Ivor Benson was a South African journalist who began his career on Fleet Street, London. In South Africa he became chief assistant editor of The Rand Daily Mail, and became particularly well known in 1963 as a news commentator for Radio South Africa.
Benson was then employed as information adviser to the White-ruled Rhodesian government, under Ian Smith. Benson was also an author of conspiratorial anti-Communist books and booklets, such as This Worldwide Conspiracy and Truth out of Africa, linking Communism and super-Capitalism with the assault on White rule in Africa.
Barry Alexander Kosmin, in his text Majuta: a history of the Jewish community of Zimbabwe, described the controversies concerning Benson's time in Ian Smith's government. He described the background to the ascendancy of Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front, and then said:
| “ | The scene was thus set for the intrusion of racial politics into all spheres of social action. In June 1964, Ivor Benson, a 'far rightwing political theorist,' was imported from Natal as Government Information Adviser. Up until that time there had been no coherent R.F. ideology ...
Benson, however, offered the new Government a coherent radical rightwing policy which would suit both their internal and external problems. Rhodesia began to be presented as the last bastion of Christianity and Western tradition against the attack of sinister forces directed from joint headquarters in New York and Moscow. This type of insidious propaganda began to infiltrate the government controlled media of radio and television with attacks on the ever ubiquitous communists and international financiers. This, of course, was the Europeans' answer to the Third World Revolutionary ideology of the African nationalists.... The Jewish community which has been in the forefront of the liberal multiracial camp felt very vulnerable in this heightened political atmosphere....[1] |
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Benson edited a newsletter, Behind the News, and founded the National Forum. He also wrote the introduction to Douglas Reed's conspiratorial polemic The Controversy of Zion, which attacked Communism and Zionism, presenting them as twin subversive movements that, if left unchecked, would ultimately create another World War and impose a world government.
Benson's later views are described in a pamphlet entitled This Age of Conflict, in which he attempted to reconcile his own White Nationalist views with those of Carroll Quigley, Douglas Reed, and Antony Sutton (he critiqued what he perceived to be the limitations of each of these authors). He argued that there existed a "Wall Street Struggle" between the Anglophile WASP banking Establishment and the Jewish Banking Establishment. He believed that the Jewish banking establishment had first overcome it's competitors in the Boer War, that they were the force behind this war, causing unnecessary strife between Europeans, that they were powers behind the rise of Communism, and that the Anglophile establishment in turn responded by subsidizing Fascism and other Nationalist movements. He believed that with the ascendancy of FDR and World War II the "internationalist" Jewish banking establishment triumphed over the "Nationalist" WASP banking establishment, took control of the power structures it's competitors had created, and were from that time forward the dominant force in World affairs.
His collection of essays The Zionist Factor critiqued Jewish politics in a manner that combined conspiracism (arguing that there existed an obscured alliance between Zionism, Communism, and the Jewish banking establishment), and the idea of conscious ethnic struggle between Jews and Gentiles that would later be put forth by White Nationalists like David Duke and Kevin B. MacDonald.