Digest of World Press Opinion

Comparing Sir Oswald Mosley with Hitler and predicting that Mosley may come to power in England because the average Englishman is too indolent to bother about polities, Johannes Steel writes in the New York Post:

The new Mosley campaign is an exact replica of Hitler’s early campaigns. The dominant note is the undisguised and vehement anti-Semitism expressed in a terminology which is taken word by word from the Nazi example.

The English may be nice people, and w##e it is true that they have a great sense for fair play and a fairly good sense of values, any one who saw the six or seven thousand people literally go mad in the Albert Hall when the British “Pied Piper of Hamlin’ talked about “the sweepings of the Ghettoes” or saw him madly cheered as he revived obscene fairy tales and the faked legend of the Elders of Zion, must have shuddered and, indeed, have asked, “What is England coming to?”

I have seen Hitler’s irresistible efforts of agitation and demagoguery in action; I have seen how essentially sane people in the course of three years were hypnotized into convulsions of class hatred. Thus I recognize well the symptoms of any similar development.

I cannot understand it any more, and while I know that many skilled observers will say that I don’t know what I am talking about, I repeat that Mosley has found the formula to transform thirty-five million level-headed Englishmen into madmen of the same caliber as their German cousins.

Before Mosley started on his recent anti-Semitic campaign, his Jewish friends in the city candidly reminded him that his late wife, Lady Cynthia, was a descendant of the prominent Jewish Leiter family of Chicago and that his own Dutch ancestors were Jewish. He reassured them that his anti-Semitism was a matter of tactics “only to provide the emotional appeal for his campaign.”

HEINE PUT REICH PAGANS IN BAD SPOT

The Manchester Guardian comments editorially on the embarrassment Heine’s “Lorelei” has created among Germans, as follows:

The bald announcement from Berlin that “that part of the Middle Rhine between St. Goar and Oberwesel where the currents do not permit of two lines of steamer traffic” is soon to be controlled by traffic lights like those in the most commonplace streets of Cologne or Manchester sounds as though it may deal a final blow to an already damaged legend.

For the dangerous currents referred to in the announcement are those that swirl around the broad base of the Lorelei or Lurley, the towering rock on the top of which it has been supposed that a legendary maiden is sitting, combing her golden hair, while she melodiously lures mariners to their destruction on the reefs below. It all seemed a sufficiently Teutonic variant of classical myth until it was remembered that the charming song which had kept it alive was written by Heine, the Jew.

The discovery that such a frank piece of Germanic paganism could bear the Semitic taint then led to many patriotic embarrassments, for the ballad had even been included in one of the early Nazi collections of “Songs of the Homeland.”

For generations the pilots who steer the Rhine pleasure steamers round the rock had made every journey to the accompaniment of hearty toasts in Rhenish and the lusty singing of the song. Even today older travelers are still sometimes heard piping up the familiar strains as the ship puffs away from the St. Goar quay, and though younger and more up-to-date patriots may counter with the jerky affirmations of the “Horst Wessel Song,” they do not always shout the louder.

MORE COMMENT ON BLACKSHIRT LEADER

The New Statesman and Nation, published in London, commenting upon Sir Oswald Mosley’s anti-Semitic speech at a London public meeting, states:

Let no one after this meeting say that anti-Semitism is not dangerous in England. Sir Oswald’s anti – Semitic passages were wildly, madly cheered, from all parts of the hall. People rose in their seats and yelled delight when he accused the Jews of trying to, drag England into war with Germany, of attacking Blackshirts (he quoted some foreign names of men charged with violence against Fascists in the courts), of blackmailing the press and of destroying England by their international financial control. (I agreed with some of his remarks, about the influence of the international finance, but cannot see why the Jewish banker is better or worse than the Gentile. Actually the proportion of Jewish financiers in the city is very small. He said, amid terrific applause, that it is not “the sweepings from the ghettoes of Europe” that the Fascists are interested in, but “it is the big men we are after, and, believe me, we know who they are.”

Apropos of the remark, I will disclose a recent incident. I met a very wealthy Jewish financier the other day—one of the men presumably that Sir Oswald is “after.” He told me that he was not troubled about Fascism in this country. He had made discreet inquiries about Mosley’s real attitude, and had been given complete assurance that he did not really intend to damage the financiers or the Jews. His attack on the city was merely propaganda and not really part of his programme! You see the technique? Hitler got money from the big German Jews by the same tactics. The Fascist leader stumps the country, rousing intense hatred of the Jews and the financier; privately he lets the big Jews and financiers know that he values their support in saving capitalism from the “Left,” and that his atack on them is only poppycock for the multitude. Pretty, is it not?

UNION ORGAN BERATES PELLEY AND SHIRTS

Commenting on how the Silver Shirts are utilizing the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” for their anti-Semitic propaganda in America, the Advance, the official organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, writes:

Perhaps you heard from a Silver Shirtist, or a Ku Klux Klanner in your vicinity the terrifying story of how the Jews dominate the world, run its business, its government, control the winds, the weather and smallpox. Well, Mr. Pelley, the head of the Silver Shirts, who is now in jail, or ought to be, for muddy financial transactions, and Mr. Artie Smith, head of the late decomposed Khaki Shirts, in jail for unceremonious extravaganzas with his Khaki Shirts’ funds, both loved to tell how Franklin D. Roosevelt is just another Jew coming from the Rosenfeld family. These babes are so afraid of the spectre of the Jews running the world that they see a Jew wherever they turn. Jesus Christ is about the only one they have not yet described as being a Jew.

Anti-Semitism is as good a racket as any. One can make a political career on it and money if the promoting racketeers just know how to capitalize and cash in on ignorant persons’ fear and prejudices. One of the preferred pieces of “source material” these traffickers in ignorance and profiteers in misery so often use is the ill-famous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”