This article's report of Mackenzie King's meeting with Adolph Hitler, quoting him as saying, "He (Hitler) smiled very pleasantly and indeed had a sort of appealing and affectionate look in his eyes. My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow man."
And according to Churchill's son Randolph, Mackenzie King was, "one of the most delightful men I've ever known".
Yet, this kindly Canadian Prime Minister harbored a deep fear and hatred for Jews.
What troubles me most about myself and my fellow Americans, is how easily we are duped into believing the warm smile and kindly eyes of our Masters. We have been led to believe that they are "just regular folk".
But make no mistake about it, there are Adolph Hitler's lurking among them.
How do we know them? Look behind that friendly smile and ignore those warm words. Follow them into their dark places where they watch as their underlings torture and rape and murder innocent men, women and children.
Do not be taken in by the fact that these Monsters walk among us in human form, smiling and acting all buddy buddy.
Do not turn your back and pretend that when they take away the freedom of other people, both around the world as well as within our own nation, that your turn will not come. Read your history books. Empires always destroy anyone or any group that they fear. And Empires are paranoid by nature.
Curious Carl
Wartime diaries
by Robert Fisk:
The Independent & The Independent on Sunday
Saturday, 12 June 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-premier-who-thought-hitler--was-a-joan-of-arc-1998351.html
The date: 10 February 1937. The city: Ottawa. The man: William Lyon
Mackenzie King, prime minister of Canada, soon to be the trusted wartime
friend and confidant of Winston Churchill.
That frozen day in the Canadian capital, King recorded in his diary a
friendly encounter with an old man on Wilbrod Street, a Jewish Russian
immigrant called Cohen who had divided his possessions--a furniture and
clothing business on Rideau and Banks Streets--among his three sons and
daughter. He was now in retirement. As another former Canadian prime
minister, Brian Mulroney, said of the Cohens, "a true Canadian success
story".
Mulroney described to a Jewish meeting in Toronto last month how his
illustrious predecessor "listened to Mr Cohen thoughtfully, treated him
kindly" and then recorded the encounter in his diary. And this, dear reader,
is what the odious King wrote: "The only unfortunate part of the whole story
is that the Jews having acquired foothold of (sic) Sandy Hill, it will not
be long before this part of Ottawa will become more or less possessed by
them. I should not be surprised if, some time later, Laurier House (the
prime minister's residence) was left as about the only residence not
occupied by Jews in this part of the city."
Mulroney's devastating critique--it gets much worse--was published in last
Monday's edition of Canada's ever more lunatic National Post, a paper which
reads more and more like a right-wing Israeli settlers' house magazine in
its defamatory attacks on the dead Turks of last week's aid convoy to Gaza
and in its grovelling support for Israel's indisciplined army. Many Jews in
the 1930s--even those who survived the Holocaust while still living in Nazi
Germany--opposed the Zionist project for Palestine on the grounds that this
would deprive the Arabs of their land, the one and a half million
Palestinians now living in the prison of Gaza are part of the tragedy they
foresaw. I do not know if Mr Cohen shared their views. It doesn't matter.
What is important is that Mackenzie King--"one of the most delightful men I
have ever met" in the words of Churchill's rash son Randolph--set off, a few
months after his encounter with Mr Cohen, to meet Chancellor Adolf Hitler of
Germany. And here are the reflections of Canada's prime minister on the
Fuhrer who will launch the Second World War scarcely two years later.
"He (Hitler) smiled very pleasantly and indeed had a sort of appealing and
affectionate look in his eyes. My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked
with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow man. His face
is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give the impression of.
It is not that of a fiery overstrained nature but of a calm, passive man
deeply and thoughtfully in earnest... His eyes impressed me most of all.
There was a liquid quality about them which indicates keen perception and
profound sympathy. Calm, composed and one could see how particularly humble
folk would have come to have profound love for the man. As I talked with him
I could not but think of Joan of Arc..."
This is not just OUCH! This is "Jesus, Joseph and Mary!" Several times over.
Next day, our Canadian hero was off to see Nazi foreign minister Konstantin
von Neurath. "He admitted that they (the Nazis) had taken some pretty rough
steps in cleaning up the situation... He said to me that I would have
loathed living in Berlin with the Jews, and the way in which they had
increased their numbers in the city, and were taking possession of its more
important part... Many of them were very coarse and vulgar and assertive...
I left him (von Neurath) feeling that I had met a man whose confidence I
would continue to enjoy through the rest of my days... He is, if there ever
was one, a genuinely kind, good man."
Little surprise, then, that when a passenger ship called St Louis--packed
with 700 Jews fleeing Europe, their faces alight with hope before the
cameras as it approached Canada on 17 June 1939--Mackenzie King's government
refused it entry. Canadians protested. So did journalists. And if you look
today at photographs of the ship, you'll see children, husbands and wives
with faces of smiling relief. They were safe. But they were not. They were
sent back to the gas chambers.
There's no doubt why the National Post carried Mulroney's terrible story
last week: to smother our condemnation of Israel's latest brutality. As
usual, we who speak out against the ruthlessness of Israel's army--as, of
course, we do against the Arabs--are anti-Semites. Remember the Holocaust.
Remember Our Guilt. But it was Rick Salutin of the Toronto Globe and Mail
who got it right this week. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that Israel's
leaders have grown mindlessly, habitually dependent on asserting their own
victimisation. This was often effective, based largely on sympathies rooted
in revulsion of the Holocaust and the story of Western anti-Semitism. But
this has gradually changed, due partly to the arrival of generations who, as
it were, knew not Hitler, and aren't inclined to feel even indirectly guilty
for him. The shift became evident during the 2008 Gaza invasion... Yet
Israel's leaders still automatically assume the victim position... Societies
that lose their internal dissent and self-criticism have a sad and scary
record, especially when combined with a sense of victimisation."
I was on a Turkish television show this week and two of the other speakers
were Jews from Israel. But both were outraged at the actions of their own
government. And I wonder, as I write this, whether the doomed Jews on the St
Louis might not agree with us, rather than the cruel regime that has laid
claim to their souls. As for Mackenzie King... Well, he knew how to turn a
boat away.
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