Eric Butler
| Eric Butler | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 7, 1916 Benalla, Victoria, Australia |
| Died | June 7, 2006 (aged 90) Victoria |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Occupation | Political activist and journalist |
| Known for | Founder of the Australian League of Rights |
Eric Dudley Butler (7 May 1916 – 7 June 2006), Australian political activist and journalist, was the founder of the Australian League of Rights.
Butler was born in the Victorian country town of Benalla, although he lived most of his life near Melbourne. In the 1930s he 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.
Butler served in the Australian Army during World War II. 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."
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, Crayton Burns (father of Creighton Burns, a 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 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."
In 1945 the Attorney-General, Dr H.V. Evatt, began 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 1946 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 . 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.
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