the Jews the right to designate Palestine as their Homeland?
28. Why were the Jews carried captive to Babylon?
29. Why do today's Jews make such an ungodly pother about returning to Palestine as a race?
30. How many Jews are there in the whole world today?
31. What is the Jewish Sanhedrin?
32. Is the Sanhedrin still in active existence?
33. Do Jews actually believe that the day is coming when they are going to be supreme masters over all the other races and peoples of earth?
34. Are the Jews a united people for the achievement of a world messiahship?
35. How do Sephardic Jews differ from Ashkenazic Jews?
36. To which branch of Jews did Jesus Christ belong?
37. Why did the Jews deny Christ?
38. Why does the Bible, as the "Inspired Word of God," persistently represent Christ as being a Jew?
39. What was Ebionitism?
40. Isn't the Bible the Inspired Word of God?
41. What is the Vulgate?
42. How can we condemn or persecute people who cannot help having been born into the Jewish race?
43. What is to be the future of the Jews when this present paroxysm of anti-Semitism has run its course?
44. Why jump on all the Jews, just because some of them misbehave? Aren't there any good Jews?
45. Is it true that all Jews are Communists?
ASSUME that you are a normal American citizen, born and raised in this one-time Land of the Free, educated in its public schools, and a member of some Christian denomination — Catholic or Protestant. You are as good as you can be, and probably no worse than circumstances allow. You are undoubtedly married and possibly have children. You pay your bills as best you can, and subscribe to a policy of "Live and Let Live!" If you have sympathies, they usually go to the underdog in a contest, and if you have a pet peeve, it's being hoaxed or bamboozled. In other words, you're a 99 percent American, trying as best you can to get along and stay out of jail; you like to see fights carried on in a sporting manner and don't especially enjoy the realization that someone thinks of you, or treats you, as a "sap." . . . Very good!
You look about you in this Land of the Free — that isn't as free as it was in your boyhood — and observe that your country, your State, and perhaps your city or neighborhood, also contain a quota of human beings who are commonly labeled Jews. They are people whom you know you must watch in any business deal, for their trickery is so proverbial that the word "Jew" is often used as verb as well as noun. When your neighbor comes to you and tells you that his partner "Jewed" him out of last year's profits, you know at once what he means. He means that he was cheated. No one has maliciously originated this use of the word Jew. It has simply come about through long experience of "your kind" of folks in dealing with Israelites. But you know other things about Jews.
You know that as a people they have definite characteristics that forever mark them out as being Jews. Some have enormous hooked noses. Others have a queer rubbery look about the eyes. Some you can pick out because of the vulgarity of their dress or the lewd way in which they display and wear expensive jewelry. Commonly you recognize them by the manner in which they talk. That they have no reserve, no respect for other people's privacies, and little stability of character — being arrogant and insolent one moment and fawning and wailing the next — is something you've probably observed subconsciously. Furthermore, they are great people to hive up, or gang together. In our great cities, they prefer to live close to one another to such an extent that we call their localities of abode, "Ghettos."
But there is this strange item about these Jews: from the time that you were first able to walk and talk, or know anything about religion or history, you have had it dinned into your consciousness that this strange folk — as a race — were special favorites of the Almighty.
The popular term designating them has been "God's Chosen People."
God, it seems, back over the ages, for no particularly good reason that you've been able to figure out in logic, took an eccentric divine fancy to this especial breed of humans. You don't know exactly why God should have done so. You don't see many characteristics in them today that should have prompted God to make such a choice. All the same, tradition has informed you that God once promised the whole earth and all the peoples in it, to the seed of Abraham, and to cap the whole business, you were further informed that the universal Savior of all mankind — the Christ, born in the Bethlehem Manger and crucified on Calvary for the sins of the world — was likewise a Jew.
It stacks up to you, if you have ever given thought to it at all, that if it hadn't been for the Jews, the world would have had no Christ. You don't know a whole lot about the authenticity of the business; again, I say, that's what you've keen told.
Lately you've been told a lot of other things, and chiefly they concern one race of people abroad who were our recent enemies in the World War. The Germans! You've been told that all of a sudden the Germans have arisen under their Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and "persecuted" the Jews — persecuted them frightfully. In fact, this persecution amounts to kicking them out of Germany. After living in that country for generations, they've had to pull up stakes, give up their homes and friends, and flee from the wrath of the Terrible Nazis. Of course it has been represented to you, that the Jews were by no means guilty of doing anything to Hitler, his followers, or the German people as a whole, meriting such inhuman treatment. The Germans, almost overnight, decided that they simply didn't like the Jews, and didn't want them around. So they rose up and clubbed and maimed and hounded the poor Israelites, who had to flee to foreign countries before such pagan violence.
And while such unfair and unsporting treatment has been going on in Germany, a lot of other Old-World nations have taken their cue from Hitler and decided it would be nice to seize the opportunity to resort to some inhuman violence on their own Jews as well. People who don't want to see Communism come in their country, want a scapegoat for it and blame it on the Jews. So other nations follow Germany's lead and join in giving the Jew a good kick in the pants.
Of course the Jew wants some place to flee to, therefore he asks permission to come over here into the United States. A halfcrazy Jewish boy shoots a Nazi official in Paris, and the German people riot and treat the Jews roughly, ending up by fining the whole race — or such part of it as lives in Germany — something like $400,000,000 for the mischief.
You feel that such treatment is a bit unfair, and yet when the Jew asks permission to come over here to the United States, you wonder how on earth the country is going to take on any more liabilities. We have something like 12 million unemployed already, and only about so much work to go around. If ungodly numbers of refugee Jews come over here, somebody must support them. If they apply for work and support themselves, it means that an equal number of native American Gentiles must relinquish their present jobs and either go on Relief or join the bread line.
Nevertheless, it looks as though the attitude of the Roosevelt Administration is to let them come in. It seems the humane thing to do.
But gradually it has likewise been occurring to you, that the attitude of even the Federal Administration is changing. Instead of Christian Gentile people being put in key government jobs, the big places in Washington are being filled by Jews. You hear that Morgenthau is a Jew, Madam Perkins is a Jewess, Judge Brandeis is a Jew, Felix Frankfurter — who has just gone upon the Supreme Court Bench — is another Jew. In fact something like 275 of the biggest and most vital positions in the Washington government, are filled by Jews. You hear that Jews control or own 65 percent of the nation's industries. You know that the movies are owned and run by Jews. As for the Relief agencies, since the Administration has had to meet the problem of aid to the unemployed they are everywhere staffed by Jews and most of them Communist Jews at that.
All of a sudden, all over the earth, it seems, everybody is becoming Jew-conscious. Jews are everywhere. They are into everything. If you hear of a great vice ring being broken up in New York, Chicago or San Francisco — always it is Jews that are reported as having been arrested. Is a great arson ring run to earth? Again the perpetrators are Jews. Is the white slave trade attacked? Again Jews are nabbed for having engaged in it. Does Dewey make a great pother about busting up the rackets in New York? Get behind the Gentile names being used by the racketeers, and always the true names of the culprits are Jewish.
Jews are into crime, it seems, even as they are into business. You turn on the radio of a Sunday afternoon and dial into Father Coughlin. He is thundering from his Royal Oak pulpit against the International Bankers. But they all have Jewish names. What on earth is making the whole world seem to go crazy simultaneously against the Jews?
Some Sunday evening you read a bitter tirade in the papers against the Jews, or some spirited defense of the Jews, and you suddenly bethink to ask yourself —
Just how much do you know about the Jews, or the Jewish Question, anyway?
Whom can you go to, to ask truthful particulars about the Jews, and get the real low-down on why they may be persecuted from the poles to the equator?
All at once it seems as if there were about a hundred questions you'd like to ask about the Jews — why they act as they do, why they always stir up such animosity against themselves in whatever land they settle, why they exhibit such buttinsky manners that rile other races and make them retaliate, what the real Jewish situation is throughout the earth. and what's to be the end of it.
Well, my friend, average and normal American that you are, this little booklet is put into your hands, anticipating your questions and answering them candidly, honestly, without undue bias, and in the intense patriotic desire to preserve the welfare of this, our mutual country, against inequitable encroachments by minorities especially minorities with a different moral code.
You may feel the desire to combat some of the answers, and others you will probably want more enlightenment upon. But in the main, if you do further checking, you'll discover to your amazement that the answers are quite accurate. They have been compiled, not as any sort of Nazi propaganda, but by the officials of an American patriotic movement, after years of being interrogated on the public platform and in private interviews precisely in the manner set forth in this handbook.
The true purpose of this handbook, therefore, is to open your eyes to what's going on around you, and what an unhallowed menace to the peace, prosperity, and longevity of your country, this influx of overseas Israelites may be.
If you want more information on any of these answers, you can get it — pressed down and overflowing, in such detail as to stupefy you. There is now a vast and equitably authenticated literature on this most vital of all issues to the non-Jewish peoples of the earth. And it is yours for the acquiring.
However, to the first question. What is it that people most want to know about the Jews —
1. Why did God create such a difference between Jew and Gentile, so that the Jew is at once recognized, no matter what race he lives among?
Answer — God did not create any essential difference between Jew and Gentile. The difference between Jew and Gentile is a man-made thing entirely. It has arisen from the fact that over the generations the priests, scribes, and rabbis of the Jews have compiled a great mass of racial and religious instruction which the Jewish baby imbibes with its mother's milk. This racial and religious instruction impresses upon each new Jewish child, from the moment it first begins to understand the Hebrew tongue that it has been born into a race that is "different" from the other races of mankind, that it has been born into a "better" race, and that by comparison with the people of the Jewish race, the people of all the other races are likened to mere cattle and animals. However — unfortunately — while the people of the Jewish race are "better," at the same time they are fewer in number. So, being the smarter and yet in the minority, the members of the Jewish race suffer "persecution" — which comes from naught else than the jealousy of the more populous races, who are resentful that the "better" and "smarter" Jews best them at every turn. Such is the psychology in which the Jewish child is reared, and after a time he builds a defense mechanism against the results of it. He looks at the members of all other races as his "enemies" and is in a state of subconscious antagonism with them. God has had nothing to do with it. It is a case of race psychology that has gained such a terrific momentum up through the ages that no one Jew can arrest or change it.
2. How did the Jews come to have such strange traditions setting them apart, racially and religiously, from the Gentiles?
Answer — When Moses led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, he is traditionally credited with having introduced a strange custom for the perpetuation of his One-God religious ideas and the priesthood that was intended to keep them alive in the hearts of the Israelites. He laid it down as a law that the first-born son of every Hebrew family should be dedicated to the priestly calling, also that one-tenth of the resources of every family should be donated for the upkeep of such priesthood. Now for one boy out of every family to be qualified as a priest, or "cohen" — from which so many modern Jews get the surname Cohen — meant that over a long period of time the numbers of priests must become prodigious. There were so many of them, in fact, that they came to be recognized as a caste, called Levites. Incidentally from Levites we get the many variations or names such as Levi, or Levy, that designate today's Jews. These formidable numbers of priests came eventually to make the Hebrews the worst priest-ridden people on the face of the earth. They had to be supported, and anything that in any way threatened their priestly jobs, met with swift and fierce opposition. The only way that they could preserve these jobs, was by enforcing a rigid solidarity and racial consciousness among the masses, and binding them tight to the priestly counsel. The only way such solidarity and racial consciousness could be created and maintained in turn, was to so interpret religion — or what passed for religion — that the populace could not perform the simplest acts of daily life without having the priestly interpretation of it, and making the people feel that such priests were indispensable. This was accomplished by training the people to think that they were "different," and thus creating the barrier between them and members of other races in consequence. As the priests were likewise the only learned men, and in charge of the Israelite traditions, they could interject into those traditions what they pleased — if it only impressed upon their people a sense of the priestly importance, that they — the Israelites — were the truly great people and those beloved of the Creator, and that the priests were unchallenged leaders over them. Today we would term such monopoly a racket, because basically it was built on priestly gain and power. In other words, whatever enhanced the racial and spiritual solidarity of this people, enhanced the influence and indispensability of the priestly caste. So in teaching the Israelites to think that they were "different" and "better" the priests were feathering their own nests and making their jobs sure-fire and profitable. So Israelite — and later Jewish — traditions became what they are today. It is ingrained into the Jew to think himself "different," and "better," and the priest-rabbi now has such a hold over him that he cannot be a Jew without acknowledging the priest-rabbi influence in the most trivial of his daily acts.
3. Should we say that Jews are members of a race or followers of a religion?
Answer — The Jews, according to blood-tests made in English laboratories, belong to one of the divisions of the oriental or yellow-branch of the human family. Biologically, or anthropologically, they are not a race unto themselves — as the Finns, the Britons, the Latins, or the Negroes. Strange to relate, and contrary to popular notion, the Jew has no physical characteristics but his basic Mongoloid stock to mark him out as to which division of the species he belongs. The great hooked nose or "schnozzle" of the Ashkenazic Jew, is a feature that he acquired by cross-breeding over untold generations with the Assyrians. So the Jews of today are orientals who have been kept politically intact throughout the earth by a clan consciousness derived from the peculiarities of their common Mosaic faith. Jews have crossbred with other races to such an extent that there is almost no such thing today as a pure-blooded Jew. Anthropologically the Jew is a racial hybrid, wherever we find him. That is why he no longer welds together politically or sets up a strictly Jewish nation. It is the more nearly correct thing to say that the Jew is the follower of a religion — and a particularly formalized and debased religion at that — and any claim to membership in a "race" is spurious.
4. If the Jew is the follower of a religion, why does it cause him so much inconvenience or harassment as against the followers of other religions?
Answer — Strictly speaking, it does not. There are hundreds of religions being practiced in the world today, and the devotees of each are quite as fanatical and defensive of their tenets of faith as the Jew — speaking now of the orthodox Jew. What seems to be inconvenience and harassment resulting to the Jew from his religion, visited upon him of course by other races and devotees of other faiths, is the debased character of his concepts in regard to God and humanity that are not religious so much as theological. Here again a plethora of priests is responsible. Having, as we might put it, nothing else to occupy their time, and being insistent on making themselves indispensable to this particular people, these priests have "laid down the law" to a minute detail that in the estimate of other religionists is little short of ridiculous. For instance, it is a religious "sin" for a Jewish family to have butter on the table if they also have lard. So many white hairs must be counted on a cow's pelt in order to truthfully call the beast a "white" cow — such absurdities became priestly designations. There is no act of the strictly orthodox Jew's life, from the instant he awakens in the morning till he closes his eyes at night, that his priests have not prescribed for him as to what is right and what is wrong, what is "sin" and what is "keeping the law." As a result, his religion has lost all its spontaneous spirituality. And a theology without inherent spirituality soon begins to present a blunted or distorted moral code. This in time becomes no code at all. Finally when the psychopathy of this plethora of priests begins to tell the Israelites that it is altogether "moral" for him to lie and cheat and steal — if it be done to a human being who is not an Israelite — the devotees of such an unmoral or non-spiritual cult are bound to land in plenty of social trouble with their neighbors. And such atrocious tenets are precisely what the Talmuds, or Jewish rabbinical writings, DO teach — although it is not our intent to swell this little book with the authenticating Talmudic quotations. The latter can be procured in a special booklet giving these atrocious quotations and naught else.
5. What is the Talmud?
Answer — The Talmud is the name given to the fundamental code of the Jewish civil and canonical law as compiled by various rabbis, or schools of theological writers, after and since the destruction of the first Temple at Jerusalem. It comprises the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna is the canonical text, the Gemara is the commentary or complement to the text.
6. Is the Talmud a single book?
Answer — No, there are two Talmuds. There is the one called the "Talmud of the Occidentals" — sometimes referred to as the Jerusalem or Palestine Talmud, which was closed at Tiberius. Then there is the Babylonian Talmud. But the Babylonian Talmud has nothing to do with the Captivity of the Jews in Babylon. It gets its name from the fact that it was compiled by Rabbi Ashe, president of the Academy of Sora in Babylon, about 400 years after Christ. The Jerusalem Talmud is the older book, originating in Tiberius, in the school of Johanan, who died A.D. 179.
7. Are the two Talmuds alike?
Answer — No! The Babylonian Talmud, compiled some time in the fifth century after Christ, is nearly four times as voluminous as the Jerusalem Talmud. The latter extends over 30 treatises of the Mishna only. The Babylonian Talmud covers 36 treatises but the Gemara or commentaries fill 2,947 folio leaves — nearly 3,000 pages.
8. How did the Babylonian Talmud come to be written, if the Jerusalem Talmud was already in existence?
Answer — Both the Mishna and Palestine Gemaras had, despite the comparatively brief time that had elapsed since their compilation in A.D. 179, suffered greatly, partly by corruption, that had crept into their texts through faulty traditions, partly through the new decisions arrived at independently in the different younger schools of rabbis — of which there flourished many in different parts of the Dispersion after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus the Roman, in 70 A.D. At times these decisions were contradictory. To put an end to disputes and the general theological confusion resulting from them, which threatened a complete religious chaos, Rabbi Ashe, aided by his disciple and friend Rab Abina, commenced the cyclopean task of collecting anew the enormous mass of material which by that time had accumulated. It took him, with the assistance of ten secretaries, no less than 30 years, and many years were spent by him in the revision of the work.
9. Are the two Talmuds the holy books of the Jews?
Answer — No! Strictly speaking, the Biblical Old Testament is the holy book of the Jews, the same as it is one-half of the Holy Book of the Christians, the New Testament being the other half for the Christians. To get the more correct idea of the relationship of the Talmuds to the Old Testament, we might put it that the Talmuds bear the same relation to the Old Testament that the Constitution of the United States does to the Christian religion as practiced or professed by American Christians. The Old Testament gives the background and supposedly sacred history and social code of all Israelites; the Talmuds are the compilations of the commentaries of the rabbis and learned scribes of this people, interpreting this background, history, and code for the daily conduct of Judaists and the application of their Faith to the worldly circumstance.
10. What does the term Rabbi mean?
Answer — In Jewish history and literature, Rabbi is the noun "Rab" with a pronominal suffix, and in Biblical Hebrew it means "great man, distinguished for age, rank, office, or skill." Since Biblical times, and in popular parlance, it has been used as a title indicating sundry degrees by its several terminations, but generally speaking it means Master Teacher, or Doctor of the Law.
11. Is a Rabbi and a Jewish priest one and the same?
Answer — Absolutely not! Up to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, in 70 A.D., and the scattering of the Jews throughout the earth, the priests were the officials, dignitaries, and sacred attaches of the Temple and its ceremonials. After the Temple was destroyed, the Hebraic law was kept alive in the hearts of orthodox Jews by district teachers, who merely expounded the canonical law. In other words, the difference between a Jewish priest and a rabbi might be likened to the difference between an ordained clergyman or priest of the Christian religion and a Professor of Theology in a theological seminary.
12. Why did the Destruction of the Temple destroy the Israelite priestly caste?
Answer — Because Israelite priests, strictly speaking, were personal attendants on a literal Jehovah, who, when in contact with the earthly world and His Chosen People, was assumed to be somehow attached mystically to the Ark of the Covenant. This Ark of the Covenant was carried by four men before the Israelitish hosts into battle on long pole-handles, and because Jehovah was popularly represented as being connected therewith, He literally "went before His people into battle." Sometimes the Lord God was thus captured by His puny mortal enemies — or enemies of the Israelites, and that wasn't so good. It always gave the Israelites a horrible funk to have their Lord God captured by their enemies. When the Israelites had finally conquered Canaan and had no more battles to fight, they required some place to put the Lord God. So they erected the Temple — which all good Christian Masons make such a pother about today — and stored the Ark of the Covenant, with the Lord God, in the Holy of Holies. Only the very Top-Boss priests went in and held powwow with the Lord God in the Holy of Holies. So, when the Temple was destroyed — or rather the Second Temple erected by the Jews on the return from the Babylonian Captivity — there was no place for the Ark of the Covenant or the Lord God, therefore no Holy of Holies, therefore no possibility of personal attendants, therefore no priests excepting as they were designated as such by courtesy title. The Lord God escaped His coffer in the Holy of Holies and presumably went back to heaven. The Ark, after many vicissitudes — and being hidden hither and yon among the cities of Asia Minor — is now credited with reposing in a sealed room in the basement of the British Museum. For political-racial reasons it is not permitted to be exhibited or examined.
13. What was the Ark of the Covenant?
Answer — The word Ark literally means: a chest or coffer for the safekeeping of any valuable thing; a depository. The Ark of the Covenant, in the synagogue or Temple of the Jews, was the chest or vessel in which the Tables of the Law were preserved. This was a small chest or coffer, three feet nine inches in length, two feet three inches in breadth, and the same in height, in which were contained the various sacred articles. It was made of shittum wood, overlaid inside and out with gold, and was covered by the Mercy Seat, called also the Propitiatory — that is, the lid or cover of propitiation. Thus, in the language of Hebrew Scripture, those sins which are forgiven are said to be covered. The orthodox Jew will scoff at the non-Jewish implication that the Lord God Himself dwelt in or near such a box, but that was the general acceptance by the populace.
14. Is there any difference between the Jehovah of the Jews and the Divine Father of Jesus as worshiped by the Christians?
Answer — There is a difference so vast as to render them practically two different personages. The word Jehovah is the modern English rendering of the Hebrew term for the Midian tribal deity, Yahvah. Moses, after he had murdered two Egyptians for their treatment of an Israelite, fled to Midian, a district across the Red Sea, south of the Land of Goshen. There he married a Midian wife and became a sheepherder. Jehovah or Yahvah was the neighborhood god of the Midianites whom Moses seized upon, and utilized, in his later politico-racial exploits back among the Egyptians. Moses claimed that this little tribal god, with all his provincial hates and lusts, was the One Lord God of all the universe. This last could only be interviewed by Moses in person, or by Aaron or his Levites when Moses wasn't around. Christ came, and got Himself hated unto crucifixion, by standing this narrow and fallacious notion of the deity on its head. Christ said that the Lord God was Universal Spirit, and that man needed no paid priest or elaborate temple ceremonials to commune with Him. This threatened the whole basic foundation of Judaism, since it counseled the masses that priests were dispensable.
Furthermore, Christ taught that the Lord God was the Father of all mankind, Jew and Gentile alike. This was insufferable to the Israelites, who had a personal monopoly on the Creator, He being their original tribal deity and they being His particular devotees. In the Ebionitic attempts to reconcile the two identities, however, early church fathers mixed the two deities hopelessly, and filled the Bible full of contradictions and paradoxes. See answer to Question 38: Who were the Ebionites?
15. What is the difference between a Jewish Temple and a Synagogue — and isn't the synagogue the Jewish Church?
Answer — The Lord God, having mystical connections with the Ark of the Covenant, could only be at the great Temple at Jerusalem, or wherever the Ark of the Covenant was, and the High Priest was handy to attend Him. There was but one Jewish Temple and that was at Jerusalem. But scattered throughout ancient Palestine, particularly after the Dispersion, were meeting-houses where the cantors did the sacred chantings on the Sabbath, and the rabbis expounded the canonical law. These were labeled Synagogues — or Community Houses. A synagogue, strictly speaking, was not a church as we Christians think today of our dedicated edifices; it was a public gathering place. Hence going into the Synagogue to teach, no more made Christ a Jew than it would make you or me a Catholic — presuming that you're a Protestant as I am — to deliver a lecture on Pure Foods in a parochial hall in Racine, Wisconsin.
16. Are the modern Jews and the ancient Israelites one and the same people?
Answer — For all practical working purposes, yes! But in the same sense that we might answer the parallel question: Are the modern Americans and the ancient Pilgrim Fathers — who landed on Plymouth Rock and started the settlement of New England — one and the same people? According to the Old Testament, which is purely a transcript of tradition and legend and not much besides, the Israelites in Egypt were divided into Twelve Tribes.
Each tribe comprised the descendants of a son of Jacob, or acknowledged tribal allegiance to one of his sons, who thereby became the tribal patriarch. Among these Twelve Tribes was one known as the Tribe of Judah. After the conquering of Canaan — exactly as this same people tried to "conquer" Germany in the past generation but was stopped by Hitler, or is now "conquering" the United States under Roosevelt — the Tribe of Judah was allotted the area of land that included the City of David, or what we know today as Jerusalem. This possession of the capital city within their particular territory, gave the Tribe of Judah a particular prominence over the other tribes. Because the Temple and the priestly caste likewise exercised functions within their allotted territory, the Tribe of Judah became the more race-and-theology conscious. And the members of this Tribe "carried on" the more fanatically and zealously in preserving the legends, traditions, and literature of all the tribes, after the city's and temple's destruction. It is the progeny of this one tribe of Israelites, the Tribe of Judah, that we identify as today's Jews. The members of the other tribes of Israelites have largely disappeared from the world's face.
17: Were there no Jews in the world before the coming of Jacob's sons to Egypt?
Answer — There have always been the same elements among all populations of the earth that we identify today as Judaists. The very ancient Egyptian and Sumerian chronicles refer to them as the People of Set, or "Spirit of Disorder in Governments." No matter what conditions they found politically or socially in the lands wherein they were received, they always wanted them changed, to conform to their own eccentric notions. The Egyptians seem to have referred to them as the "Set-un" Set being the god of Darkness and Destruction, and ''un'' being the suffix meaning "people." We derive our modern word Satan from this source. When Joseph escaped from his brethren, and went down into Egypt to work himself into the good graces of Pharaoh, and his brothers later followed him and "multiplied," this racial element was designated strictly among Pharaoh's subjects as the Tribe of the Habiru. From the term "Habiru" the term "Hebrew" comes down to us. But Jews as we know them today were not so called till after the "conquering" or "overrunning" of Canaan and its capital city of Jerusalem, and the allotting of the land whereon it stood to the Tribe of Judah. The word Jew is a sort of slang contraction of Judaist or member of the specific Tribe of Judah, only we spell it J-e-w instead of the terser J-u.
18. Was there really an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob?
Answer — We do not know! We have only tradition and legend to account for them. The Old Testament says such persons existed, but the contents of the Old Testament were passed down by word of mouth through a hundred generations before they became written on scrolls of sheepskin as a permanent literary record. At the time of the destruction of the first Temple and the Captivity, most of the records were destroyed. When the Jews came back from the Captivity and had completed the Second Temple, rebuilding it in tawdry form upon the ruins of the first Temple, Ezra the High Priest came running wildly to his compatriots one morning and proclaimed that he had "found" the ancient records miraculously intact down behind the altar in the Holy of Holies. Unbiased common sense tends to the conclusion that there was nothing mysterious or miraculous about it. Ezra rewrote the legends and traditions of his people from memory, naturally altering them to make the members of the Tribe of Judah the "big shots" of such chronicles. It is still this narrative reported by Ezra as thus "restored," that our Old Testament version of the Egyptian episode comes from.
19. Did not Christ's words confirm that there was an Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
Answer — None of us know accurately what Christ's real words were. He never left a scrap of paper or parchment penned by Himself personally. All accounts of His words were purported as taken down by His disciples or followers, but even their original manuscripts were lost, and all that we have to go by, are copies of copies. How these were altered, edited, augmented, deleted, and transformed, is described in the answer to Question 40 further on: What is the Vulgate?
20. Why does the Old Testament refer to the early Hebrews as Israelites?
Answer — Because, before the coming of the legendary Moses, they were followers of the same worship as their neighbors, the Egyptians. That is, they were worshipers of Isis, goddess of life and fecundity, co-deity with the Sun. The word Israel should be broken down into three syllables: Is-Ra-El. "Is" stands for Isis; "Ra" means the name of the god of the sun, represented like Horus — with the head of a hawk and bearing the disk of the sun atop it. "El" means "high Lord" or that which is over all, as expressed by the modern word Elevated. "Ites" means those who follow or belong to. So Israelites, translating literally, were "those who followed or belonged to the High Deities Ra and Isis." Moses is popularly supposed to have changed all that, when he introduced his Midian tribal deity Yahvah to the people of the Habiru. Today the word Israelites clings to the Jews merely as a symbol for their identification as one-time worshipers of the sun.
21. Have we any other accounts than those of the Old Testament on the advent and adventures of the Hebrews in Egypt?
Answer — Yes! Lord Breasted and others have recovered scores of papyrus scrolls and other records in very ancient Egyptian tombs along the Nile. These have been translated from time to time, but modern Jews do their best to discourage such translations and suppress printed copies of them, because they brutally contradict the pro-Jewish accounts in the Old Testament.
22. Were the Children of Israel persecuted by the Egyptians?
Answer — Undoubtedly! — but in the same manner that the Nazis of today are persecuting the Jews of the Fatherland, and from similar causations. The Children of Israel were not "persecuted" until they had overrun the land of Egypt, corrupted the Pharaohan court and Egyptian institutions, introduced — or tried to introduce — an ancient version of the NRA into Egyptian politics and economics, and subverted and debased pure-blooded Egyptian subjects. Finally Moses undertook to get them out, precisely as many an international Jewish or Zionist leader is trying to get the Jews out of Germany today but meeting with poor success because such an exodus means taking so much wealth — or as the Israelites expressed it, "spoils" — out of the country. When Pharaoh finally gave his consent to the departure of the Hebrews, he discovered to his consternation that they had taken with them vast amounts of portable valuables, and he chased after them with a force of chariots to recover this loot.
23. Was Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea while the favored Hebrews passed over to Midian unscathed?
Answer — He could not have been, unless his royal body was recovered, because his fairly well-authenticated mummy is preserved today in the British Museum.
24. Is the Exodus story a myth?
Answer — No, but it appears to be a complete subversion of what actually took place. The debasing influence of the Habiru or People of Set became so great, that from time to time severe pogroms occurred. The Egyptians would gladly have let the Habiru depart, had the latter been willing to go empty-handed. But taking their property, much of it gotten as dishonestly as the New-Deal Jews of today have gotten their fortunes by exploitation or open graft, represented a severe economic problem. In the Scriptures as written by Jews, however, and thence handed to us for acceptance, all this hocus-pocus is glorified and blessed by the benedictions of Yahvah. As for the Chosen-People notion's being fallacious, we have the statement of a Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy of London, who declared quite frankly: "We the Jews invented the myth of being God's Chosen People!" Later, Dr. Levy died a very sudden and mysterious death. You can draw your own conclusions.
25. Did Moses write the first five books of the Old Testament?
Answer — He could not have done so. At the time of Moses, 1,440 years before Christ, the Hebrews possessed no language of their own in which to write it. At the most, he would have had to write in Egyptian hieroglyphics or picture-graphs. Not till the Hebrews came into contact with the Phoenician peoples after settlement in the Land of Canaan, did they appropriate the strange block-letter alphabetical system that we recognize as the Hebrew of today. Even so, it contained no vowels for many generations. Try to write a page of this booklet in English, but leave out all the vowels, and see how accurately you get the exact sense of what is meant. P-T might stand for pat, pet, pit, pot, or put. How would you know which of these five words I might mean, were the vowels not used? So how can we tell what Moses, or any other ancient teacher or "law-giver" said literally?
26. Why do we call the Jews "Semites"?
Answer — Because the forebears of the Habiru in Egypt were credited with having come from Arabia and the Arabian peninsula. This district, said legend, was allotted to Shem, a son of Noah, upon descent from the mythical Ark. The habitat of the Habiru was likewise described by some authorities as comprising Abyssinia, Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria. From the name Shem, we get the term "Semites" or probably, "Shemites." But the Arabs, and some Persians, are likewise designated as Semites — without having a drop of Jewish blood in them. It is strictly a territorial designation, as today we term all people Americans who dwell within the territorial confines of the United States.
27. Have the Jews the right to designate Palestine as their Homeland?
Answer — No more and no less than either the Arabs or Syrians.
When the Habiru were chased out of Egypt by Pharaoh's charioteers, they "wandered" for forty years in the Wilderness — a district no bigger than our State of Connecticut — and then under Joshua "cased" the Land of Canaan, as bandits "case" a bank they intend to rob today. In other words, they got the lay of the land, and then proceeded to attack the Canaanites and take their property and real estate away from them with the avowed encouragement of the petty Midian Yahvah. Ultimately they succeeded in this pillage and sabotage, and parceled out the conquered territory among the Tribes. David became eventually their greatest political-warrior king, and his illegitimate son, Solomon, their most voluptuous ruler. After Solomon's death, the tribal territories were divided under the rule of his two sons. One son succeeded to rulership over the lands of the Tribes of Judah and Beniamin, and this coalition came to he known as the Southern Kingdom; the other son succeeded to the rulership of the remaining tribes north of Jerusalem, known as the Northern Kingdom.
28. Why were the Jews carried captive to Babylon?
Answer — Because Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian monarch, became utterly outraged over the manner in which the Hebrews to the southwest of his country and capital were preying upon his caravans and trade routes to Egypt. In 585 B.C. he sent an army down into Palestine, defeated the Judaists, and carried them off to Babylon, razing Solomon's Temple and leaving Jerusalem a waste. The distance that the Judaists were transported was only a couple of hundred miles, however. Remember, that the size of all Palestine is only 75 miles wide by 193 miles long — about the same territorial coverage as the State of Massachusetts. The duration of this Captivity is usually reckoned as 70 years, although, strictly speaking, it lasted only 56 years. A great part of the remaining Northern Tribes had previously been taken captive to Assyria for similar maraudings.
29. Why do today's Jews make such an ungodly pother about returning to Palestine as a race?
Answer — Most of it is lachrymose propaganda. The Jews do not want to return to Palestine. In the first place, a country only 75 miles wide and 193 miles long couldn't contain them. In the second place, they wouldn't be happy living with one another, having to endure one another, and being without Gentiles to exploit. History has proven this; it is no particular libel. The true reasons why the Jews are making such a clamor over having Palestine "returned" to them, is the presence of the stupendous mineral and chemical wealth in the Dead Sea, which would go to them along with the presentation, and the fact that in Palestine they would be in a strategic position to introduce Jewish-Communist Russia down to the Suez Canal and thereby sever a major artery between the British Isles and India. This would inflict a mortal wound to the British Commonwealth of Nations. Material gain is usually the real basis of any project over which the Jew waxes sentimental!
30. How many Jews are there in the whole world today?
Answer — Jewish populations are usually deceptive when given in the census figures, because Jews are forever trying to hide their Jewish nationality or race. Furthermore, when Jewish authorities compile a strictly Jewish census, they count males who have attained to their majorities only. As the average human family of any race customarily consists of five persons, we are safe in multiplying whatever figures the Jews give us of their numbers by five, or adding four times the original figure. Gentiles do not possess an accurate count of all the Jews in all the countries of the earth, but 80 millions — men, women, and children — would not be a wild estimate. Doubtless it is nearer a hundred millions, considering that the earth holds 2 billion inhabitants. That there are something like 25 million Jews, males and of age, within the civilized countries of the earth is a sound possibility. Of these, some 12,046,648 are in the United States at the present time. Only ten years ago, the figure, from Jewish sources, was set at 4,228,029. In other words, Jews in the United States have increased by 7,818,619 since 1927 — an average of something like 15,000 a week! Fully half the world's Jews would seem to be within the United States at the present time. And arrangements are being completed under the American Jewish leaders and the Roosevelt Administration to bring the rest here as swiftly as it can be managed!
31. What is the Jewish Sanhedrin?
Answer — It is — or was — the supreme international council of the Jews, established at the time of the Maccabees, probably under John Hyrcanus. It consisted of 71 members, and was presided over by the Nasi — or "prince" — at whose side stood the Ab-Beth-Din, or "Father of the Tribunal." Its members represented the different castes and classes of Hebrew society. There were priests, elders — that is, heads of families — men of age and experience, scribes or doctors of law, and others exalted by eminent learning — the sole condition of acceptance into this assembly. The presidency was usually conferred upon the High Priest, if he were sufficiently erudite, otherwise "he who excels all others in wisdom." The limits of its jurisdiction are not known with certainty but the supreme decision over life and death was exclusively in its hands. With the exception of Sabbath and feast days, it met daily. After the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, it finally established itself, after many migrations, in Babylon. During the Middle Age, we find, it met in Constantinople.
32. Is the Sanhedrin still in active existence?
Answer — Gentiles who have made a deep study of the Jewish Question and international organizations and activities of Jews, have ample evidence for believing so. But the Jews seem to have reasons for keeping its existence a secret till their fancied or anticipated reestablishment of their material kingdom over the earth is accomplished.
33. Do Jews actually believe that the day is coming when they are going to be supreme masters over all the other races and peoples of earth?
Answer — Orthodox Jews most certainly do! Apostate Jews are cynical about the whole business, but are by no means averse to looting all Gentiles and obtaining their wealth as they may discern opportunity. This unhallowed business in action is the world-wide movement known as Communism. Gentiles and the world's laboring classes are the instruments utilized to get this accomplished. But most Jews seem to have altered their notions about such dominance by modern Israel's coming about through the appearance of one man, a messiah, or anointed leader. They now interpret the ancient prophecies, that "the Jews as a race shall be the world messiah" and make the world over into one united kingdom with a single great Jew as supreme dictator. See the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Talmud is literally loaded with such interpretations, too. The orthodox Jews consider the matter idealistically. The apostate, or atheistic Jews, are riding along perfectly content to profit from the gains of Jewry as a whole, and despoiling the modern Egyptians with zest, whenever and wherever they are permitted the chance.
34. Are the Jews a united people for the achievement of a world messiahship?
Answer — They most certainly are not! They are guilty of quite as much racial discontent, brawling, and general psychopathy among themselves as against the Gentiles. And this state of things has always been true. From the return from the Captivity, down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the scattering of the Jews throughout the nations of the earth, the average length of reign of the Jewish kings — and one Jewish queen, Alexandria — was no longer than two years. Jews can't agree on rulers, even among themselves. Yet they think themselves capable of ruling all the other nations, comprising millions upon millions of Gentiles. The perpetual cry of their leaders, from Rabbi Ashe to Rabbi Wise, has forever been: "Stop your fighting and get together!" But the Jew can't "get together," not even with his own breed. The phobia of "being different" has bitten into him too deeply. The only thing that really drives the Jews into any sort of unity is persecution or violence directed against all classes of them as a people. Then they coalesce like sheep in a fold, all packed together and wailing to high heaven — only sheep don't wail. Only Jews wail. And how they wail!
35. How do Sephardic Jews differ from Ashkenazic Jews?
Answer — The Sephardim are the Jews of the Mediterranean Basin — Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and later Dutch and English Jews — who have diluted their Jewish blood with these Latin and Nordic races by cross-marrying to such an extent that Gentile characteristics predominate. They can usually be identified only by Jewish names — if they have not changed them — or by the Jewish temperament as it exercises in times of crisis or vicissitude. Sephardic men have clean-chiseled Grecian profiles and lips. Sephardic women are dark-eyed and strikingly beautiful. The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, are the Russian, Polish, or German Jews — in other words, Mongoloid Jews — who were swept into Asia and Europe when the Assyrian king "scattered" the Northern Tribes and replaced them with Gallic peoples brought down by him from the Danube Valley. The Ashkenazic Jews are possessed of the "schnozzle" nose, derived from Assyrian interbreedings, the small round head on the thick neck, and the gross and vulgar mannerisms making them so offensive to Gentiles of reserve and Christians of refinement. When the Ashkenazim crossed their Mediterranean Hebrew or Sumerian with the Russian, Polish, or German tongues, they got a hybrid vernacular that is called Yiddish. Generally speaking, it can be said that the great mass of the Sephardim are orthodox Jews, and the great mass of the Ashkenazim are apostate Jews. The Sephardim uniformly hold that Judaists constitute the devotees of a religion; the Ashkenazim uniformly hold that the Judaists are a race or political unit. The Sephardim believe in gaining ascendancy over the non-Jewish races by strategy and peaceful penetration; the more or less apostate Ashkenazim believe in going straight to their ascendancy by crack-down and violence. Thereby do we witness Communism being mainly supported and advanced by Ashkenazic Jews, while the Sephardim behold it in an increasing alarm, sensing that the world's Gentiles may eventually penalize or exterminate all Jews for the lusts, hatreds, and atrocities of the Communistic Ashkenazim, and they find themselves included.
36. To which branch of Jews did Jesus Christ belong?
Answer — Jesus Christ belonged to neither branch! Shocking as it becomes to modern Christians, an examination of the evidence now coming to light reveals that Jesus Christ was not a Jew or any other kind of an Israelite! This, of course, strikes at the very core and heart of present Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, sooner or later, Aryan Christians have got to face the facts. It takes a whole volume in itself to present these facts, but such a volume is available. In the first place, the only true Jews are descendants of the Tribe of Judah, and even if Biblical bases be taken for argument, the New Testament says in a score of places that He emphatically did not come from that tribe. Christ was a Galilean and a Nazarene. Galilee got its name from the Gauls, brought down by the Assyrian king when he denuded the northern kingdom of Hebrews. The proper spelling of the word should be Gaulilee. Over and over, too, the New Testament writings speak of "Galilee of the Gentiles" ... The genealogies of Christ in the two New Testament Gospels do not determine the matter, since they do not agree, and since they do not agree, neither one of them can be established as authentic. Moreover, Jews reckoned genealogies through the father, always. Christians are confronted by the dilemma that if they make a tenet of their faith that Mary conceived Christ by the Holy Ghost, then she did not conceive Christ by Joseph her husband; and if she did not do the latter, then the Hebrew genealogies, tracing Jesus' ancestry back to David and Abraham, are fabrications. Jesus did not speak the prevalent Jewish tongue of the period; He conversed in what was a Gentile language. At no place did He Himself confirm that He was a Jew, and the words before Pilate, "Thou sayest!" were merely a colloquialism, not of acquiescence to Pilate's remark but of the thought: "You're doing the talking, I'm keeping quiet!" This great question about the Jewishness or non-Jewishness of Jesus, manifestly cannot be handled in a handbook of this size. If you are interested to read the complete attestments of his Gentile blood and background, send to the publishers of this booklet for the
lengthier volume.
37. Why did the Jews deny Christ?
Answer — Because He would not subscribe to the tenet that their little Midianite tribal deity, Yahvah, could possibly be the Great Creator of the Universe and the author of all living things, or that such a Great Creator had a Chosen People, or that the Hebrew religion as the Sanhedrin propounded it, was a true religion, or that the Jews as such were due to inherit the earth and rulership over all its institutions. No man who thus struck at the roots of Judaism, could possibly be their long looked-for Messiah. Furthermore, Christ was the outstanding "Jew-Baiter" of His day. He called the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites and whited sepulchers, and indicted the Sanhedrin to the teeth of its big shots as being "of the Synagogue of Satan." In other words, by not being willing to "play the Jew game" to other nations and races, Christ was identified as an "enemy" of the Jews; and the Jews know of but one way in which to treat their enemies: Kill them!
38. Why does the Bible, as the "Inspired Word of God," persistently represent Christ as being a Jew?
Answer — Because the Biblical manuscripts, comprising the Old and New Testaments as we know them today, were written under Jewish auspices, by writers striving to reconcile the prophecies of the Hebraic Old Testament with the astounding and not-controllable spread of the new Christianity. Obviously, if Christianity continued to grow and strengthen, in time it would supersede and exterminate Judaism altogether. So the Judaists got busy and worked out a clever ruse that, in practice, came to be called Ebionitism. They "tied into" the aggressive and expanding new religion by preaching that Christianity was the outgrowth of Judaism. Because Christianity was built upon a blanket castigation of everything Judaistic, to be an utter Christian one had to go through the same process and first be a Judaist. After one had first acknowledged everything Judaistic, including the priority of authority of the law of Moses, the authenticity of the Hebrew prophets and prophecies, and the whole patriarchal background of Judaism, then one was ready to take the next step into Christianity. Thus, one of the most important tenets of this atrocious subversion was to make the text impress upon the would-be convert's mind that even Jesus Himself was born a Jew. Therefore if there hadn't been any Jews, there wouldn't have been any Jesus, and if there hadn't been any Jesus, there wouldn't have been any Christian religion. This subversion and rewriting of the sacred text was carried to so bold a point that in one place it is crassly and satanically stated that . . . "salvation is of the Jews!" Salvation is nothing of the sort. Salvation is of the Christ, and the Holy Spirit! To explain the point in the modern scene, it is like saying that after a few hundred years the German Jews will get together and subvert the whole Nazi program in history by giving it out that Hitler was a Jew — because he lived, operated, and instructed in German-Jewish Germany — and that one couldn't become a good Nazi without first subscribing to the tenets of predatory Jewry, because otherwise what would Nazism have had, to be different from or agitate against?
39. What was Ebionitism?
Answer — The subversive instructors, sent out by the Jerusalem authorities to imbed such notions in the minds of early Christian converts, were called Ebionites. It was their job and commission to make the very Judaism against which Christ inveighed, the foundation and background of the new Christian theology. Christ must be made to say that He came "to fulfil the law of Moses." Thereby the law of Moses became quite as essential to the new religion as did Christ. And so on, throughout a hundred scriptural passages. Again, we can compare it to the Jews of a hundred years hence making Hitler to say "I came to fulfil the law of Karl Marx!" These Ebionites had their headquarters in the Greek city of Pella, so that they would not be openly recognized as subversive missionaries for the Jerusalem Sanhedrinists. And it was in, or near, Pella that the New Testament manuscripts were compiled. The Apostle Paul once cut up an awful shindy about the mischief of Ebionitism, and said that the Doctrine of the Trinity had nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. It was a clean-cut departure from it. Yet when the Gospels came to be translated into other languages for our modern world, the New Testament Gospels were dyed dripping wet with the subvertings and deceptions of Ebionitism. Christian people today who say, "Yes, I know the Jews crucified Christ, and I know He said some atrocious things against them; also I know that Jews are practically wrecking our United States with their crazy incompetence — all the same we have to remember that they are God's Chosen People, " — these are but modern Ebionites, acquiescing to the very doctrine that the Sanhedrin went to much trouble and expense to promulgate and get incorporated into the Christian's "holy" books.
40. Isn't the Bible the Inspired Word of God?
Answer — No! Not literally considered! It cannot be such, because it holds too many contradictions and paradoxes in its present form, and a Perfect Creator could not indite a contradictory or paradoxical book. This view is confirmed by no less an authority than St. Jerome. About the year 370 A. D. he translated the whole Bible into Latin. Damascus, who was Pope at that time, had asked him to attempt such translation. Jerome, in a letter to Damascus, reported on his work in connection with the new version. He wrote that "it would be a dangerous presumption" to attempt to issue a Bible which would reproduce the correct text, since the existing copies of the original documents were scattered all over the world and no two of them were alike! Jerome was now called to judge between them. If he did so, and produced a Bible, it would be so unlike anything currently passing for the Bible, that he would be dubbed a forger and fabricator. He would be charged with having altered words and sentences, having omitted something here or inserted something there, or trying to "improve" on originals elsewhere. And then he added a remark that strikes a body blow at all who hold today's Bible to be the unadulterated Word of God: "Even those who condemn me as an impious forger must admit that we can no longer speak of such a thing as Truth, where there are variations in that which is said to be true." In his letter, Jerome went on to state how the many discrepancies between the copies of the original text can be explained. Some copyists, he said, were deliberate criminal forgers. Others were conceited enough to attempt to improve on the text, but in their inexperience only succeeded in impairing it. Still others dozed while they copied, and so left out, misread or misplaced words and passages. To say that God nevertheless caused Absolute Truth to result from all this, is to rationalize an absurdity.
41. What is the Vulgate?
Answer — The Vulgate is the Bible that St. Jerome produced, none-the-less, when he went ahead as Damascus directed and "cleaned up" prevalent "Holy" Writ after his own notions and erudition. But he did precisely what he lamented that others had done before him. He followed his own personal opinion, altered words and passages, made omissions, and wrote into it such stuff as suited his caprice. Maybe God was using St. Jerome as editor. But if He did, then assuredly God showed Himself as naught but a Papist of the period. Then, by decree of the Council of Trent, it was declared that the Vulgate contained the inspired Word of God. Jerome, of course, was a top-notch Ebionite. Everything in the New Testament rested four-square upon the Old. The Jews were still God's Chosen People. Jesus was a Jew. One could not subscribe to being a good Christian without first subscribing to being a good Judaist and accepting all the patriarchal fol-de-rol — much of it unmoral and obscene — which Christianity appeared to exterminate and supplant. So the Jews today profit. And the modern rabbi cries to the anti-Semite battling for survival of his precious Christianity: "If you repudiate us, you repudiate the Savior whom we gave you!"
The insolence of it!
42. How can we condemn or persecute people who cannot help having been born into the Jewish race?
Answer — We should consider that we are neither condemning nor persecuting, when we look squarely at the Jewish Enigma in modern society, recognize its fundamentals for what they are, and declare that after due discrimination, we do not want them further materialized in a country which recognizes the Christian moral code as all that epitomizes true spiritual greatness. Disapproving of the Jew and his mischievous background, moving to harness him from subverting Christian institutions or debasing Christian culture, is not persecution, excepting as the Jew himself seizes upon that ruse to blunt the edge of the resistance sent against him. That a child is born to Jewish parents is neither here nor there. Children are likewise born to parents who are burglars, counterfeiters, and highwaymen. Is that any reason why we should not raise up authorities to put a stop to robbery, counterfeiting, or thuggery? If one is metaphysically inclined, it is probably true that a given child is born to Jewish parents because "like attracts like" and children are born to parents toward whom they have karmic adjustments to work out. If one is strictly orthodox in his beliefs, a Jewish child, born with Jewish blood in his veins, and reared in a Jewish persecution-complex from infancy, must stand elementally with his people till the two great antithetical philosophies of Judaism and Christianity move to a crisis and one bests the other for good and all. This Jewish child, as it grows, has ample opportunity to discern wherein the conduct or ethics of its people are right or wrong. If it disapproves, then it can live its own life righteously. That is its prerogative in Free Will. But again, condemnation or persecution in regard to the Jew is no more than the disapproval and legal restraint that society throws around any individual whose ways do not work for the universal good. Let us not be Ebionites in this item, either. If we want a clean country to live in, we've got to be willing to do our parts toward its constant sanitation.
43. What is to be the future of the Jews when this present paroxysm of anti-Semitism has run its course?
Answer — The Jew as an unruly and wilful race-child, is going to be made by the more sedate parental races to submit himself to wholesome discipline, get over his obsession that God loves him more than his Gentile neighbor, stop the glorification of personal and racial dishonesties, and take his place in world society as a chastened and penitent citizen. He is to have branded into his eternal consciousness that being classed as a Jew is tantamount to being classed as an immature or fledgling Spirit, with much to learn culturally and esoterically before he may call himself a true worldly resident — thereby consulting his own good as much as the good of his associates. Probably thousands will lose their present lives in the process, but that will all be part of the general education. Let us waste no lacrimose sentimentality over these great elemental issues between distinctive blocs of the human race. They are set in movement to teach the mass populace something which it very much requires to know permanently.
44. Why jump on all the Jews, just because some of them misbehave? Aren't there any good Jews?
Answer — To judge as between good and bad, we must first have a standard. When the question is put: "Aren't there any good Jews?" the implication is strong that Jews judged by the Christian moral standard and Christian social ethics, are meant. But on the other hand, the Jew himself doesn't use — but repudiates — the Christian moral standard and Christian social ethics. To be a "good" Jew, to himself, he must be a very Judaistic Jew — meaning a Jew who follows literally the instructings of the two Talmuds and generally considers the Christians as having been put on earth for Jewish exploitation or human drudgery.
To be a "good" Jew to his Christian neighbor, he must, in the sense of doctrine and logic, be a "bad" Jew to the orthodox Talmudist. So a good Jew is a bad Jew to the Talmudist, and a bad Jew to the Talmudist is a good Jew to the Christian. If we want to ask: "Are there not some Jews that obey the laws, conduct themselves decorously, and do not lie, cheat, or steal?" it is possible that they exist as individuals. But it is the damning indictment of this race and its ethics that they thereby prove themselves exceptions to the racial rule. The Jew is, first of all, himself! As Christianity is the antithesis or opposite of Judaism, so the Jew must forever be something "different" from the Christian Gentile. We have to look upon him as a Jew, racially and theologically, and say: "There may be some Jews who are a little less Jewish than their fellows." But we are herein considering Jews as a race, not as individuals. The moment the Jew starts being too "good" according to the Christian's standard, he ceases being a Jew. But his rabbi will soon get after him if he doesn't watch out!
45. Is it true that all Jews are Communists?
Answer — In fairness to our Jewish citizens, no! No more than all Americans, by the very fact of being Americans, are necessarily good patriots. It has been repeatedly said, not without truth, that Communism itself is Jewish. By that is meant that the system known as Communism was conceived by a Jew — Karl Heinrich Mordecai, alias Marx — and since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 has been uniformly promoted and propagandized by Jews. We find the foul egg which later hatched into Communism described in the correspondence between Marx and Baruch Levy:
"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own messiah. It will attain world domination by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, by the annihilation of monarchy which has always been the support of individualism, and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this new world order, the Children of Israel, who are scattered over the world, will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition; and this will more particularly be the case if they succeed in getting the working masses under their control. The governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will, through the victory of the proletariat, fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property, and everywhere to make use of the resources of the State. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which it is said, that when the Messianic time has come, the Jews will have the property of the whole world in their hands."
From this scheme, the main mass of the world's Jews have, of course, not dissented. The Jew, Marx, went ahead with his Scientific Socialism , and found the Ashkenazic Jews uniformly sympathetic and endorsive of what he proposed to accomplish. You will note therefore, that when Communism first came into post-war Russia, not only were Lenin and Trotsky both Ashkenazic Jews, but of 504 commissars at the head of the Politburo running Bolshevia, 496 of them were Ashkenazic Hebrews, and the other eight renegade white Russians or Armenians. That's the way Communism works in practice and why we have the reasonable right to say that Communism is Jewish — or Ashkenazic World Jewry in Action. The Sephardim, in the main, believe more in gaining their ends over the Gentiles by strategy and political maneuvers. They are horrified, more or less, at what aroused Gentiles may do to all Jews for developing the nightmare of Communism, and in many cases work as they can to lay or defeat it. At the same time, they do not want to go so far in defeating it that they join openly with Gentiles or destroy Jewish racial gains to the moment.
THESE 45 Questions, of course, by no means comprise all the interrogations which can be projected regarding the people known as Jews. But they are the 45 Questions that are most constantly asked by common folk, seeking to know why the Jews meet with trouble everywhere they take up residence. In course of time there may be a second booklet gotten out, answering questions of importance that have been omitted for lack of space or overlooked.
What has been printed herein, however, should be sufficient to give the average American a fair working knowledge of the background of the Jewish Problem.
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!"
http://iamthewitness.com
War Is a Racket
War Is A Racket
By Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
• Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
• Educated: Haverford School
• Married: Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
• Awarded two congressional medals of honor:
1. Capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
2. Capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
• Distinguished service medal, 1919
• Major General - United States Marine Corps
• Retired Oct. 1, 1931
• On leave of absence to act as director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
• Lecturer — 1930’s
• Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
• Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940
For more information about Major General Butler, contact the United States Marine Corps.
Contents
Chapter 1: War Is A Racket
Chapter 2: Who Makes The Profits?
Chapter 3: Who Pays The Bills?
Chapter 4: How To Smash This Racket!
Chapter 5: To Hell With War!
CHAPTER ONE
War Is A Racket
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep’s eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other’s throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people — not those who fight and pay and die — only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war — anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter’s dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war — a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit — fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?
Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington’s warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people — who do not profit.
CHAPTER TWO
Who Makes The Profits?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.
Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company — and you can’t have a war without nickel — showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public — even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought — and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it — so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches — one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 — count them if you live long enough — was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them — a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers — all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment — knapsacks and the things that go to fill them — crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them — and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up — and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee —with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator — to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses — that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
CHAPTER THREE
Who Pays The Bills?
Who provides the profits — these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them — in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us — the people — got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par — and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men — men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement — the young boys couldn’t stand it.
That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead — they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded — they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too — they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam — on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain — with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don’t forget — the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share — at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system — the medal business — the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance — something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back — when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly — his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too — as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.
CHAPTER FOUR
How To Smash This Racket!
WELL, it’s a racket, all right.
A few profit — and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation — it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages — all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers — yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders — everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn’t they?
They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket — that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people — those who do the suffering and still pay the price — make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant — all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war — voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms — to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide — and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.
A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.
At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
1. We must take the profit out of war.
2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
CHAPTER FIVE
To Hell With War!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won’t.
So . . . "
Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don’t mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war — even the munitions makers.
So...I say,
TO HELL WITH WAR!
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
http://iamthewitness.com
By Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
• Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
• Educated: Haverford School
• Married: Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
• Awarded two congressional medals of honor:
1. Capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
2. Capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
• Distinguished service medal, 1919
• Major General - United States Marine Corps
• Retired Oct. 1, 1931
• On leave of absence to act as director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
• Lecturer — 1930’s
• Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
• Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940
For more information about Major General Butler, contact the United States Marine Corps.
Contents
Chapter 1: War Is A Racket
Chapter 2: Who Makes The Profits?
Chapter 3: Who Pays The Bills?
Chapter 4: How To Smash This Racket!
Chapter 5: To Hell With War!
CHAPTER ONE
War Is A Racket
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep’s eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other’s throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people — not those who fight and pay and die — only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war — anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter’s dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war — a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit — fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?
Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington’s warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people — who do not profit.
CHAPTER TWO
Who Makes The Profits?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.
Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company — and you can’t have a war without nickel — showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public — even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought — and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it — so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches — one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 — count them if you live long enough — was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them — a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers — all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment — knapsacks and the things that go to fill them — crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them — and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up — and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee —with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator — to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses — that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
CHAPTER THREE
Who Pays The Bills?
Who provides the profits — these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them — in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us — the people — got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par — and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men — men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement — the young boys couldn’t stand it.
That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead — they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded — they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too — they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam — on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain — with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don’t forget — the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share — at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system — the medal business — the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance — something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back — when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly — his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too — as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.
CHAPTER FOUR
How To Smash This Racket!
WELL, it’s a racket, all right.
A few profit — and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation — it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages — all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers — yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders — everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn’t they?
They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket — that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people — those who do the suffering and still pay the price — make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant — all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war — voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms — to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide — and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.
A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.
At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
1. We must take the profit out of war.
2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
CHAPTER FIVE
To Hell With War!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won’t.
So . . . "
Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don’t mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war — even the munitions makers.
So...I say,
TO HELL WITH WAR!
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
http://iamthewitness.com
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