Eric Dudley Butler (1916 - June 7, 2006), Australian political activist and journalist, was the founder of the Australian League of Rights and for many years Australia's leading exponent of antisemitic and extreme right-wing views. Events 1099 - The First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem begins Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Australia topics. League of Rights redirects here For the British group see British League of Rights The Australian League of Rights is a minor Antisemitism (alternatively spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism; also rarely known as judeophobia) is the Prejudice against or hostility
Butler was born in Adelaide, although he lived most of his life near Melbourne. Adelaide is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of South Australia, and is the fifth largest city in Australia with a Melbourne ( is the second most populous city in Australia, with a Metropolitan area population of approximately 3 In the 1930s he became an admirer of fascism in the form of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, whose doctrines he combined with an intense devotion to the British Empire and the monarchy. Fascism is a totalitarian nationalist and corporatist ideology Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley 6th Baronet (16 November 1896 &ndash 3 December 1980 was a British Politician, known principally as the founder of the British The British Union of Fascists (BUF was a Political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by a Labour government minister and former MP The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for over a century was the foremost global power. TalkCommonewalth realm.--> The monarchy He also became a follower of the British economist C. H. Douglas and his Social Credit theories. Major C H (Clifford Hugh Douglas MIMechE MIEE ( January 20 1879 &ndash September 29 1952), was a British Engineer and pioneer Social Credit is a socio-economic Philosophy wherein Consumers fully provided with adequate Purchasing power, establish the policy of production From 1938 Butler wrote for the Australian Social Credit newspaper New Times, where he gave Douglas's theories an anti-Semitic twist by alleging that it was "the Jewish banks" who controlled credit and caused the Great Depression.
Butler served in the Australian Army during World War II. The Australian Army is Australia's military land force It is part of the Australian Defence Force (ADF along with the Royal Australian Navy and the World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including According to one of his obituarists: "He served as a gun sergeant for twenty months without leave in the Torres Straits, taught troops as an instructor at Canungra Jungle Training School for six months, transferred to the Officers Training School at Seymour, Victoria and was honourably discharged at the end of the Pacific phase of the war. "[1]
By this time his political activities were under surveillance by the security authorities, as is shown by documents in the Australian Archives. In July 1940 the Victorian publicity censor, Creighton Burns (later editor of The Age), wrote: "I have taken steps to warn the provincial and country press that the activities of this gentleman and his assistants are being closely watched by the authorities. Creighton Lee Burns AO (19 March 1925 &ndash 19 January 2008 was an Australian journalist and academic who was editor-in-chief of The Age newspaper The Age is a Broadsheet daily Newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854 There is no doubt that the general trend of their propaganda is damaging to the financial side of the war effort. "
In December 1939, Butler wrote: "The real enemy is not Hitler and Germany, but the powers which control Britain, and which are working for the complete bolshevisation of the nation. " In a 1940 pamphlet he wrote: "A stream of Australian youth is leaving to be smashed to bloody pulp in the second war to 'save democracy', which like the first war, was fomented by Jewish International Finance, will be financed and controlled by the same group and will mean their undisputed world domination. " In December 1941, the Commonwealth's chief publicity censor, E. G. Bonney, banned a series of Butler's New Times articles, one of which described Soviet Russia as "a Jewish slave state . . . controlled by international Jewish financiers in New York. "[2]
In 1945 the Attorney-General, Dr H.V. Evatt, began an inquiry into Butler's activities. Herbert Vere Evatt, QC MP ( April 30, 1894 - November 2, 1965) was an Australian Jurist, politician He told Parliament: "In the opinion of the Director-General of Security, Butler has written articles constituting an attempt to create adverse public reaction to war loan campaigns and to the war effort generally. " Butler was not charged.
In 1947 Butler published The International Jew, in which he claimed that Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Curtin were covert communists, that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish plot and that the Nazi Holocaust was a myth. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC, PC (Can ( 30 November 1874 John Joseph Curtin (8 January 1885 &ndash 5 July 1945 Australian politician and 14th Prime Minister of Australia, led Australia when the Australian mainland came under direct See also Russian Revolution (1905 The Russian Revolution of 1916 refers to a series of popular revolutions in Russia, and the events surrounding them The Holocaust (from the Greek el ''ὁλόκαυστον'' (el-Latn holókauston holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt" also known as Butler's eulogist Nigel Jackson described this book as "an essay built around an analysis of the controversial Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ( Protocols of the wise men of Zion, Library of Congress 's Uniform Title; "Протоколы In it Butler challenged the Jewish role in international finance and its connections with communism. Of all Butler's publications, this was perhaps the one which roused the greatest fury. " This was hardly surprising in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, particularly since the Protocols were well known in 1947 to be a forgery. [3] This book was followed by The Dangerous Myth of Racial Equality.
Butler founded the Australian League of Rights in 1946, and served as its National Director until his retirement in 1993. Although Butler ran for the Australian House of Representatives (as an independent) in 1951, the League was not intended to be a political party. The House of Representatives is one of the two houses (chambers of the Parliament of Australia; it is the Lower house, the Upper house being the Senate Rather it was a lobby group and "grass roots" organisation, promoting Butler's mix of anti-communist, social credit, monarchist and pro-British ideas. Antisemitism was seldom overt in League publications, but frequent references to "international bankers" were generally understood to be code-words for "the Jews. " The League's many publications included the monthly On Target and the irregular Intelligence Survey. In 1949 Butler began contributing articles on national and international affairs to the Melbourne morning newspaper The Argus, then an extremely conservative paper, but when it was revealed that the articles were based on a League of Rights study course, the series was cancelled. [4]
From the 1960s the League concentrated on infiltrating the Country Party, a mainstream conservative rural party (now the National Party of Australia), by using a front group, the Citizens Electoral Councils. The National Party of Australia is an Australian political party. The National Party of Australia is an Australian political party. The Citizens Electoral Council of Australia ( CEC) is a minor nationalist political party in Australia affiliated with the international LaRouche Movement This tactic achieved considerable success, particularly in areas where small farmers were under economic pressure, such as Gippsland, the Riverina, the Darling Downs, the Yorke Peninsula and the Western Australian wheatbelt. Gippsland is a large rural region in Victoria, Australia. It begins immediately east of the suburbs of Melbourne and stretches to the New South Wales border The Riverina is an agricultural region of south-western New South Wales (NSW Australia The Darling Downs is a Farming region on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland, Australia. Yorke Peninsula is in South Australia and should not be confused with Cape York Peninsula, in Queensland. The Wheatbelt region is one of the nine Regions of Western Australia. The League pamphlet They Want Your Land alleged that "international financiers" were trying to force Australian farmers off their land by manipulating commodity prices. Successive Country Party and National Party leaders warned against League infiltration and League-controlled branches were occasionally disaffiliated. Queensland Nationals Senator Ron Boswell was particularly outspoken in attacking League infiltration of the Queensland Nationals. The Hon Ronald "Ron" Boswell (born 9 December 1940) Australian Politician, has been a National Party member of the
A Liberal federal MP, James Killen, was identified as a League supporter in the 1960s, and travelled to Europe with Butler in 1962, but he later severed his connections with the League. The Liberal Party of Australia is an Australian political party. Sir Denis James "Jim" Killen, AC, KCMG ( 23 November 1925, Dalby Queensland, Australia - 12 January In the 1960s and '70s Butler devoted much time to defending the apartheid system in South Africa and the white-minority regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. The Republic of South Africa (also known by other official names) is a country located at the southern tip of the continent of Africa Ian Douglas Smith GCLM ID ( 8 April 1919 &ndash 20 November 2007) served as the Prime Minister of the British Rhodesia was the name adopted when the formerly British colony of Southern Rhodesia declared itself independent ( Unilateral Declaration of Independence He travelled several times to South Africa and Rhodesia, which he saw as bastions against communism in Africa. He was also Far Eastern correspondent for American Opinion, magazine of the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is a political education and action organization founded by Robert W
In July 1972 Butler achieved some public attention when he debated Max Teichmann, senior lecturer in politics at Monash University, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Monday Conference program. Monash University is a Public university based in Melbourne, Australia. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly abbreviated to the 'ABC' is Australia's national public broadcaster. Teichmann confronted Butler with his many explicit anti-Semitic statements from the 1930s and '40s and challenged him to disavow them, a challenge which Butler evaded. The program highlighted the issue of League infiltration of the Country Party in the period before the December 1972 federal election, at which the long-serving conservative government was defeated.
Other League fronts included the Institute of Economic Democracy, Ladies in Line Against Communism (LILAC) and its successor, Women Who Want to be Women - although this latter group later escaped from League tutelage and became an independent group. In the 1990s the League lost its position as the leading extreme right political organisation in Australia. Butler complained that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party had stolen his policies. Pauline Lee Hanson ( née Seccombe; born 27 May 1954) is an Australian Politician and former leader of Pauline Hanson's Not to be confused with the One Nation program of infrastructure works carried out from 1991 to 1996 by the Keating Labor Government The Citizens Electoral Council was taken over by followers of the American cult leader and convicted swindler Lyndon LaRouche, and developed a much higher public profile than the League itself. Views of Lyndon LaRouche Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr (born September 8 1922 in Rochester New Hampshire) is an American Political activist and founder of several
Butler lived most of his life in rural Victoria, in his later years on a farm at Panton Hills, where his home was used as a meeting place for League and other extreme right activists. In the 1950s he was a member of the Eltham Shire Council for some years. He retired as League Director in 1993 but remained politically active until shortly before his death. In 1999 he chaired an address by the Holocaust denier David Irving. Holocaust denial is the claim that the Genocide of Jews during World War II —usually referred to as The Holocaust —did not occur in the David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938 is a British writer specializing in the Military history of World War II.
References
- ^ Nigel Jackson, Lion for Freedom
- ^ All these quotations are from David Greason, Australia-Israel Review, 24 April 1997 (available online here)
- ^ Nigel Jackson, Lion for Freedom
- ^ Nigel Jackson, Lion for Freedom
External links
- Australian League of Rights (This website contains a complete online archive of On Target since 1965. )
- Fascist fruitcake held surprising political sway, The Australian, 13 June 2006
- Lion for Freedom (eulogy by Nigel Jackson at the Adelaide Institute website)
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