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So what did the RCMP think of John Beattie's "Nazis"?

By Ezra Levant on May 18, 2009 2:46 PM | | |

So in 1965, a 24-year-old unemployed clerk dressed up in a Halloween-style Nazi costume, strutted into a Toronto park, and gave a speech -- or a few minutes of one, until he was mobbed by literally thousands of "anti-Nazi" Jews, many wielding baseball bats and other weapons.

Beattie said he was the leader of the "Canadian Nazi Party", but it wasn't a party. It wasn't even an organization in any legal sense. It didn't have a bank account. It didn't have a newsletter. It didn't have any formal organization -- no bylaws, not constitution.

(It's just like Syed Soharwardy, the anti-Semitic Muslim radical who took me before the Alberta human rights commission in 2006 because I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Soharwardy claims he's the president of the "Islamic Supreme Council of Canada". Sure -- and he's also its only member. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, the ISCC has been struck from the corporate registry -- so even Soharwardy isn't a member of it!)

Anyways, Beattie was a joke -- but a useful one to the Canadian Jewish Congress, who were looking for a PR boost for their perennial campaign to bring censorship laws to Canada. Beattie was it -- so the CJC hired John Garrity, a 37-year-old ex cop with a lot of street smarts, to help Beattie organize his little band. (Garrity also provided critical bodyguard services to Beattie.) Garrity billed the CJC for his services directly -- thousands of dollars in 1965 money, tens of thousands in 2009 money. That was money that was skimmed from Jewish charitable donations that funded the CJC.

So, we know that Beattie was useful to the CJC. But what did the police think of him and his "Nazis"? Were they a threat? Here is a three-page RCMP memo on Beattie and his group from December of 1969, with a cover letter written in February of 1970. Their conclusion: Beattie had no influence over the government or the community in general. He wasn't even worth following, from an security intelligence point of view. The only value that Beattie and his "Nazis" had, according to the RCMP assessment, was that "some pressure has been brought to bear on Federal authorities in the anti-hate literature bill."

Who was using Beattie to bring that pressure? The RCMP wasn't shy about naming names: the CJC. "It is also known that as a result of activities of the C.N.S.P. [Canadian National Socialist Party], some influence is brought on local and Federal authorities, mostly by the Jewish community in Canada."

Read the whole memo. Here are a few of my favourite snippets:

Poorly attended, except by left-wingers.jpgThe RCMP notes that Beattie's rallies were poorly attended, except by counter-protesters (that would be the CJC and company). How were those counter-protesters described? "Left wing". The CJC? Left wing? How dare the RCMP cast aspersions on the CJC's political neutrality!

No money.jpg

 

 

The RCMP noted that the "Nazis" had no money, and didn't receive any from the U.S., either. Most of the dollars they would scrounge up were used by Beattie himself, as he was unemployed. Lucky for Beattie, the Canadian Jewish Congress was there with their thousands of dollars to provide him with a bodyguard, organizational talent and -- according to the CJC's Rabbi Reuven Bulka -- a bottle of rum. Hey, maybe it was Jewish charity after all!

No members.jpgWell, if they didn't have any money, what about members? I mean, that's what the CJC's Garrity's job was, right? Well, according to the RCMP, Beattie's "Nazis" actually didn't have any membership at all -- just "supporters", maybe 50 of them all told. Now, we know that one of those supporters was Garrity, so that leaves 49. And we know that at least three other Jewish groups has their agents at his events. So we're probably under 40 now. And then, obviously, the RCMP had their agents there. Are we still at 30 "followers" in the entire Toronto region? I'm not even sure if that's true -- for these followers didn't actually follow Beattie to, say, his public rallies.

No influence on its own members.jpgFine. No money, no members, but a few followers. That's a powderkeg, ready to blow, right? Well, according to the RCMP, Beattie's influence on his own "followers" was marginal.

Except for the CJC, and the Liberal government of Canada -- they took Beattie seriously enough to bring in censorship laws in response to him -- throwing out nearly eight centures of British common law, and our ancient freedom of speech along the way.

 
Not politically astute1.jpg

I could go on line by line, but I'll end here. This is from the investigator's conclusions: Beattie and the Nazis are impotent.

But there is one area in which I would disagree with the good officer. He wrote that Beattie's followers were "dull and not politically astute."

That might apply to most of them. But Beattie's number one supporters -- the Canadian Jewish Congress -- were very clever indeed. They managed to parlay a second-rate carnival act into the raison d'etre for censorship laws that would otherwise have likely failed to become law. The CJC took Beattie, built him up, and used him to get their own agenda.

Along they way, the CJC destroyed the Jewish tradition of liberalism, especially the Jewish love for debate and disagreement. They replaced it with an authoritarian tradition of censorship and bullying. And, worse, they replaced the Jewish belief in the individual with the anti-Jewish, even bigoted, belief that we are all merely parts of political groups, and there ought to be group rights, group privileges and group punishments.

Those tyrannical notions -- censorship and group rights -- were precisely the principles that have punished the Jews from the time of the destruction of the Temple through to the Nazis and Communists.

So maybe, after all, the CJC was Beattie's one true follower. He was the one wearing the swastika. But they were the ones promoting book-burning and political authoritarianism.

When you look at it that way, John Beattie was successful after all, wasn't he? 

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Ezra Levant published on May 18, 2009 2:46 PM.

Beware the Nazi menace! Better brush up on your German! was the previous entry in this blog.

Human rights commissions on the defensive is the next entry in this blog.

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