Eric Butler (politician)

Eric Dudley Butler (born May 7, 1916 in Benalla , Victoria , † June 7, 2006 in Victoria) was an Australian politician and journalist who founded the Australian League of Rights and chaired it for decades. This right-wing , anti-Semitic and anti-Communist party was for decades the major party of the rights of Australia until the late 1990s, the party One Nation of Pauline Hanson was massive popularity in an election in Queensland and in Australia, which dropped considerably since the beginning of the 2000th

Early life

Eric Butler's father was a teacher and headmaster whose ancestors were Irish and Welsh descendants. Eric Butler was a regionally known batsman in cricket in his youth . He lived near Melbourne for most of his life . In the 1930s he became a supporter of the right-wing radical ideology of the Social Credits of the Scottish engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas and wrote as a journalist from 1938 for the New Times newspaper of the Social Credit Party of Australia . In 1937 the Australian Security Service and the Military Police Intelligence of Australia kept a file on him. Butler served in the Australian Army in the Pacific during World War II .

Second World War

During the war his political activities were under surveillance by the Australian security authorities and in December 1941, articles by Butler in the New Times were censored when he described the Soviet Union as "a Jewish slave state [...] controlled by international Jewish financiers in New York" (German: "a Jewish slave state [..] controlled by Jewish financiers in New York"), designated. Butler was interrogated by the security services in 1941 and their verdict was that he was a "good soldier".

In 1945 Butler wrote about Prime Minister Robert Menzies of the Liberal Party of Australia that he was a dangerous politician and a dictator, as was Herbert Vere Evatt , who later became the Justice and Foreign Minister of Australia. As the attorney general at the time, Evatt initiated a parliamentary investigation into Butler's activities, which was without consequences for Butler.

After the Second World War

In 1946, Butler founded the League of Rights in South Australia and Victoria, and in 1946 he published in The International Jew , claiming that Winston Churchill , Theodore Roosevelt and other leaders in Britain and America, as well as in the Soviet Union, were under dominance and influence the international Jewish financial rule.

The League of Rights in South Australia then focused on a campaign against the national banks before branching out into other federal states. The Australian League of Rights was founded in 1961, butler was national director until he left in 1992. Although Butler ran as an independent for the Australian House of Representatives in 1951, it was not intended by him that the League develop into a political party. Rather, it was an advocacy group and grassroots organization that should promote Butler's ideas of anti-communism, social credit, monarchy and British ideals. In the 1950s he was a member of the Eltham Shire Council and Shire President (Eltham is a suburb of Melbourne) for several years .

In addition to the New Times newspaper , the League of Rights brought out various publications such as the weekly On Target (German: Zieltreffer) and the monthly Intelligence Survey . From 1949 onwards, Butler published a series of articles on national and international affairs in the Melbourne morning paper The Argus , then a conservative newspaper. However, when it became known that the articles were based on training material from the League of Rights and the ideology of Social Credits , they were discontinued.

In the 1960s it became known that members of the League of Rights were double registered in the conservative parties of the Liberal Party and Country Party , the forerunner of the National Party of Australia . A close confidante of Butler, Arthur Chresby , was elected as the Liberal Party candidate in the Queensland election. Little by little, the party leaders of the Country Party and National Party warned of an infiltration of their party by the League of Rights , as a result of which party members and party branches were partially excluded.

The Liberal Party member James Killen , who was Australian Defense Minister from 1969, became known as a supporter of the Australian League of Rights in the 1960s when he traveled to Great Britain with Butler in 1962 to oppose accession to the European Economic Community and for the Government of Ian Smith to perform in Rhodesia . In the 1960s and 1970s, Butler defended apartheid in South Africa and Ian Smith's white minority regime in Rhodesia. As a proponent of apartheid, Butler traveled several times to South Africa and Rhodesia, which he regarded as bastions against communism in Africa. He was also the Far East correspondent for American Opinion magazine for the far- right John Birch Society in the United States .

In July 1972, Butler discussed with Max Teichmann , a professor of politics at Monash University, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Monday Conference television program . Teichmann confronted Butler with his proven anti-Semitic statements from the 1930s and 1940s and asked him to distance himself from them, whereupon Butler evaded. The television program also highlighted the issue of the League of Rights infiltration of the Country Party ahead of the December 1972 national elections when the Conservative government that ruled for many years was defeated.

After the mid-1990s, the party was the One Nation of Pauline Hanson into the leading right-wing party of Australia, which then was disintegrated and insignificant again.

Butler lived in rural Victoria and in his later years on a farm near Panton Hill , which was a meeting place for the League of Rights and other right-wing extremists. He resigned as director of the League of Rights in 1992, handing that position over to David Thompson, but remained politically active until shortly before his death. In 1999 he gave a speech for Holocaust denier David Irving .

literature

• Konrad Kwiet : Butler, Eric , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, p. 117

Web links

• Australian League of Rights (This website has kept the archive of On Target magazine since 1965.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ WW2 Nominal Roll - Certificate for ERIC DUDLEY BUTLER ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at www.ww2roll.gov.au, accessed June 26, 2011 
2. ↑ alor.org : Jeremy Lee: Eric Butler, accessed April 3
3. ↑ ^{a b} aijac.org.au ( Memento of the original from August 25, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : David Greason, Australia-Israel Review, April 24, 1997, accessed April 3, 2011 
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} jcu.edu.au ( Memento of the original from August 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : David Greason: The League of Rights: a reply to Brockett , accessed April 4, 2011 
5. ↑ KD Gott (1965): Voices of Hate. A Study of the Australian League of Rights and its Director, Eric D. Butler , s. 18, Dissent Publishing Association, Melbourne
6. ↑ alor.org : On Target from September 16, 1983 called on April 4
7. ↑ ^{a b} alor.org : On Target: League scores heavily from National TV programs , July 7, 1972, accessed April 4, 2011
8. ↑ theflatearthsociety.org : Military (English), accessed 4 April 2011