Douglas Reed (1895–1976) was a British journalist, playwright, novelist and author of a number of books of political analysis. His book Insanity Fair (1938) was influential in publicizing the state of Europe and the megalomania of Adolf Hitler before the Second World War. Beginning in the 1940s, and for the rest of his life, Reed became convinced that there existed a "hidden hand" governing World Affairs, and that this hidden hand was Jewish, though it involved some non-Jewish characters. Reed believed in a long-term Zionist conspiracy to impose a world government on an enslaved humanity.[1] He was also staunchly anti-Communist, believed that there existed a Communist-Zionist-Supercapitalist nexus, and argued that National Socialism was a "stooge or stalking horse" meant to further both the aims of the Communist Empire[2] and the Zionist ambition,[3] reasoning that "for great successes, which they could not otherwise achieve, Soviet Communism and Political Zionism needed an apparent antithesis, as a heavyweight champion needs a sparring partner."[3] Thus, when he died, The Times described him in an obituary as a "virulent anti-Semite",[4] though Reed himself claimed that he drew a distinction between opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism, and was not against the Jewish Race, but rather, was against the Jewish Religion, which he believed was a master race ideology. Reed is best known today for his text The Controversy of Zion, a posthumously published polemic in the tradition of Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, in which he argued that there existed a destructive master conspiracy, represented in his time by Communism and Zionism, that aimed for world control. He said in The Controversy of Zion:
| “ | The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as "the Law".
... The creed which was given force of daily law in Judah in 458 BC was then and still is unique in the world. It rested on the assertion, attributed to the tribal deity (Jehovah), that "the Israelites" (in fact, the Judahites) were his "chosen people" who, if they did all his "statutes and judgments", would be set over all other peoples and be established in a "promised land". Out of this theory, whether by forethought or unforeseen necessity, grew the pendent theories of "captivity" and "destruction". If Jehovah were to be worshipped, as he demanded, at a certain place in a specified land, all his worshippers had to live there. Obviously all of them could not live there, but if they lived elsewhere, whether by constraint or their own choice, they automatically became "captives" of "the stranger", whom they had to "root out", "pull down" and "destroy". Given this basic tenet of the creed, it made no difference whether the "captors" were conquerors or friendly hosts; their ordained lot was to be destruction or enslavement. Before they were destroyed or enslaved, they were, for a time, to be "captors" of the Judahites, not in their own right, but because the Judahites, having failed in "observance", deserved punishment. In this way, Jehovah revealed himself as the one-God of all-peoples: though he "knew" only the "chosen people", he would employ the heathen to punish them for their "transgressions", before meting out the foreordained destruction to these heathen.[5] |
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In The Controversy of Zion, he attacked Judaism as a declaration of war against humanity, arguing that it was an imposition of a malicious Levitical priesthood in reaction to the Universalist tendencies present in Israel and in other cultures. He argued that this hostile Levitical cult which became Judaism believed that if its adherents didn't obey God, they would be persecuted, and if they did, they would destroy the Gentiles and rule the Earth. Reed argued that the Levites then became the Pharisees, and these characters were the Moloch-worshippers denounced by Biblical prophets like Jeremiah. To Reed, Christianity was a direct challenge to Judaism, Jesus was "the opposite and adversary of all that which would make a literal Jew today or would have made a literal Pharisee then",[6] and he argued that Jews responded to it by heightening their chauvinism with the Talmud and Kabbalah. Reed held that the Talmud was a racist, abominable work of manipulative men, who sought only power and the destruction of others. To Reed, persecution, revenge, and destruction were an integral part of the Jewish identity. He then cited the text The History and Destiny of the Jews by the zealous Zionist macro-historian Dr. Joseph Kastein to the effect that Jews, by subverting nations, led to the destruction of the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, each time by "stretching out open arms" to a conqueror. Pervading this analysis was an idea he developed in Disgrace Abounding that "anti-Gentilism" was the real obstacle to Jewish assimilation, and that anti-Semites were akin to victims in war who decided to retaliate. In the rest of the book, he argued that while the Jews of the House of Joseph (which he associated with Sephardic Jews) were content to assimilate, the descendants of the Levites, centered in Russia (Khazarians from the "Talmudic Ghettos"), were not. In the chapters of his book entitled "The World Revolution" and "The Design", he argued that Cromwell's Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution were part of a larger movement of World Revolution that was revealed by the exposure of Weishaupt's 18th Century Illuminati, that it probably traced back to predecessors, and that this organization went underground and became the mainspring for subsequent revolutions. After this, in a chapter entitled "The Warnings of Disraeli", Reed argued that while evidence was inconclusive to show that Jews were the hidden hand behind the French Revolution and the 18th century Illuminati, statements made by British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli proved that these Jews from the Russian "Talmudic ghettos" gained control of Weishaupt's Illuminist world revolution conspiracy networks. To Reed, the most important statement from Disraeli was:
| “ | But existing society has chosen to persecute this race which should furnish it's choice allies, and what have been the consequences? They may be traced to the last outbreak of the destructive principle in Europe. An insurrection takes place against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property. Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the Mosaic or Christian form, the natural equality of men and the abrogation of property are proclaimed by the Secret Societies which form Provisional Governments, and men of the Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them. The people of God cooperate with atheists; the most skillful accumulators of property ally themselves with Communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe; and all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes them even its name, and whose tyranny they can no longer endure.[7] | ” |
Reed also ascribed significance to Disraeli's assertion that:
| “ | There is in Italy a power which we seldom mention in this House ... I mean the secret societies.... It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe - the whole of Italy and France and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries - is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads. And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government; they do not want ameliorated institutions ... they want to change the tenure of land, to drive out the present owners of the soil and to put an end to ecclesiastical establishments. Some of them may go further...[8] | ” |
In this chapter, Reed also devoted considerable attention to Mikhail Bakunin, the prominent anarcho-syndicalist and rival of Karl Marx who assailed Jewish control of the World Revolution in his Polemique Contre les Juifs.[9]
Subsequently he argued that these characters put a stop to the Jewish emancipation that threatened their authority, founded Bolshevism,[10] and hijacked world Jewry into their Zionist ideology and garrison state, aiming for total world power. He spent considerable space in his text examining the origins of Zionism, and gave a great deal of attention to Chaim Weizmann's autobiography Trial and Error (1949), which he claimed was one of the best sources showing the common origins of Communism and Zionism. Reed also, in a chapter of his book entitled "The Heresy of Dr. Herzl", discussed how Zionists threatened European leaders with revolutionary turmoil if they did not acquiesce to their demands, and postulated a "Jewish International" consisting of various European and American Jewish financiers affiliated with Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. as subsidizing Zionist and Communist political ambitions.[11]
He argued that the common argument that the Protocols of Zion[12] was a forgery was misdirection, and, echoing the position of Nesta Webster, he stated that the program within that text bore much more resemblance to the 18th Century Illuminati's program of World Revolution than it did to Maurice Joly's text Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu.[13] He also believed that the political program contained within the Protocols was shown to be real by the statements of Disraeli and Bakunin concerning Jewish leadership of the World Revolution, and that this program was apparent in the Bolshevik Revolution. He stated, in a chapter entitled The "Protocols":
| “ | No proof is given that the document is what it purports to be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish "Elders". In that respect, therefore, it is valueless.
In every other respect it is of inestimable importance, for it is shown by the conclusive test (that of subsequent events) to be an authentic document of the world-conspiracy first disclosed by Weishaupt's papers. Many other documents in the same series had followed that first revelation, as I have shown, but this one transcends all of them. The others were fragmentary and gave glimpses; this one gives the entire picture of the conspiracy, motive, method and objective. It adds nothing new to what had been revealed in parts (save for the unproven, attribution to Jewish elders themselves), but it puts all the parts in place and exposes the whole. It accurately depicts all that has come about in the fifty years since it was published, and what clearly will follow in the next fifty years unless in that time the force which the conspiracy has generated produces the counter-force.[14] |
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Reed argued that 20th Century political events showed that politicians ceased to reflect the popular will, and instead were puppets of their "advisors", who he argued served not their countries, but Communism, Zionism, and the World Government ambition. Reed argued that Woodrow Wilson was the puppet of Col. Edward Mandell House, and spent some time reviewing House's text Philip Dru: Administrator, which contained the blueprint of the Wilson (and FDR) political program. He then argued that Harry Hopkins filled this role during the Roosevelt administration, and that underlying much of the Roosevelt political program was a devotion to the worldwide triumph of Communism, no matter what the costs. Particular focus was given, in a chapter entitled The Revolution Extends, to a controversial text entitled From Major Jordan's Diaries, which claimed that Hopkins forced U.S. soldiers to transfer American nuclear capabilities to the Soviets during World War II. He believed that throughout this, Bernard Baruch was even more powerful, that he was the de-facto dictator of the United States. He then argued that Harry Truman was completely controlled by Zionist interests, and that Baruch was the puppeteer behind President Eisenhower. Reed argued that Chaim Weizmann carried out this role in Great Britain, noting, in a chapter of his text entitled "The Decisive Battle" that Weizmann lobbied Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Army Chief Sir William Robertson to divert soldiers from the Western Front to conquer Palestine, and that when the British leaders demurred, Weizmann used money and control of the press to install Lloyd George and Sir Henry Wilson in their place. He used this as a basis for his argument that Zionists achieved control of the British political scene during World War I.
In the chapters of The Controversy of Zion entitled "The World Revolution Again" and "The Talmudic Vengeance", he put forth the argument that the Bolshevik Revolution was an international Jewish conspiracy, but that this fact had been intentionally obfuscated. He stated:
| “ | The simultaneous triumphs of Bolshevism in Moscow and Zionism in London in the same week of 1917 were only in appearance distinct events. The identity of their original source has been shown in an earlier chapter, and the hidden men who promoted Zionism through the Western governments also supported the world-revolution. The two forces fulfilled correlative tenets of the ancient Law: “Pull down and destroy … rule over all nations”; the one destroyed in the East and the other secretly ruled in the West.
... The fact of Jewish leadership was a supremely important piece of knowledge and the later suppression of it, where public debate would have been sanative, produced immense effects in weakening the West. The formulation of any rational State policy becomes impossible when such major elements of knowledge are excluded from public discussion; it is like playing billiards with twisted cues and elliptical balls. The strength of the conspiracy is shown by its success in this matter (as in the earlier period, of Messrs. Robison, Barruel and Morse) more than by any other thing.[15] |
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To substantiate this argument, Reed cited various statements from Winston Churchill which presented Bolshevism as an international Jewish conspiracy, the unabridged British White Paper on Bolshevism, Russia No. 1, which presented it as a movement despised by Russians and carried out by Jews, stating "Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things",[16] the Jewish Chronicle, which stated in 1933 that one-third of the Jews in Russia had become officials, and other sources; but mostly he focused on the reportage of the London Times correspondent Robert Wilton and the Sokolov investigation.[17] Reed noted that Wilton, in the French edition of The Last Days of the Romanovs, reprinted the official Bolshevik lists, which presented the proportion of Jews to gentiles in the Bolshevik leadership as much higher than was later claimed, namely, that out of the 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik State there were in 1918-1919: 17 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 11 Armenians, 35 Lets, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 2 Poles, 2 Finns, 1 Karaim, and 457 Jews. He then devoted considerable time to summarizing Wilton's account of the murder of the Romanovs, noting that the murderers left behind an adaptation of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine's lines on the fate of Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans who, according to the Old Testament Book of Daniel, was murdered as God's punishment for an affront offered to Judah.[18] Reed cited the Official History of the Times to the effect that Wilton was deemed an extremely reliable reporter, but that he began to be shunned as soon as Zionist circles developed a distaste for his dispatches from Russia. He then argued that the situation in Russia was intentionally falsified by the Zionist controlled press, who Reed believed was not only minimizing the Jewish influence in Bolshevism, but also whitewashing Bolshevik atrocities. He compared this account of Wilton's experiences to his own experiences after he began presenting Zionism as a subversive movement.
Summarizing the situation, Reed stated:
| “ | In the very week of the Balfour Declaration, the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western politicians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their policies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revolution, too, was "antisemitism."[19] | ” |
Reed believed that the Zionist ambition was best defined by Deuteronomy 7:1-3 - "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee ... seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them." He spent much of his book discussing the influence of Zionism in Britain and the United States, but, also devoted some time to the Dier Yassin massacre and Zionist terrorism, suggested that Zionism would eventually overtake the middle east,[20] and took note of the Communist-Zionist collaboration that occurred in the 20th century.
Reed believed that World Wars I and II followed the line put forth in the Protocols, that "wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains", and that the only victors in these wars were Zionism, Communism, and the World Government ambition. He took note of the Zionist leader Max Nordeau's exact prediction of the outcome of World War I in 1903:
| “ | Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference - where with the help of England a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.[21] | ” |
and then, throughout his text, argued that Zionism was the hidden hand behind World Wars I and II, each time moving the world closer to World Government (in a chapter of The Controversy of Zion entitled "The World Instrument", he discussed Bernard Baruch's postwar proposal for a World Government with atomic powers,[22] as a premonition of what to expect after another World War). He believed that Zionism will eventually lead to World War III, after which a World Government will be imposed.
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At the age of 13, Reed began working as an office boy, and at 19 a bank clerk. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the British Army. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, gaining a single kill in aerial combat and severely burning his face in a flying accident. (Insanity Fair, 1938) Around 1921 he began working as a telephonist and clerk for The Times. At the age of 30, he became a sub-editor. In 1927 he became assistant correspondent in Berlin, later transferring to Vienna as chief central European correspondent. He went on to report from various European centres including Warsaw, Moscow, Prague, Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest.
Reed resigned his job in protest against the appeasement of Hitler after the Munich Agreement of 1938. In Somewhere South of Suez: A Further Survey of the Grand Design of the Twentieth Century (1949), Reed wrote that his resignation came in response to press censorship which prevented him from fully reporting "the facts about Hitler and National Socialism." He believed that by becoming a "journalist without a newspaper," he would be free to write as he chose. Reed spent the duration of the Second World War in England; in 1948, he moved to Durban, South Africa.
Reed was vociferously anti-Nazi. His text The Burning of the Reichstag (1934), stemming from his experiences as witness to the fire and The Times special correspondent at the trial, was one of the first to suggest that Hitler was behind the Reichstag fire, and used it as a false flag operation to consolidate power. In Britain, he was one of the greatest opponents of appeasement, believing that the Hitler program was one of destructive expansion. His book Insanity Fair was the first to predict the Anchluss, and won him instant world fame. For Reed, Hitler was an "epileptic mongrel", a "professional perjuror", "the greatest traitor and renegade that Germany ever had" and a "liar who believes in nothing".[23] Reed initially feared Nazism because he believed that Hitler's actions meant war, and that the Nazis would unleash a destructive fury over Europe, but as he explored the "Jewish Question" in world affairs, he began to believe that the Nazis were ultimately controlled by the Communist-Zionist "hidden hand". In opposition to Hitler, he promoted Otto Strasser, writing two biographies of him based on interviews - Nemisis? The Story of Otto Strasser (1940), and The Prisoner of Ottowa (1953). For Reed, Strasser was a "Conservative Revolutionary",[24] a Christian National Socialist who opposed Hitler's belief in Nordic racial superiority by arguing that European people were a mixture of four or five races, and they should develop into a federation of equal nations and not one subject to German domination. Reed believed that Strasser represented a legitimate movement of National revival, as opposed to Hitler, who he believed to be a destructive maniac and (beginning with his post-war texts) a front for conspiratorial Jewish interests. His unique interpretation of Hitler's ulterior motives is apparent in his 1953 text The Prisoner of Ottowa, in which he devoted particular attention to Hitler's stint as the go between from the soldiers in the barracks and the mostly Jewish Communist leaders who took over Munich in 1919. In addition to his two biographies of Strasser, Reed also translated and introduced Otto Strasser's book History in My Time (1940).
Although very much a conservative, Reed eventually came to respect another socialist thinker, the anarcho-syndicalist Mikhail Bakunin. He stated in a chapter of The Controversy of Zion entitled "The Warnings of Disraeli":
Everything about Bakunin is genuine: his struggle, sufferings and death. Everything about Marx is bogus: his thirty years of incitement from the British Museum reading-room, his comfortable life on Friedrich Engels' bounty, his obviously calculated marriage to a “von,” his genteel funeral with graveside orations; all are typical of the petty bourgeois who so loudly declaimed against the bourgeoisie. The most bogus thing of all was his Communist Manifesto, which diagnosed an ailment (“The proletarian is without property”) and prescribed suicide as the remedy (“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”).[25]
He furthermore stated:
The ruling passion (and original motive) of all Bakunin's work was a horror of despotism; Marx planned to destroy a ruling class in order to establish such a despotism as the world had never known. This was the profound difference between the two men, and it throws up a question never to be answered: what would the effect on the world have been if Bakunin's Anarchism, instead of Marx's Communism, had assumed leadership of the world-revolution? For Anarchism was opposed to every kind of forcible government, and to the State as the embodiment of the force employed in the government of the community; Communism was the deification of force wielded by the State.[26]
After the publication of Insanity Fair and coinciding with his texts on the Strasser brothers, Reed developed increasing antipathy to the Jewish people, viewing them to be racial supremacists, and in his subsequent anti-Nazi writings argued that Jews were mirror images of Nazis in their social organization. In his 1939 book, Disgrace Abounding, Reed declared, in a chapter entitled "How Odd of God", that anti-gentilism (not anti-Semitism) prevents assimiliation of Jews, that "this keeps them welded together as alien communities in foreign lands, communities ultimately hostile to the Gentile.".[27] In his 1941 book, A Prophet At Home, he argued that "The anti-Jewish teaching of National Socialism was but the direct inversion of the anti-Gentile teaching of the Hebrew religion, and this statement of the case cannot be refuted; it never is refuted, but is always ignored."[28] The last book exploring these themes while still focusing on National Socialism was Lest We Regret (1943), which suggested that Jewish politics had a subversive effect on Great Britain, suggested that the Jewish community was inflating the effect to which Hitler's policies endangered them for propaganda purposes, and stated that the statements of Zionists concerning their political ambitions were "indistinguishable from Hitlerist speeches, save in the substitution of 'Jewish' for 'German'",[29] and that Zionists would eventually take over the entire Middle East. He also discussed an incident he first reported in A Prophet At Home, where the Rabbi of Prague proclaimed in 1939 that "Hitler is the Jewish Messiah, because he will cause all those countries of the world to be opened to the Jews, which are closed to them now."[30]
After WWII, Reed settled in South Africa, and became increasingly alienated from mainstream political discourse. His work then went beyond National Socialism to what he perceived to be the greater problem of Communism, and the influence of the Zionist movement. He started to believe that World War II only benefited the forces of Communism and Zionism, and he began to see Zionism as a subversive movement. Reed flirted with conspiratorial anti-Zionism in From Smoke to Smother (1948), and the nucleus of the ideas that permeated The Controversy of Zion presented themselves in his 1949 text, Somewhere South of Suez, which, in addition to it's conspiratorial arguments, explored the thesis of the Khazarian origins of Ashkenazi Jewry, and included the observation that:
During all that period and to the present time, it was not possible freely to report or discuss a third vital matter: Zionist Nationalism. In this case the freedom of the press has become a fallacy during the past two decades ... When I came to America I found that this ban, for such it is in practice, prevailed even more rigidly than in my own country.... In daily usage, no American or British newspaper, apparently, now dares to print a line of news or comment unfavorable to the Zionist ambition ... The inference to me is plain: the Zionist Nationalists are powerful enough to govern governments in the great countries of the remaining West![31]
The text that completely alienated Reed from mainstream discourse was Far and Wide (1951). The first part of the text, "The American Scene", was an autobiographical account of his travels in the United States, combining observations on American culture and history in light of his experiences in Europe. Included in this section is the speculation that the World Revolutionary conspiracy that he chronicled in his later works was involved in the assassination of Lincoln, in order to prevent reconciliation, and a comparison between the conditions imposed on the South after the Civil War to the conditions imposed on the Eastern European countries by the Soviet Union after World War II. The second part of his text, "Behind the Scene", was the one which brought him the most trouble. In that section, he declared that America was held hostage by servitude to Communism and Zionism. In a chapter of that section entitled "Zionism Paramount", he explored Zionism's role in the world wars. He then began to question much of the Holocaust, arguing that the number of Jews killed had been inflated for propaganda purposes,[32] citing various encyclopedias and almanacs, and stating "no proof can be given that six million Jews 'perished'; proof can be adduced that so many could not have perished."[33] Reed believed that as long as Zionism remained in power, we would never have a clear picture of these events. He then argued that Zionists held immense propaganda power in the United States, and portrayed the Anti-Defamation League as a sort of secret police, claiming that it kept black lists and worked to destroy it's political opponents.
In a chapter entitled "Communism Penetrant", Reed first discussed at length the case of Whittaker Chambers vs. Alger Hiss, and the associated controversy concerning Communist infiltration in the United States. He then argued that Franklin Delano Roosevelt consciously worked to subvert Constitutional safeguards, helped further the aims of World Communism, and ultimately served higher circles. He asked, "What real purpose did Mr. Roosevelt promote through the way he used his imperial powers?", and then noted:
| “ | He furthered the main principles of a plan for the redistribution of the earth published in 1942 (but clearly prepared much earlier) by a mysterious 'Group for a New World Order', headed by a Mr. Moritz Gomberg. What this group proposed was startling at the time but proved farsighted. The main recommendations were that the Communist Empire should be extended from the Pacific to the Rhine, with China, Korea, Indo-China, Siam and Malaya in its orbit; and that a Hebrew State should be set up on the soil of 'Palestine, Transjordan and the adjoining territories'. These two projects were largely realized. Canada and numerous 'strategic islands' were to pass to the United States (the reader should keep these 'strategic islands' in mind). The remaining countries of Western Europe were to disappear in a 'United States of Europe' (this scheme is being vigorously pursued at present). The African continent was to become a 'Union of Republics'. The British Commonwealth was to be left much reduced, the Dutch West Indies joining Australia and New Zealand in it. The scheme looks like a blueprint of the second stage in a grand operation of three stages, and substantial parts of it were achieved; what was not then accomplished is being energetically attempted now.[34] | ” |
He subsequently cited Admiral William D. Leahy's text I was There (1950) to argue that "Mr. Roosevelt's grand design was for a large apportionment of the globe between the Communist Empire and the United States, at the expense of the British Commonwealth and French Empire. Support of Communism in China, too, was primarily intended to prevent a British revival there and in the planning of the Pacific campaign everything was done to exclude the British and make China and Japan into a Soviet-American sphere of influence."[35]
He then argued that Roosevelt was a puppet of Harry Hopkins and higher circles, and that Hopkins consciously subverted Western interests in favor of Communism.
After writing Far and Wide, Douglas Reed spent three years in the New York Central Library researching the material for his text The Controversy of Zion. He finished the text in 1956, but it was considered to be too controversial for publication. The small right-wing South African publisher Dolphin Press Ltd., published the book in 1978, after Reed's death. Reed stated in the last chapter of that text, "The Climacteric":
| “ | During the writing of the book I have had small expectation, for the reasons I have given, that it would be published when it was ready; at this stage of "the Jewish century" that seems unlikely. If it does not appear now, I believe it will still be valid in five, ten or more years, and I expect it to be published one day or another because I anticipate the collapse, sooner or later, of the virtual law of heresy which has prevented open discussion of "the Jewish question" during the past three decades. Some day the subject will be freely debated again and something of what this book records will then be relevant.[36] | ” |
Richard Thurlow attacked Reed as an "anti-Nazi anti-Semite" in an eponymous article in the Jewish journal Patterns of Prejudice.[37] He noted that Reed believed that Nazism was a Communist and Zionist front, but ignored his arguments,[38] merely stating that "for Reed the actions of organized Jewry were about as repugnant as those of Hitler. Therefore he refused to believe that Hitler could be a real antisemite, because two such evil forces could not be opposed to each other." Thurlow chastised Reed for ascribing legitimacy to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and arguing that the political program contained within that text was being implemented. Thurlow also attacked Reed's belief that Zionists exaggerated the suffering of Jews under Hitler for propaganda purposes as bordering on Holocaust denial. Thurlow believed that the conspiratorial view of history that Reed put forth in The Controversy of Zion, which presented Jews as destructive, supremacist subversives, had genocidal implications, stating that it "was only [Reed's] Christianity, and his strong ethical sense, which prevented him from seeing the ultimate logic of his beliefs."
Reed himself believed that the Jewish people as a whole are essentially held captive by their own leaders who influence them to act as a destructive force in the world. He thought that by shining a light on the destructive nature of Communism and Zionism, he would prevent further misery. In the epilogue to The Controversy of Zion, he stated:
| “ | In our time, I judge, a barbaric superstition born in antiquity and nurtured through the ages by a semi-secret priesthood, has returned to plague us in the form of a political movement supported by great wealth and power in all great capitals of the world. Through the two methods used, revolution from below and the corruption of governments from above, it has come far towards success in a fantastic ambition of achieving world dominion, using these two instruments to incite nations against each other.
... The feeling I had, in tracing the story of this ancient superstition and its re-emergence as a political force in our century, was that of contact with a living, evil thing. The destructive revolution, in my view, is part of it and I could have written exactly what an American diplomat, Mr. Frank Rounds, junior, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day of 1951: "In Moscow, you feel that evil exists as a thing, as a presence; that is my thought this Christmas Day". In this 20th Century process, which I feel as an accompanying, evil presence, all of us now alive, Jew and Gentile, are involved, and most of us will see the denouement. As to that, Mr. Bernard J. Brown in 1933 misgivingly wrote, "Of course we must be feared and eventually hated if we persist in absorbing everything America offers us and yet refuse to become Americans just as we have always refused to become Russians or Pales." This statement applies to all countries of the West, not only to America, but Mr Brown was wrong. What he foresaw is one thing the Talmudists can not achieve; hatred is their monopoly, and creed, and they cannot make Christians, or Gentiles, hate Jews. The hateful things done by the West in this century were done under Talmudic prompting; hatred and vengeance are not innate in Westerners, and their faith forbids these. The teaching of hatred, as part of a religion, still comes only from the literal Torah-Tulmudists in the revolutionary area, in Palestine, and where they have nested in the Western capitals. No Westerner would speak as a Zionist leader spoke to a Jewish meeting at Johannesburg in May, 1953: "The beast that is called Germany must not be trusted. The Germans must never be forgiven and the Jews must never have any contact or dealings with the Germans". The world cannot live like that, and for this reason the insensate plan must ultimately fail. This is the heresy which the teaching of Christ above all else repudiated; it is the one to which the political leaders of the West have lent themselves since Mr. Balfour, just fifty years ago, began to subordinate national policy to it. When the approaching climax has been overcome this heretic teaching, injected into the West from the Talmudic centre in Russia, will pass.[39] |
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Reed was an extremely close friend of Ivor Benson, a conspiratorial anti-Communist who was the information advisor for Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front. Like Benson, he believed that Rhodesia was preserving old European civilization against the forces of Communism. He argued this position in his texts The Battle for Rhodesia (1966), The Siege of South Africa (1975), and The Grand Design of the 20th Century (1976).
Novels:
Author of Downfall (three-act play), J. Cape, 1942, Appleton, 1943.[40]