Part 6 (2/2)
”Every other successful name you see in a great city is a Jewish name,”
says Mr. Brisbane. In his own city the ratio is even higher than that.
”Jews numbering less than one per cent of the earth's population possess by conquest, enterprise, industry and intelligence 50 per cent of the world's commercial success,” says Mr. Brisbane.
Does it mean anything to Mr. Brisbane? Has he ever thought how it will all turn out? Is he willing to absolve that ”success” from every quality which humanity has a right to challenge? Is he entirely satisfied with the way that ”success” is used where it is supreme? Would he be willing to undertake to prove that it is due to those commendable qualities he has named and nothing less commendable? Speaking of the Jew-financed Harriman railroad campaign, is Mr. Brisbane ready to write his endors.e.m.e.nt upon that? Did he ever hear of Jewish money backing railroads that were built for railroad purposes and nothing else?
It would be very easy to suggest to Mr. Brisbane, as editor, a series of articles which would be most enlightening, both to himself and his readers, if he would only put unbiased men at work gathering the facts for them.
One of the articles might be ent.i.tled ”The Jews at the Peace Conference.” His men should be instructed to learn who were the most prominent figures at the Peace Conference; who came and went most constantly and most busily; who were given freest access to the most important persons and chambers; which race provided the bulk of the private secretaries to the important personages there; which race provided most of the sentinels through whom engagements had to be made with men of note; which race went furthest in the endeavor to turn the whole proceeding into a festival rout by dances and lavish entertainment; which civilians of prominence oftenest dined the leading conferees in private session.
If Mr. Brisbane, with the genius for reporting which his organization deservedly has, will turn his men loose on that a.s.signment, and then print what they bring him, he will have a story that will make a mark even in his remarkable career as an editor.
He might even run a second story on the Peace Conference, ent.i.tled, ”Which Program Won at the Peace Conference?” He might instruct his men to inquire as to the business which brought the Jews in such quality and quant.i.ty to Paris, and how it was put through. Particularly should they inquire whether any jot or t.i.ttle of the Jews' world program was refused or modified by the Peace Conference. It should also be carefully inquired whether, after getting what they went after, they did not ask for still more and get that, too, even though it const.i.tuted a discrimination against the rest of the world. Mr. Brisbane would doubtless be surprised to learn that of all the programs submitted to that Conference, not excepting the great program on which humanity hung so many pathetic hopes, the only program to go through was the Jews'
program. And yet he could learn just that if he inquired. The question is, having obtained that information, what would Mr. Brisbane do with it?
There are any number of lines of investigation Mr. Brisbane might enter, and in any one of them his knowledge of his country and of its relation to this particular Question would be greatly enlarged.
Does Mr. Brisbane know who owns Alaska? He may have been under the impression, in common with the rest of us until we learned better, that it was owned by the United States. No, it is owned by the same people who are coming rapidly to own the United States.
Is Mr. Brisbane, from the vantage point afforded by his position in national journalism, even dimly aware that there are elements in our industrial unrest which neither ”capital” nor ”labor” accurately define?
Has he ever caught a glimpse of another power which is neither ”labor”
nor ”capital” in the productive sense, whose purpose and interest it is to keep labor and capital as far apart as possible, now by provoking labor, now by provoking capital? In his study of the industrial situation and its perfectly baffling mystery, Mr. Brisbane must have caught a flash of something behind the backmost scene. It would be good journalistic enterprise to find out what it is.
Has Mr. Brisbane ever printed the name of the men who control the sugar supply of the United States--does he know them--would he like to know them?
Has he ever looked into the woolen situation in this country, from the change of owners.h.i.+p in cotton lands, and the deliberate sabotage of cotton production by banking threats, right on through to the change in the price of cloth and clothing? And has he ever noted the names of the men he found on that piece of investigation? Would he like to know how it is done, and who does it? Mr. Brisbane could find all these things and give them to the public by using his efficient staff of investigators and writers on this Question.
Whether Mr. Brisbane would feel free to do this, he himself best knows.
There may be reasons why he would not, private reasons, prudential reasons.
However that may be, there are no reasons why he should not make a complete study of the Question--a real study, not a superficial glance at it with an eye to its ”news value”--and arrive at his own considered conclusion. There would be no intolerance about that. As it is now, Mr.
Brisbane is not qualified to take a stand on either side of the Question; he simply brushes it aside as troublesome, as the old planters used brush aside the anti-slavery moralists; and for that reason the recent defense of the Jew is not a defense at all. It is more like a bid for favor.
Mr. Brisbane's chief aversion, apparently, is toward what he calls race prejudice and race hatred. Of course, if any man should fear that the study of an economic situation would plunge him into these serious aberrations of mind, he should be advised to avoid that line of study.
There is something wrong either with the investigation or with the investigator when prejudice and hatred are the result. It is a mighty poor excuse, however, for an intelligent man to put forward either on his own behalf or on behalf of those whose minds he has had the privilege of molding over a course of years.
Prejudice and hatred are the very conditions which a scientific study of the Jewish Question will forestall and prevent. We prejudge what we do not know, and we hate what we do not understand; the study of the Jewish Question will bring knowledge and insight, and not to the Gentile only, but also to the Jew. The Jew needs this as much, even more than the Gentile. For if the Jew can be made to see, understand, and deal with certain matters, then a large part of the Question vanishes in the solution of ideal common sense. Awaking the Gentile to the facts about the Jew is only part of the work; awaking the Jew to the facts about the Question is an indispensable part. The big initial victory to be achieved is to transform Gentiles from being mere attackers and to transform Jews from being mere defenders, both of them special pleaders for partisan views, and to turn them both into investigators. The investigation will show both Gentile and Jew at fault, and the road will then be clear for wisdom to work out a result, if there should perchance be that much wisdom left in the race.
There is a serious snare in all this plea for tolerance. Tolerance is first a tolerance of the truth. Tolerance is urged today for the sake of suppression. There can be no tolerance until there is first a full understanding of what is tolerated. Ignorance, suppression, silence, collusion--these are not tolerance. The Jew never has been really tolerated in the higher sense because he has never been understood. Mr.
Brisbane does not a.s.sist the understanding of this people by reading a ”simply written” book and flinging a few Jewish names about in a sea of type. He owes it to his own mind to get into the Question, whether he makes newspaper use of his discoveries or not.
As to the newspaper angle, it is impossible to report the world even superficially without coming everywhere against the fact of the Jews, and the Press gets around that fact by referring to them as Russians, Letts, Germans, and Englishmen. This mask of names is one of the most confusing elements in the whole problem. Names that actually name, statements that actually define are needed for the clarification of the world's mind.
Mr. Brisbane should study this question for the light such a study would throw on other matters with which he is concerned. It would be a help to that study if from time to time he would publish some of his findings, because such publication would put him in touch with a phase of Judaism which mere complimentary editorials could not. No doubt Mr. Brisbane has been deluged by communications which praise him for what he has written; the real eye-opener would come if he could get several bushels of the other kind. Nothing that has ever come to him could compare with what would come to him if he should publish even one of the facts he could discover by an independent investigation.
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