Everyday popular delusions and the madness of the Jewish crowd: It’s a bizarre tale, indeed, one recounted by Ezra Levant here, here and here. It’s about how, back in the 1960s, Canada’s most prominent Jewish advocacy group, the organization one would think the least likely to want to boost the fortunes of local “Nazi” types, did just that.
Ezra calls it an “embarrassing” chapter in CJC history, and the Ceej apparently agrees, since it’s gone to great lengths to try to discredit him and expunge it from the public record. No can do since the record—newspaper reports, and even a cover story in Maclean’s—speaks for itself. However, in reading Ezra’s gobsmacking J’accuse, along with the chapter he links to in historian and Ceej executive Frank Bialystok’s book (whose last name, sorry Frank, always makes me titter since it’s the name of Zero Mostel’s character in The Producers), I think I can begin to unpack the sequence of events and underlying psychology that led to a kind of Jewish hysteria—a tribal freak-out, if you will. That freak-out back in 1960s Toronto, I’m sad to say, led directly to state censorship and the enforcers (the “human rights” commission chuckleheads) who lord it over us today.
It begins in the run up to WW2, when American and Canadian Jews were trying to figure out what they could do to the Jews of Europe escape from Nazi oppression. As always, there were two approaches to try to rouse government action: speak up forcefully and demand action; or “sha shtil,” the succinct Yiddish phrase for “don’t make too much noise because you’ll only draw attention to yourself and make things worse.” Official Jewry of that day, naturally, chose the latter approach, and discouraged anyone—for example, Peter Bergson in the U.S.—to raised a hue and cry. It’s unclear whether speaking out forcefully would have been more persuasive. However, not only did “sha shtil” not work, but it had a dreadful impact on the psychology of the Jews who lived in safety in Canada as Hitler’s final solution was unfolding in Europe, making them feel impotent and angry at themselves for embracing “sha shtil”.
Of course, having six million of your brethren slaughtered in the most horrific ways imaginable is bound to have a deleterious effect on one’s psychology—maybe even make you a bit paranoid and apt to perceive threats that aren’t really there. And that’s exactly what happened in Toronto, when word got out that a pathetic loser named John Beattie who styled himself as the leader of Canada’s Nazi Party was going to hold a “rally” in Allan Gardens, a lovely if somewhat skeezy Toronto botanical park (heroin addicts liked to go there to shoot up). He never got the chance. A Jewish mob barred his entry, and ended up throttling the handful of “Nazis” who had turned out to hear him. Police were called in to break up the fracas, news of which ended up being splashed all over the front page, causing no end of embarrassment for official Jewry, who had to try explain why it was that a mob of Jews felt the need to beat up on a few deadbeats.
What made the Jews behave in this freakish way? As Bialystok explains in his book, it was a reaction—or rather, an over-reaction—to “sha shtil,” the Jews’ way of repudiating their former “tread gently” approach. I venture there was also a degree of survivor guilt involved, along with lots of pent up anger. And one more element: fear. It was only twenty years, after all, since the end of the war, twenty years since Hitler’s Death Camps had been liberated. It was also the height of the Cold War—duck and cover drills in schoolrooms, and only a few years on from the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It all blended together in a goulash of paranoia—and led to the freak out at Allan Gardens.
It also led to the most demented part of the story—the CJC paying a guy named John Garrity to “infiltrate” the Canadian Nazi Party. Sure, the name sounds very impressive and scary, hearkening back to Hitler’s version, but prior to Garrity’s involvement, “the Party” was nothing more than a “handful of pathetic losers” (as they were described by Maclean's magazine at the time). Once Garrity—remember, the CJC’s “mole”—got his hands on it, though, he was able to build it up into a going concern. Or at least, enough of a going concern to keep the Jews’ paranoia on a low boil and prompt official Jewry to demand the government take action to protect the Jews from this “threat”. Which led directly to provisions against “hate speech”—really, a curtailment of free speech—being written into Canada’s human rights codes.
To recap: Upset over the final solution and their embrace of “sha shtil,” Canadian Jews in the ‘60s whipped themselves into a frenzy over a bogus “threat” and then insisted the government step in to defend them from the phantom menace they themselves had concoted (“reasoning” that Hitler started out small, too, and it’s a well-known fact that “hate speech” invariably leads to genocide.)
And that, my friends, is how we got from there to here, and why official Jewry clings e’er tightly to its fraying security blankie—state censorship—even as mobs of angry Jew-haters are given free reign to rage in downtown Toronto, and police tell counter-protesters to flee for their lives because there’s no way to protect them.
Ironically, the threat Canadian Jews feared all those years ago has now materialized, only it isn’t sporting Nazi duds. It’s wearing a multi-culti happy face.
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