Phillip Adams sinks a final boot into the fetid corpse of Eric Butler in the Weekend Oz’s magazine:
When Eric Butler died recently I was not among his mourners, regarding it as calamitous that he was ever horn.
For more than 60 years this most repulsive of creatures spread his poison in our political life.
Beginning on the most lunatic of fringes he camouflaged his pornographic politics sufficiently to infiltrate and influence the mainstream. Turn over any rock from Hitlerism in the 1930s to Hansonism in the 1990s and there you ’ll find Butler and his League of Rights. As I frequently wrote during his squalid and toxic lifetime, he was a traitor to his country, to his professed Christian faith and to human decency. I ’m proud that we were enemies for decades. But some very surprising people were his friends.
Sir Raphael Cilento was a leading Butler groupie, as was Jim Killen MHR, later Sir James.
Perhaps we can forgive Jim’s dalliance with Butler in the 60s, when he accompanied him to London to protest Britain’s intention to join the Common Market. Perhaps he hadn’t read Butler’s ravings on race. When pressured to distance himself from the League of Rights and shown Butler’s Jew-hating writings, Killen expressed shock.
Yet he declined to go public.
Describing the scene, Jewish leader Isi Leibler says Killen felt he ’d “look foolish if he suddenly announced the discovery of what appeared so ohvious.”
But what excuse has Alexander Downer for sharing a League of Rights Lectern 30 years Later?
Butler’s treasons and anti-Semitism were on the record before Downer was born.
But perhaps ASIO hadn’t told him. They’d been so busy looking under beds for reds.
Norman Banks was Australia’s first shock jock and pushed the Butler harrow on 3AW in Melbourne and TV, rejoicing in his surreal anti-communism and support of apartheid. But Butler had his own medium, The New Times, a rag launched in 1934 when Butler was a young man.
From the beginning it was rancid with anti-Semitism, claiming that Jesus-killing Jews were not only the authors of Bolshevism but, in some bizarre way, the promoters of Nazism.
Insisting that Jesus wasn’t a Jew, Butler would spend his worthless life peddling the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still the textbook for pogroms. Neo-Nazis still swear by it as do Muslim fanatics. I’d see it on the shelves of his Melbourne bookshop, alongside tracts carrying anti-Jewish material as depraved as Der Sturmer, Hitler’s favourite rag.
On the eve of World War II The New Times was still pro-Axis, supporting Japanese aggression against China and Oswald Mosley’s fascists in Britain.
Much praise, too, for Italy and Germany, and for the invasion of Poland. This line was softpedalled after the declaration of war, having opposed Australian involvement. And, yes, the Jews were running Churchill and Roosevelt, along with Sir Charles Moses, then head of the ABC, and Sir Keith Murdoch.
Butler’s madness knew no bounds. The Jews were behind everything from the Spanish Inquisition to Nazism. Hitler was of Jewish descent and “Hitler ’s policy was a Jewish policy” - Yes, folks, the Fuhrer was “a man who helped advance Jewish aims”.
Nazi policies were financed by Jews with the intention of having Jews arrive as refugees all over the world to spread their anti-Christian evil and political subversion. He spelled it out after the war in his book The International Jew, Australia ’s home-grown Mein Kampf. Oh, almost forgot. Holocaust was a hoax, six million dead Jews a joke.
Butler would turn his attention to the UN, “merely a cloak for Jewish policies”, and make common cause with the John Birch Society in the US and individual anti-Semites such as British Nazi Arnold Leese.
Billed as “an Australian patriot” he ’d preach to rabid racists overseas and return home to talk to the Adelaide Junior Chamber of Commerce, Maitland Rotary, Apex gatherings and Young Liberals. Conservative clergy made their pulpits available.
He had a regular column in the Melbourne Argus. And this appalling creature became a member of the Melbourne Synod of the Anglican Church and was elected President of the Shire of Eltham in Victoria.
Its fortunes revived by the internet, the League would play its role in the rise of One Nation.
For Butler, Pauline Hanson was a dream come true. As was the long list of geese in the National Party who were happy to associate with this goose-stepping menace.
To his dying day many saw Butler as heroic. I got glowing tributes about this “great patriot” after announcing his death, and denouncing the man, on radio.
The last time I actually saw him was when he took me to the Press Council for calling him our most virulent anti-Semite.
Apologising for my understatement I promised to be harsher in future. When the council showed Butler the door I told him to sue me. For flattery.
