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Chapter 44
The Second War produced a third result, additional to the advance of the revolution into Europe and the establishment by force of the Zionist state: namely, the second attempt to set up the structure of a "world government", on the altar of which Western nationhood was to be sacrificed. This is the final consummation to which the parallel processes of Communism and Zionism are evidently intended to lead; the idea first emerged in the Weishaupt papers, began to take vigorous shape in the 19th Century, and was expounded in full detail in the Protocols of 1905. In the First War it was the master-idea of all the ideas which Mr. House and his associates "oozed into the mind" of President Wilson, and sought to make the president think were "his own". It then took shape, first as "The League to Enforce Peace" and at the war's end as "The League of Nations".
Thus it was given first and partial realization, like all the ideas auxiliary to it, during the confusion period of a great war, that is, the later period of the fighting and the early aftermath of it. It was never submitted before that war to the peoples who became embroiled, nor was any reasoned explanation of its nature and purpose given to them; during the "emergency" the "premier-dictators" took their assent for granted; the only expresseion of popular opinion ever given was the immediate refusal of the United States Congress, as the fog of the First War cleared, to have anything to do with it.
The twenty years between the two wars showed that "the League of Nations" was unable to enforce or preserve peace and that nations would not of their own will surrender their sovereignty to it. Nevertheless, as the Second War approached the men who were to conduct it again were busy with this idea of setting up what they called a "world authority" of some kind and the one common thing in all their thought about it was that "nations" should give up "sovereignty". Mr. Roosevelt (according to Mr. Baruch's biographer, Mr. Morris V. Rosenbloom) as far back as 1923, after his paralysis, devoted his sickbed time to drafting "a plan to preserve peace" which, as president, he revised in the White House, then giving his blueprint the title, "The United Nations".
Similary in England, the champion of British nationhood, Mr. Winston Churchill, in 1936 became president of the British section of an international association called "The New Commonwealth Society" which advocated "a world police force to maintain peace" (the conjunction of the words "force" and "peace" occurs in all these programmes and pronouncements), and publicly declared (November 26, 1936) that it differed from "other peace societies" in the fact that it "advocated the use of force against an aggressor in support of law". Mr. Churchill did not say what law, or whose law, but he did offer "force" as the path to "peace".
Thus it was logical that at the meeting of President Roosevelt and Mr.
Churchill in August 1941, when the sterile" Atlantic Charter" was produced, Mr. Churchill (as he records) should tell the president that "opinion in England would be disappointed at the absence of any intention to establish an international organization for keeping peace after the war". I was in England at that time and, for one, was disappointed at the inclusion of the reference which Mr. Churchill desired; as for "opinion in England" in general, there was none, for no informative basis for any opinion had been offered to the people. Mr. Churchill was pursuing the idea on his own authority, as was Mr. Roosevelt: "Roosevelt spoke and acted with complete freedom and authority in every sphere . . . I represented Great Britain with almost equal latitude. Thus a very high degree of concert was obtained, and the saving in time and the reduction in the number of people informed were both invaluable" (Mr. Churchill, describing how "the chief business between our two countries was virtually conducted by personal interchanges" between himself and Mr. Roosevelt in "perfect understanding").
Consequently, in the concluding stages of the war and without any reference to the battling multitudes, "the questions of World Organization" (Mr. Churchill) dominated the private debate between these two, General Smuts in South Africa, and the premiers of the other British oversea countries. By that time (1944) Mr. Churchill was using the term "World Instrument" and (as in the earlier case of his allusion to "law") the obvious question arose, whose instrument? "The prevention of future aggression" was stock language in all these interchanges. The difficulty of determining who is the aggressor has been shown in the cases of Havana harbour in 1898 and Pearl Harbour in 1941, and for that matter the coaggressor at the start of the Second War, the Soviet state, was to be the party most lavishly rewarded at its end, so that all this talk about stopping "aggression" cannot have been seriously intended. Clearly the idea was to set up a "world instrument" for the use of whoever might gain control of it. Against whom would it be used? The answer is given by all the propagandists for this idea; the one thing they all attack is "the sovereignty of nations". Ergo, it would be used to erase separate nationhood (in fact, only in the West). By whom would it be used? The results of the two great wars of this century supply the answer to that question.
Against that background the "United Nations Organization" was set up in 1945. Within two years (that is, while the confusion-period of the Second War still continued), the true nature of "world-government" and the "world instrument" was for an instant revealed. For the first time the peoples were shown what awaited them if this idea were ever fully realized. They did not understand what they were shown then and forgot it at once, but the disclosure is on record and is of permanent value to the student now and for as long as this idea of the super-national "authority", so clearly foretold in the Protocols of 1905, continues to be promoted by powerful men behind the scenes of
international politics. At this point in the narrative the figure of Mr. Bernard Baruch first emerges from advisory shadows into full light, so that reasonable inferences may be drawn about his long part in the events of our century.
As has been shown, he made a decisive intervention in favour of the Zionist state in 1947 by "changing a great deal" from his earlier hostility to Zionism (Dr. Weizmann) and by advising a responsible Cabinet officer, Mr. James Forrestal, to discontinue his opposition. That is the first point at which Mr. Baruch's influence on state policy may be clearly traced, and it is a significant one, discouraging to those who hope for Jewish "involvement in Mankind", for up to that time he seemed to be (and presumably wished to appear) a fully integrated American, a paragon of Jewish emancipation, tall, handsome, venerable and greatly successful in his affairs.
If Mr. Baruch's "change" was as sudden as Dr. Weizmann's narrative suggests, another incident of that period makes it appear also to have been radical, even violent. One of the most extreme Zionist chauvinists in America then was a Mr. Ben Hecht, who once published the following dictum:
"One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle. If I'd had charge of executing Christ I'd have handled it differently. You see, what I'd have done was had him shipped to Rome and fed to the lions. They never could have made a saviour out of mincemeat".
During the period of violence in Palestine which culminated in the pogrom of Arabs at Deir Yasin, this Mr. Hecht inserted a full-page advertisement in many of the leading newspapers throughout America. It was addressed "T o the Terrorists of Palestine" and included this message:
"The Jews of America are for you. You are their champions . . . Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts".
It was the author of this advertisement (according to his autobiography) whom Mr. Baruch chose to visit and inform of his affinity and support:
"One day the door of my room opened and a tall white-haired man entered. It was Bernard Baruch, my first Jewish social visitor. He sat down, observed me for a moment and then spoke. 'I am on your side', said Baruch, 'the only way the Jews will ever get anything is by fighting for it. I'd like you to think of me as one of your Jewish fighters in the tall grass with a long gun. I've always done my best work that way, out of sight'."
This revelatory passage (added to Mr. Baruch's intervention in the Forrestal affair) gives the student insight into the personality of Mr. Bernard Baruch. If this was the sense in which he had done his best work ("as a Jewish fighter in the tall grass with a long gun . . . out of sight") during his thirty-five years of
"advising six Presidents", the shape af American policy and of world events during the 20th Century is explained. The reader is entitled to take the quoted words at full value and to consider Mr. Baruch's influence on American and world affairs in the light they shed. They are equally relevant to Mr. Baruch's one great public intervention in world affairs, which came about the same time. This was the "Baruch Plan" for a despotic world authority backed by annihilating force, and the words cited above justify the strongest misgivings abaut the purposes to which such a "world instrument" would be used. The "Baruch Plan" is of such importance to this narrative that a glance at Mr. Baruch's entire background and life is appropriate.
He was always generally assumed to be of the aristocratic Jewish type, that is to say, of Sephardic descent leading back, by way af the experience in Spain and Portugal, to a remote possibility of Palestinian arigin. In fact, as he himself stated (February 7, 1947) his father was "a Polish Jew who came to this country a hundred years ago". That places Mr. Baruch among the Slavic Ashkenazi, the non-semitic "Eastern Jews", who are now said (by the Judaist statisticians) to comprize almost the whole of Jewry.
He was born in 1870 at Camden in South Carolina. His family seemed to have identified itself with the weal or woe of the new country, for his father served as a Confederate surgeon and Mr. Baruch himself was born during the evil days af "Reconstruction"; as a child he saw the Negroes, inflamed by carpetbagger oratory and scallawag liquor, surge through the sleepy streets of this plantationcountry town, and his elder brothers stand with shotguns an the upstairs porch; his father wore the hood and robe of the Ku Klux Klan.
Thus in childhood he saw the destructive revolution at work (for it took charge during the final stages and aftermath of the Civil War and "Reconstruction" was recognizably its work) and later saw the enduring values of a free society. However, his family was not truly part of the South and soon the pull of New York drew it thither. There, before he was thirty, Bernard Baruch was a rich and rising man, and before he was forty he was already a power, though an unseen one, behind politics. He is probably the original of the master-financier, "Thor", in Mr. House's novel. Against much opposition Mr. House included him in the group around Mr. Wilson.
His life-story then was already full of great financial coups, "selling short", "cashing in on the crash", "driving the price down", and the like. Gold, rubber, copper, sulphur, everything turned into dollars at his touch. In 1917, during an investigation into stock-market movements prompted in 1916 by the dissemination of "peace reports", he informed the House Rules Committee of Congress that he had "made haf a million dollars in one day by short selling". He stated that his support of President Wilson (to whose electoral campaigns he made lavish contributions) was first prompted by Professor Wilson's attack on exclusive "fraternities" at Princeton University (which in 1956 distinguished
itself by allowing Mr. Alger Hiss to address one of its student clubs). The implication here is that he is of those who detest all "discrimination of race, class or creed"; however few men can have suffered les s than Mr. Baruch from "discrimination".
His first appearance in Wall Street was much disliked by the great men there on the ground that he was "a gambler" (a reproach apparently first made by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan). He survived all such criticisms and described himself as "a speculator". During the First World War President Wilson appointed Mr. Baruch head of the War Industries Board (Mr. Baruch having repeatedly urged President Wilson that the head of this dictatorial body should be "one man") and he later described himself as having been, in that capacity, the most powerful man in the world. When President Wilson returned, completely incapacitated, from the Versailles Peace Conference Mr. Baruch "became one of the group that made decisions during the President's illness. . . called 'the Regency Council' ", and President Wilson rallied from his sickbed long enough to dismiss his Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Lansing, who had been calling Cabinet meetings in opposition to this "Regency Council".
Mr. Baruch's biographer states that he continued to be "adviser" to the three Republican Presidents of the 1920's, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt testifies to the fact that he was President Roosevelt's adviser both before and during the twelve-year Democratic regime that followed. By March 1939 Mr. Winston Churchill felt able to inform Mr. Baruch (then in residence at his Barony in South Carolina) that "War is coming very soon . . . You will be running the show over there".
By that time Mr. Baruch had been "advising" Presidents for nearly thirty years and in spite of that the zealous student can not definitely discover or state what Mr. Baruch's motives were, nature of "advice" he gave, or what the effect of his counsel was on American policy and world events. This is natural, for he had worked always "in the long grass . . . out of sight". He was never an elected or responsible officer of state so that his work was beyond audit. He was the first of the "advisers", the new type of potentate foreseen, at the century's start, only in the much-abused "Protocols" of 1905.
Deductions and inferences alone were possible in his case; fragments here and there might be pieced together to make the parts of a picture. First, his publicly recorded recommendations were always for measures of "control". In the First and the Second War alike this was his panacea: "control", "discipline" and the like. It amounted always to the demand for power over people, and for the centralization of authority in one man's hands, and the demand was raised again long after the Second War, once more in the plea that it would prevent a third: "before the bullets have begun to fly. . . the country must accept disciplines such as rationing and price control" (May 28, 1952, before a Senate Committee).
Each time this recommendation was made it was presented as a means for defeating a dictator ("the Kaiser", "Hitler". "Stalin"). The controlled and
disciplined world which Mr. Baruch envisaged was depicted by him in testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1935: "had the 1914-1918 war gone on another year our whole population would have emerged in cheap but serviceable uniforms. . . types of shoes were to be reduced to two or three". This statement provoked strongrotests at the time; Americans, having helped defeat the "regimented" Germans, did not like to think that they would have presented a spectacle of drab regimentation, had the war but lasted "another year". At the time Mr. Baruch denied that he had intended "to goose-step the nation", but his biographer records that he "revived his proposal for similar drab clothing in World War II". In contemplating the picture thus conjured up the student cannot put out of his mind the similar picture, of a drab, enslaved mass inhabiting the former nation-states, which is given in the Protocols.
Other fragments showed that Mr. Baruch's thought culminated in a picture of a controlled and disciplined world. The folie de grandeur, the megalomania with which the Wilsons and Lloyd Georges, the Roosevelts and Winston Churchills reproached the Kaiser and Hitler, was in him. His biographer quotes: "of course we can fix the world, Baruch has said on many occasions". And then, during the Second War, "Baruch had agreed with President Roosevelt and other leaders that a world organization should be established at the height of allied unity in the war".
The italicized words are the key ones: they relate to the confusion-period of a great war, when the "advisers" submit their plans, the "premier-dictators" initial them (and later cannot understand how they could have done so), and the great coups are brought off.
These are all fragments, significant but partial. Immediately after the Second War Mr. Baruch made his first great public appearance in world affairs as the author of a plan for world-dictatorship, and dictatorship (in my opinion) by terror. For the first time his mind and work lie open to audit, and it is in connection with this plan that (again in my opinion) his words to Mr. Ben Hecht are of such importance.
According to his biographer, Mr. Baruch was 74 "when he began to prepare himself for the undertaking he considered the most vital of his life. . . to shape a workable plan for international control of atomic energy and, as United States representatives to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, to promote adoption of that plan by the Commission". That would have been in 1944, a year before the first atom bomb was dropped and the United Nations was even established."
If this is correct, Mr. Baruch knew what was to happen in the world about two years in advance of events; "the assignment" for which he was preparing himself in 1944 was first proposed by Secretary of State Byrnes (after a discussion with Mr. Baruch) to President Truman in March 1946 (seven months after the first atom bombs). President Truman duly made the appointment, whereon Mr.
Baruch at last appeared publicly in an official capacity. He set to work on the "Baruch Plan".
The law governing America's membership ofthe United Nations requires all American representatives in it to follow the policy determined by the President and transmitted through the Secretary of State. According to his biographer Mr. Baruch enquired what "the policy" was to be, possibly as a matter of form, because he was told to draft it himself. Therefore the "Baruch Plan" was literally Mr. Baruch's plan, if this account is correct (it was published with his approval). It was devised on a bench in Central Park in consultation with one Ferdinand Eberstadt, Mr. Baruch's assistant in 1919 at Versailles and "an active disciple" of Mr. Baruch's in the Second War. This might be described as the 20th Century method of formulating state policy, and apparently Mr. Baruch owes to it his popular title, "the park-bench statesman".
Mr. Baruch then presented his Plan to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission at its opening session on June 14, 1946. He spoke with the voice of the Levites' Jehovah offering "blessings or cursings", alluded to the atom bomb as "the absolute weapon" (within a few years an even more pulverizing explosive was in competitive production), and used the familiar argument of false prophets, namely, that if his advice were followed "peace" would ensue and if it were ignored all would be "destroyed". The proposal he made seems to me to amount to a universal dictatorship supported by a reign of terror on the worldwide scale: the reader may judge for himself.
"We must elect world peace or world destruction. . . We must provide the mechanism to assure that atomic energy is used for peaceful purposes and preclude its use in war. To that end, we must provide immediate, swift and sure punishment of those who violate the agreements that are reached by the nations. Penalization is essential if peace is to be more than a feverish interlude between wars. And, too, the United Nations can prescribe individual responsibility and punishment on the principles applied at Nuremberg by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom, France and the United States - a formula certain to benefit the world's future. In this crisis, we represent not only our governments, but, in a larger way, we represent the peoples of the world. . . The peoples of these democracies gathered here are not afraid of an internationalism that protects; they are unwilling to be fobbed off by mouthings about narrow sovereignty, which is today's phrase for yesterday's isolation".
Thus Mr. Baruch appeared, not as the representative of the United States, but as the spokesman of "the peoples of the world", and in that capacity recommended a permanent Nuremberg Tribunal as certain to benefit the world (presumably by judgments handed down on the Day of Atonement).
On the basis thus laid down, he proposed "managerial control or ownership" of all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security and power to control, inspect and license all other atomic activities. As to "violations of this
order", he proposed that "penalties as immediate and certain in their execution as possible should be fixed for (l) illegal possession or use of an atomic bomb or atomic material or for wilful interference with the activities of the Authority". He then reiterated his proposal for "punishment": ". . . the matter of punishment lies at the very heart of our present security system. . . The Charter permits penalization only by concurrence of each of the five great powers. . . There must be no veto to protect those who violate their solemn agreements. . . The bomb does not wait upon delay. To delay may be to die. The time between violation and preventive action or punishment would be all too short for extended discussion as to the course to be followed . . . The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war".
The reader will see that Mr. Baruch contended that the world could only escape "destruction" by "precluding the use of atomic energy in war" and proposed that "an Authority" with a monopoly of atomic energy be set up, which should be free from all check in its punitive use of atomic energy against any party deemed by it to be deserving of punishment.
This is the proposal of which I earlier said that the world for the first time received a glimpse of what "world government" meant. Mr. Baruch's biographer says that President Truman "endorsed the plan" and then records Mr. Baruch's efforts to "round up" votes for it on the Commission. After six months (December 5, 1946) he was impatient and begged the Commission to remember "that to delay may be to die". The confusion-period was coming to an end and even a United Nations Commission could not be brought to swallow this plan. On December 31, 1946 Mr. Baruch resigned and the plan was shelved by reference to the United Nations Disarmament Commission.
In January 1947 Mr. Baruch announced that he was "retiring from public life" (in which he was only conspicuous on this one occasion), "Interested onlookers were not overly alarmed" (his biographer adds); "the betting odds were that Baruch would be back at the White House and on Capitol Hill before the month was over, and so he was". Later in 1947 he intervened "decisively" (though not publicly) with Mr. Forrestal and had his significant meeting with Mr. Ben Hecht. Six years later his biographer (who was evidently aware that Mr. Eisenhower was then to be elected) summarized the recommendations which the new President would receive from the permanent "adviser". These related entirely to preparatory mobilization for war, "controls", "global strategy" and the like.
By that time Mr. Baruch had specified what particular new "aggression" these proposals were designed to meet, having told a Senate Committee in 1952 that to forestall "Soviet aggression" the President "should be given all the power he needed to carry through an armament and mobilization programme, including price and priority controls". This was the programme, under "one-man" direction, urged by him during two world wars. However, his private view about
the aggressor named apparently was not that af alarm and repugnance, depicted to the Senate Committee, for in 1956 he told an interviewer, "A few years ago I met Vyshinsky at a party and said to him, 'You're a fool and I'm a fool: You have the bomb and we have the bomb. . . Let's control the thing while we can because while we are talking all nations will sooner ar later get the bomb" (Daily Telegraph January 9, 1956). Nor did the Soviet regard Mr. Baruch with hostility; in 1948 (as he confirmed in 1951) he was invited to Moscow to confer with the dictators there and actually left America on that journey; only "a sudden illness in Paris" (he explained) caused him to break it off.
The disclosure in 1946 of his plan "to fix the world" gave that world a glimpse of what it might expect to be attempted in the later stages and aftermath of any third war; the "global plan" was fully revealed. In 1947 Mr. Baruch stated that his father"came to'this country a hundred years ago". The case offers the most signifkant example of the effect on America, and through America on world affairs, of the "new immigration" of the 19th Century. After just that hundred years the son had already for nearly forty years been one of the most powerful men in the world, though he worked "in the long grass. . . out of sight", and he was to continue this work for at least another ten years.
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