← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · N.B. Forrest
Thread ID: 4560 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-01-22
2003-01-22 01:42 | User Profile
Opposition to the war was similarly strong in the British labor movement. In September 1900, the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution condemning the Anglo-Boer war as one designed "to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews, most of whom had no patriotism and no country."
No member of the House of Commons spoke out more vigorously against the war than John Burns, Labour MP for Battersea. The former SDF member had gained national prominence as a staunch defender of the British workingman during his leadership of the dockworkers' strike of 1889. "Wherever we examine, there is the financial Jew," Burns declared in the House on February 6, 1900, "operating, directing, inspiring the agencies that have led to this war."
"The trail of the financial serpent is over this war from beginning to end." The British army, Burns said, had traditionally been the "Sir Galahad of History." But in Africa it had become the "janissary of the Jews."
Burns was a legendary fighter for the rights of the British worker, a tireless champion of environmental reform, women's rights and improved municipal services. Even Cecil Rhodes had referred to him as "the most eloquent leader of the British democracy." It was not merely the Jewish role in Capitalism that alarmed Burns. To his diary he once confided that "the undoing of England is within the confines of our afternoon journey amongst the Jews" of East London.
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