Alfred Harmsworth
 Alfred Harmsworth     (media mogul) | |
|---|---|
| Born | Alfred Charles William Harmsworth 1865-07-15 Chapelizod, County Dublin, Ireland |
| Died | 1922-08-14 (Age 57) Carlton House Gardens, London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Stamford, Lincolnshire |
| Founder of | Daily Mail |
Alfred Harmsworth was also known as Lord Northcliffe.[1]
Alleged insanity, confinement and mysterious death
Alfred Harmsworth, the son of an English barrister, was born in Chapelizod, County Dublin on 15th July 1865. He went to school in Lincolnshire and then in London, where he started a school magazine. Joined by his brother Harold, he went on to create the successful magazine Answers to Correspondents, a children’s newspaper and a magazine for women. He then bought the bankrupt Evening News, modernised it and made it profitable once more, before his really big breakthrough in May 1896 – founding the Daily Mail.
The paper was nothing short of revolutionary, with a small tabloid size, much more illustration and banner headlines in contrast to the broadsheets. It combined factual writing with sports, women’s sections and serials to make it an easier and more accessible read for the general public. With low-cost production methods, it hit the streets at an affordable halfpenny a copy, and was an instant success. By the time the first Boer war started in 1899, the Mail was selling a million copies a day. He went from strength to strength. In 1903 He launched the ever first daily newspaper for women, the Daily Mirror, an initial failure which eventually become a success when he made it into a picture newspaper for both sexes.
In 1905 he bought both the The Times (the leading newspaper in the world at that time) and the Sunday Observer. In the same year, the establishment recognized his achievements, and he was awarded the title Lord Northcliffe. At just 40 years old he was the youngest ever peer of the realm, and was probably the earliest example of the modern press baron.
Harmsworth saw himself as a patriot, and stated that the Mail stood for "the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire," which he firmly believed in; but he was not afraid of controversy once his stature as a powerful figure was firmly established. Despite his staunch support for the war effort, he stood up to the political establishment of his time, attacking Lord Kitchener over the ‘shell scandal’ of 1915 during World War I when Kitchener was considered a war hero, and driving the circulation of the Mail down by 80 per cent (from which it soon recovered.)
Harmsworth once said: "News is what someone, somewhere is trying to suppress; the rest is just advertising." Despite the fact that he was one of the most powerful men in what was then the British Empire, he would eventually pay for that attitude with his life. Douglas Reed, in his interesting book The Controversy of Zion, said: "He was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in the causes he launched or espoused, but he was independent and unpurchasable. He somewhat resembled Mr. Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick in America, which is to say that he would do many things to increase the circulation of his newspapers, but only within the limits of national interest; he would not peddle blasphemy, obscenity, libel or sedition. He could not be cowed and was a force in the land." However, it was his resistance to Zionism that was to eventually be his downfall.
According to Benjamin Freedman, a defector from the Jewish elite of the time, Britain was on the verge of losing the war in 1917, when the Zionists made a proposal to the British government. Britain could yet win this war, they argued, if America could be brought in on Britain’s side. With their substantial control of the American press, and their tight circle of ‘advisors’ around President Wilson (who was beholden to them because of indiscreet letters in their possession which he had written to a woman not his wife), the Zionists made a good case that they could deliver what they promised. But there was a price to be paid. The British Empire was at that time administering the small Middle Eastern territory of Palestine, populated mainly by Palestinian Arabs and Christians and with a small minority of Jews who cohabited peacefully with their neighbours. The Zionist Jews coveted that territory - later to become Israel when their plan came to fruition. The price for bringing American soldiers into the war was a declaration from Britain that the Empire favoured the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This price was paid when Lord Milner and Foreign Minister Balfour drafted the Balfour Declaration. The puppeteers pulled the strings on Wilson, and America went to war to "make the world safe for democracy and to "end all wars."
Balfour, who gave the Jews their foothold in Palestine, actually didn’t particularly like Jews. Like Adolf Hitler, Balfour liked the idea of the Jews leaving Europe to found their own state elsewhere. Both men negotiated with Zionist Jews to that end. Hitler offered them Madagascar in 1938. In 1903, while he was Prime Minister, Balfour offered them Uganda. In debates on the Alien Act of 1905, Balfour sought to cut off Jewish immigration into Britain. He openly admitted these views in 1914 to leading Zionist Chaim Weizmann, and spoke against Jewish immigration in the House of Commons.
In 1920, Harmsworth publicized the book that has been banned and furiously denounced by the Jews more than any other, the famous Protocols of Zion, which claims to record a meeting of Jews sometime during the nineteenth century, detailing a plan for world domination through intrigue, deception, and terror.
Northcliffe decided it deserved to be investigated by the British people. Accordingly he published parts of it in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, The Times, of which he was the principal owner, under the title: ‘The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for Enquiry.’ He did not declare the Protocols to be true, but called for a full investigation to discover whether or not they were. He said that "an impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable … are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work go unchecked?"
In 1922, Harmsworth asked the editor of The Times, Wickham Steed, to travel to Palestine to investigate the true nature of the Zionist project there, feeling sure that Steed, once he saw how a tiny and foreign Jewish minority was determined to use every means to dispossess the Palestinians, would make a 180 degree turn and stop supporting Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists. In this he miscalculated badly, for the Zionist hold on Steed was so strong that Steed openly refused to act upon any of the requests of his employer. Steed would not go to Palestine, and would not publish an article critical of Balfour’s attitude toward Zionism when asked to do so; and, when Harmsworth himself went to Palestine, Steed would not even publish Harmsworth’s own dispatches from there.
In 1922 Harmsworth visited Palestine, accompanied by a journalist,J.M.N. Jeffries whose book, Palestine: The Reality, remains a classic work of reference for that period. Their opinions were in stark contrast to those of the editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian, who wrote their leading articles about Palestine in England and in consultation with leading Zionist Weizmann. Harmsworth reached the same conclusion as other impartial investigators, and wrote, "In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Moslems live there and own it … The Jews seemed to be under the impression that all England was devoted to the one cause of Zionism, enthusiastic for it in fact; and I told them that this was not so and to be careful that they do not tire out our people by secret importation of arms to fight 700,000 Arabs … There will be trouble in Palestine . . . people dare not tell the Jews the truth here. They have had some from me."
The articles by Jeffries and Harmsworth were not published in The Times, but they were in his other papers, alarming the Zionists, who needed the acquiescence of the British people for their Israel project to succeed. Harmsworth’s demise was rapid and brutal following these publications. On February 26th, 1922 he returned from Palestine. On March 2nd, he strongly criticized Steed at an editorial conference, expecting Steed to resign. To his amazement, Steed did not resign but decided to consult an attorney "to secure a lawyer’s opinion on the degree of provocation necessary to constitute unlawful dismissal." Then, Steed says, he consulted Northcliffe’s own legal advisor, who supposedly stated that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal", "incapable of business" and, judging from his appearance, "unlikely to live long" and therefore advised the editor "to continue in his post." On March 31st, Steed went to see Harmsworth in France, and on his return started spreading the story, and even telling a director of the Times, that Alfred Harmsworth was "going mad."
The author Douglas Reed himself worked with Harmsworth a few weeks later and saw nothing at all indicating illness, madness, or abnormality of any kind. Reed also states that a very sane and sober Harmsworth informed him that someone was trying to kill him. Reed states:
"The suggestion of madness thus was put out by an editor whom Lord Northcliffe desired to remove, and the impressions of others therefore are obviously relevant." On May 3, 1922 Lord Northcliffe attended a farewell lunch in London for a retiring editor of one of his papers and "was in fine form." On May 11, 1922 he made "an excellent and effective speech" to the Empire Press Union and "most people who had thought him ‘abnormal’ believed they were mistaken." A few days later he telegraphed instructions to the Managing Director of The Times to arrange for the editor’s resignation. The Director saw nothing abnormal in such an instruction and was not in the least anxious about Northcliffe’s health. Another director, who then saw him, said on 24 May that he: "considered him to have quite as good a life risk as his own" and "noticed nothing unusual in Northcliffe’s manner or appearance."
On June 11th, Steed met Harmsworth again in France where he bluntly told him that he, Harmsworth would now assume editorship of The Times. The next day, Steed, Harmsworth, and his entire entourage were aboard a train bound for a hotel in Evian-les-Bains in Switzerland. Steed secreted a doctor, whose name has not been revealed to this day, aboard the train and somehow Harmsworth was manipulated into his custody. When the train arrived in Switzerland another unnamed doctor (described years later only as "a brilliant French nerve specialist") was summoned and declared Harmsworth insane. Immediately Steed telegraphed this information to London and ordered The Times to disregard and not to publish any communications from its primary owner. On June 13th, Steed returned to London.
On June 18th, Northcliffe was back in his Carlton House Gardens home in London, under a form of house arrest, and totally removed from all control of, or communication with his various enterprises. Even his telephone lines were cut. Police were posted at the offices of The Times to prevent his entering should he reach them. He never did.
On that same day, with Harmsworth out of circulation and his powerful voice of protest silenced, the League of Nations voted to reconfirm the ‘British Mandate’ in Palestine, which had transformed into a ‘mandate’ to install the Zionists in power there.
On August 14th, 1922 Harmsworth died, with supposedly the cause of death being "ulcerative endocarditis." The public knew nothing of the story of his alleged insanity or his confinement at the time, and it was concealed for thirty years, eventually coming out in the Official History of The Times.
The death of Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, has to my knowledge never been investigated in the mainstream press or any other form of mass media. The subject is perhaps more relevant today than it was back in 1922, as the echoes of decisions made back then have reverberated to a crescendo in recent years, particularly in theMiddle East. The lessons are there for those who seek the truth about the nature of power in this World, and who wields it.[2]
