Eric Butler

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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 anti-Semitic and extreme right-wing views.

Butler was born in Adelaide, although he lived most of his life in Melbourne. 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. He also became a follower of the British economist C. H. Douglas and his Social Credit theories. 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. According to one 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. 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, bagn an inquiry into Butler's activities. 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. Butler's eulogist Nigel Jackson described this book as "an essay built around an analysis of the controversial Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 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 Directory 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. Rather it was a lobby group and "grass roots" organisation, promoting Butler's mix of anti-communist, social credit, monarchist and pro-British ideas. Anti-Semitism 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 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. 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 wheat belt 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

[edit] 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