Jews Trying to Soften Us For Russian Drive’—Arcand (Montreal Gazette, 25 February 1947)

Adrien Arcand at home at Lanoraie, showing internment souvenirs to son Pierre

AMONG HIS SOUVENIRS:  Adrien Arcand, anti-semitic proponent of totalitarianism, is shown above at his home at Lanoraie, Que., showing some of his souvenirs from his stay in internment camp to his son Pierre.  During his five-year sojourn Arcand carved a number of brooches, buttons, boxes and similar objects, each bearing the emblem of the National Unity Party—a flaming torch.

Jews Trying to Soften Us For Russian Drive’—Arcand


Canada Has Become New Belgium, Says Fascist Leader; Maintains Reds Will Strike at United States Through Dominion


By Kenneth G. Wright

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE, 25 FEB 1947

(Following is the last of three articles by Kenneth G. Wright, Gazette staff writer, on Adrien Arcand, Canadian Fascist leader who was interned for five years.)

Read Part 1.  Read Part 2.

(Copyright 1947)

Canada faces a double danger from Russia today, an attack from the north and steady disintegration of the country from within by “Jewish Bolshevik spies,” according to Adrien Arcand, pre-war leader of the Canadian Fascists.  Arcand, interned for five years as a menace to his nation’s war effort, in an interview at his home at Lanoraie, Que., last week, declared his anti-Jewish organization is now stronger than before.

Official emblem of the National Unity Party of Canada

Official emblem of the National Unity Party of Canada

“Canada has become the new Belgium,” he said.  “We are geographically and economically an American country, and Russia some day must strike through Canada at the United States  The greatest danger, however, is from within, for both nations.  You see every day instances of how the Jews are trying to soften us up, ready for the big blow.  Russia is not powerful enough to attack today, but she hopes to be in time, and meanwhile the Jews are preparing the way.

“Look at the spy trials.  And don’t forget, that was one group, it was reported there are four more.  I have definite information there are four more such groups, and that they are seeking to destroy us.”

“Did you see the outcome of the recent war between Fascism and Democracy?” he was asked.

“It wasn’t a war between Fascism and Democracy, it was s war, instigated as the First Great War was, by the Jews against the rest of the world.  In smashing the fighting power of Russia, the anti-Jews have won the first round.  I am doing my part, with my fellow believers in Canada and other parts of the world to help win the second, which is inevitably coming.”

His blueshirt legions, prominent at Arcand’s meetings in Montreal around 1938, were merely a “protective organization” against the Communists, the National Unity Party leader said.

‘Ahead of Our Time’

“I put my men into uniform and insisted they keep neat and clean and look smart merely because the Communists who tried to break up our meetings were the opposite — a dirty unshaven Jewish rabble, only out for trouble.

“We were trying at those meetings to tell the people of Canada what was in store for them, we tried to warn them of the Jewish-Communist menace.  We were 10 years ahead of our time in that work.

“Our real organization, however, was one of thinkers and planners.  That organization today is stronger than it ever was.”

Denying that his blueshirts ever had violent aims, Arcand reiterated that his present goal is to achieve his ends through peaceful methods.

“I am against harming any man.  I believe in faith, hope and charity.  My present aim in life is to enjoy my family and to watch events until the time comes.”  A Roman Catholic in religion, Arcand and his family have a pew in the Lanoraie parish church.  His philosophy, however, does not prevent him from reading with delight of British plans to take a firm hand with the terrorists in Palestine.  This he sees as action “for the cause.”

Much of the Arcand story remains to be told — much that only Arcand knows.  He has friends, some of them undoubtedly sympathetic, in high places in this province and in the rest of Canada.  How far those friends, and the people they can influence, will march with Arcand, “when the time comes,” he probably doesn’t know himself.

For the present, however, he is keeping his secrets.  “Memoirs?  A book?”

“That’s an old man’s job.  I’m too busy now.”


Download the original article, “‘Jews Trying to Soften Us For Russian Drive’—Arcand“.

* The image of the NUPC emblem was added by yours truly.

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Solution to Palestine problem:  “Send Jews to Madagascar”, Says Fascist Adrien Arcand (24 February 1947)

Adrien Arcand at his typewriter in Lanoraie, February 1947

EARNING HIS LIVING:  Adrien Arcand, Montreal newspaperman who became leader of the Fascist movement in Canada, is shown at his typewriter in Lanoraie, doing commercial translation.  This work and his portrait painting, he says, earns him his living.  (Gazette Photo by Davidson.)

Send Jews to Madagascar, Says Fascist Adrien Arcand


Notorious Anti-Semite Has Own Solution for Palestine Problem; Exposé Finds Him Boasting That National Unity Party Still Growing


By Kenneth G. Wright

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE, 24 FEB 1947

(Following is the second of three articles by Kenneth G. Wright, Gazette staff writer, on Adrien Arcand, Canadian Fascist Leader who was interned for five years.)

Read Part 1.  Read Part 3.

(Copyright 1947)

The solution to the Palestine problem is to transport all the Jews in that country “and in the rest of the world” to the Island of Madagascar, according to Adrien Arcand, Fascist-minded leader of the anti-semitic movement in Canada.

“Palestine has been populated for the past 1900 years by non-Jews — why do they ask for it now?  It is only to embarrass Britain, to start a conflict which would eventually smash the British Empire as part of their plan for Jewish world domination.”

Arcand, who was interned for five years during the war under the Defence of Canada regulations, in an interview at his home at Lanoraie, Que., this week credited the Madagascar idea to his friend, Henry Hamilton Beamish.  Beamish, a South African, has been a Jew-baiter for years, and was imprisoned during the war on similar grounds to those which led to Arcand’s internment.  The two correspond regularly, and Arcand expects Beamish to pay him a visit next year.

Proposes Plan

“Palestine is and was until the heavy Jewish immigration of the past 15 years an Arab country,” said Arcand.  “The Jews there and in the rest of the world should be sent to Madagascar.  The climate is suitable for colonization, the island is 1,300 miles long and it can comfortably contain 100 million people.  There are some four million negros there now, they could be sent to Africa, to Liberia*, for instance.  Then the Jews from America, from Britain, from every country in the world, could be isolated there, without contact with the white race, and spend the rest of their lives carrying out their nefarious plotting among themselves.”

Adrien Arcand, musician, portrait artist, philosopher, Roman Catholic Fascist

Adrien Arcand, musician, portrait artist, philosopher, Roman Catholic Fascist

Arcand is a curious paradox.  Tall, thin, with ascetic features, he is well-educated, plays the violin with more than ordinary skill and has a working knowledge of Yiddish and German besides a wide English vocabulary although a strong French accent.  His conversation jumps from the Winnipeg Grain Exchange to the Battle of Narvik to early Kings of England to American politics almost in a single breath, with every reference to illustrate some anti-Jewish belief.  He is fanatical about anything Jewish, and firmly believes he and his fellow thinkers are carrying on a crusade to “save” the world from that race.  He delights in quoting Jewish authors, including the Talmud, to make his point that the “Asiatics,” as he sometimes calls them, are plotting to crush the “white race.”

Yet he denies having any racial prejudice.

“I am against no race in the world.  I am against the Jews not as Jews but because of what they are trying to do.  Anti-semitism, you must remember, is not an offensive* status, it is a defensive one.”

This thought process leaves him, for instance, in sympathy with the Columbians, anti-racial group in Georgia, only as far as they are anti-Jewish and therefore helping “the cause.”  With their other tenets, especially their use of violence, he has no sympathy.

His only knowledge of the work of the Columbians is through the newspapers, nor has he had any direct communication with Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain.

Arcand did not like the use of the word “resurgence” in a question about British Fascism since the war.

“You cannot say ‘resurgence,’ the real thing never died down, although there may not have been much outward manifestation.  More people are thinking as we do, yes, that is going on everywhere in the world.  It is the same thing in Canada, my party members who come to see me here tell me.  Ideas cannot be shot or hanged or interned.”

The exact number of members of the National Unity Party in Canada today Arcand will not discuss, although he continually says it is a considerable and growing total.  He has many fellow travellers, he says, who for various reasons do not wish to come into the open “just yet.”  His mail is heavy, however, not only from Canada but from other parts of the world.  He showed me a number of letters in his voluminous files, which contain also much anti-Jewish literature of the type which the R.C.M.P. seized in raids on party headquarters just before he was interned.  Much of that material has been returned to him and is stored about the house.*  Over his desk is a plaque on which is emblazoned the emblem of the party — a flaming torch within a wreath surmounted by a beaver and bearing the Latin word “Serviam.”*

He is immensely proud, too, of a number of wooden brooches, buttons, jewel boxes, buckles and similar items he carved during his stay in the internment camp, each bearing the party’s device.

Arcand talks freely and often amusingly of his stay in the camps, first at Petawawa and later at Fredericton, N.B. Incidentally, he had little to do with Mayor Camillien Houde, interned at the same time, and one gathers there was no love lost between the two.

If he felt it would advance his cause he would face internment again, Arcand said.

“I don’t care personally whether I live to be there when the time comes for action or not, as long as the ideals in which I believe are successful.  If I felt it would advance those ideals I would face internment again, or shooting.  A bullet in the head on the battlefield for those ideals in which one believes, that is the death of a soldier.”

* The image of the violin was added by yours truly.


EXTRA

ON THE SAME PAGE

World Government Held Solution
To Prevent War, Create Peace

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE, 24 FEB 1947

World government, based on universal brotherhood of men, or some sort of Christian socialism and moral as well as spiritual democracy is no Utopia.  It is a practical and thoroughly feasible government with authority in power to enforce world legislation which will prevent war and create lasting peace, Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, well-known American author and lecturer, stated at Loyola College last night.

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

Speaking under the auspices of the Loyola Ladies’ Auxiliary on “Unity or Chaos,” Dr. Adler, who also is professor of philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, said, “One world or none is our only choice.”  He added that the present nations, individually and collectively would only be ready to accept such a world government after having undergone an economic, moral and spiritual revolution.

He stated, “the United Nations will not do” because, he said, it has no legislative powers, no authority, too many foreign policies, and too many diplomats, each trying to enforce his own or his nation’s particular interests.

He admitted that the United Nations “however good it may be as a debating society may serve as a stepping stone to the real world government.”  The present peace period according to Dr. Adler is nothing but an “armed truce”.  He maintained that real peace in the world can only be achieved through elimination of what he called “small peaces.”  The latter he defined as peace treaties among one or several nations [sic] opposed to other nations or ideologies.

He specifically mentioned as an example (of small peaces) a recently proposed federation of capitalistic powers uniting against Communistic forces.  He said nationalism would have to play “a secondary role in any future world governments.”

Sovereign right which Dr. Adler divided into internal and external right, will have to be granted to the future world governments and to the national or sectional authorities respectively.  He said “this world government must have an armed force in order to execute law and legislative matters in order to preserve peace.”  He urged each individual to “contribute his share to the blueprint of the future world government by propagating its ideas and fundamental laws.”

Miss S. A. Murray was chairman of the meeting.

* The photo of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler was added by yours truly.


EXTRA

ON THE SAME PAGE

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE, 24 FEB 1947

Peace or Perish, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt 24 Feb 1947

“Peace or Perish”:  Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt 24 Feb 1947


AFTERWORD

I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO BE THERE…

I would have liked to be there … when Adrien Arcand received his complimentary copy of the Montreal Gazette for 24 February 1947, containing part two of Kenneth Wright’s interview with him … and also containng a big push for World Government.

Madagascar or World Government?

Madagascar or World Government? The Montreal Gazette of 24 February 1947.  Download the Gazette page.

What would Arcand have said?  Perhaps he’d have smiled wryly and returned to his portrait-painting or his violin.

On the same page with Arcand recommending quarantine for the Jews to save the white race from their “nefarious plotting”, the Montreal Gazette covers a Jew from New York pushing a “Christian socialist” world government on the “Loyola Ladies’ Auxiliary” and their guests.

And, side by side, like balls racked up in a billiard frame, is a “Peace or Perish!” ad with a big exclamation point.

We know what “Peace” means.  “Peace” is a stick-up, a protection racket, a code-word for “World Government”.  “World Government” or Perish!  Give us your guns, give us your legislative powers!  One world or none!  We rule, or everybody dies!

I think they dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a little demo to push their agenda.

And I am guessing that if Arcand analyzed the proposal of Mr. Adler for a “universal brotherhood of men” or “some sort of” ‘Christian socialist’ world government, Arcand would quote from an encyclical.  He was known to quote from Pope Pius XI.  Here’s what I think Arcand would have chosen for Mr. Adler.  Divini Redemptoris:

“Le communisme athée s’est montré au début, tel qu’il était, dans toute sa perversité, mais bien vite il s’est aperçu que de cette façon il éloignait de lui les peuples:  aussi a-t-il changé de tactique et s’efforce-t-il d’attirer les foules par toutes sortes de tromperies, en dissimulant ses propres desseins sous des idées en elles-mêmes bonnes et attrayantes.”

“In the beginning Communism showed itself for what it was in all its perversity; but very soon it realized that it was thus alienating the people.  It has therefore changed its tactics, and strives to entice the multitudes by trickery of various forms, hiding its real designs behind ideas that in themselves are good and attractive.”

Interesting that Adler should pinpoint “Christian socialism” while speaking in Canada, where the CCF is working on world government under just that brand.  Adler must know the Jews will not convert. But if the Christians become communists, big score for the Zionists.

In my post entitled “Canada’s Tax-Exempt Foundations:  A Look at the Ontario Woodsworth Memorial Foundation, the Praxis Research Institute and the roots of the federal NDP,” I noted that Arcand, in 1933, at page 43 of “Fascism or Socialism?” (Fascisme ou Socialisme ?), under the bold header, ‘There is no Christian Socialism’ (“Il n’y a pas de “socialisme chrétien”“), points out:

“Contrairement à ce que certains illusionnés prétendent, il n’y a ni ne peut y avoir de socialisme chrétien.  Ce mythe a été confondu par la plus haute autorité chrétienne, celle du Vatican, lorsque Pie X a condamné les erreurs du “Sillon”.  D’ailleurs, les grands doctrinaires du socialisme, entre autres Proudhon, Millerand, Jaurès, ont affirmé que toute prétention à un socialisme chrétien est aussi illusoire qu’idiote.”

“Contrary to what some illusionists claim, there is not nor can there be Christian socialism.  This myth was confounded by the highest Christian authority, that of the Vatican … Moreover, the great doctrinarians of socialism, among others Proudhon, Millerand, Jaurès, have affirmed that any claim to Christian socialism is as illusory as it is idiotic.”

The “illusionists” must be the CCF’ers, for Arcand was probably addressing himself to Woodsworth who founded the CCF in Calgary in 1932, the year before Arcand founded his National Social Christian Party in Quebec.

The Universal Republic (1950), Adrien Arcand

The Universal Republic (1950), Adrien Arcand

Adler spoke the previous night.  More speakers are coming this night, the 24th, from the world-government gang:  Coldwell of the communist CCF (mislabelled “Christian socialist”), and traitor Louis Saint-Laurent who just the previous year said:  “we can try to make of it (the UNO) the basis of the world government“; and featuring the widow of American traitor Roosevelt (the Jews’ asset) who lured Japan to attack Pearl Harbor so he could deliver the US to the war effort.

Not long after, in The Universal Republic (1950), Arcand will say:

Le Super-Gouvernement
Mondial

Nos chefs civils, à Ottawa, nous ont parlé plusieurs fois de la nécessité d’un super-gouvernement mondial, depuis qu’ils ont été embobinés à San Francisco, en 1945, par le texte Juif, rédigé par le Juif Harry White qui forme la charte des Nations-Unies.  Et tout leur travail, depuis cette date, a surtout consisté à nous inféoder toujours plus intimement sous l’autorité de l’O.N.U.  Ces chefs, pour la plupart francs-maçons, ne font que suivre la ligne de conduite dictée par les loges, elles-mêmes sous la coupe des Juifs.

The World Super-
Government

Our civil leaders in Ottawa have spoken to us many times of the necessity for a world super-government, since they were all wound up at San Francisco in 1945 by the Jewish text drafted by the Jew Harry White, which forms the Charter of the United Nations.  And all their work, from that date, has above all consisted in ever more tightly subordinating us to the authority of the U.N.O.  These leaders, for the most part Freemasons, are merely following the line of conduct dictated by the lodges, themselves under Jewish control.

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‘Stronger Than Ever Here’ is Arcand’s Fascist Boast, Montreal Gazette (22 February 1947)

ADRIEN ARCAND at his home in Lanoraie working on a portrait

ADRIEN ARCAND, leader of Canada’s National Unity (Fascist) Party, is shown above at his home in Lanoraie working on a portrait.  Arcand learned painting during his five years in an internment camp during the war, and now augments his income by it, earning the remainder of his money by commercial translation.  (Gazette Photo by Davidson.)

‘Stronger Than Ever Here’ is Arcand’s Fascist Boast


His Attitude Supporting Anti-Semitism Not Dampened By Internment During the War; Claims Contact With Groups in Other Nations


By Kenneth G. Wright

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE, 22 FEB 1947

(Following is the first of three articles by Kenneth G. Wright, Gazette staff writer, on Adrien Arcand, Canadian Fascist leader who was interned for five years.)

Read Part 2.  Read Part 3.

(Copyright 1947)

The National Unity Party headed by Adrien Arcand, who as a
violently anti-semitic exponent of Canadian Fascism was interned for five years during the war, is stronger than ever, Arcand declared yesterday.

“I am in communication with people who think as I do in Great Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and other countries.  In Canada we have grown tenfold.  When we are going to take advantage of that growth is a tactical question.”

I first met Adrien Arcand in 1937 when, in the course of my duties as a newspaperman, I attended early secret meetings of the then National Christian Socialist [sic] Party’s blue-shirted “legions.”  I recently spent many hours with him at his home at Lanoraie, Que., listening to him propound his theory that the Jews are responsible for most of the ills of the world.  I am convinced he is perfectly sincere in his statement that “my beliefs are stronger than ever and I have been most happy to suffer for them.”

Nor is he afraid of any further punitive action against him or his followers.

Claims Party Legal

“You must remember our party is now perfectly legal.  Neither the Royal Canadian Mounted Police nor the laws of Canada forbid it.  I am still the duly elected leader of the party in Canada.  The other leaders and the thinkers who were with me when I formed the party are with me today, and there are more people in the country who think as I do than there were before the war.  We have not gone backward a single step.  We have merely changed our tactics.”

Broadly speaking, the party’s change in tactics has been to work quietly where 10 years ago they were beginning to come into the open.  For the time being at least there will be no more blue shirts, no more public meetings.

Arcand has been Fascist-minded since the early 1930’s — at least that is when his anti-semitic ideas crystallized.  By profession he is a newspaperman, and according to his confrères a good one.  Born 48 years ago in Montreal, he is of French-Canadian-Scottish descent.  He attended primary schools here, and after studying philosophy at St. Mary’s College, took up chemical engineering with private tutors.  But illness forced him to abandon this.  He started newspaper work with La Patrie as a proofreader and later as a reporter.  He was also for 15 years secretary to his father, the organizer for the American Federation of Labor Carpenters’ and Joiners’ Union.  He was with the Montreal Daily Star for a short time as political reporter, and then for many years on La Presse, from which newspaper he was fired, he says, in 1929, for helping to organize a professional syndicate of newspapermen, an example of his early leanings to corporatism.

Corporate Views

Today, he believes newspapermen should be a group in the corporate state, electing one or more of their fellows to a parliament at Ottawa, setting, with the publishers (who should be another corporate group) their wages and the prices at which newspapers and advertising should be sold.

The doctors, the lawyers and similar professional men have corporate groups in this province — why not everybody?” he asks.

After leaving La Presse he helped found or was active in several anti-Jewish weeklies, including Le Patriote, Le Miroir and the Combat National, the latter the organ of his party.

He came into the open with his blueshirt party in the early months of 1938, and held meetings in Montreal, largely in the east end, as well as in Toronto.  At one in Maisonneuve Market in August, 1938, he forecast that:  “Success will crown our efforts in June, 1940, in a march on Ottawa.”1  A month before that date he was interned for violation2 of the Defence of Canada Regulations.

Five years and five weeks later he was released and today lives with his wife and three sons, the oldest of whom volunteered for active service with the Canadian Army on reaching his 19th birthday, and was on a draft for overseas when the war ended.3  Arcand himself holds the King’s commission as a lieutenant in the Regiment de Chateauguay (Reserve).  He lives quietly in a modest but comfortable home at Lanoraie, 40 miles down the north shore of the St. Lawrence from Montreal, making his living, he says, by painting portraits and by translation.

Blames Jews

He holds his internment against neither the people of Canada nor the government.

“I hold it only against the Jews — I know where the pressure which was brought to bear came from.”

He sees nothing disloyal in his actions, in fact he believes he is acting loyally to Canada in attacking Judaism.  At the national convention of the party in Kingston, Ont., July 1, 1938, at which he was elected leader and where the National Christian Socialist [sic] Party’s swastika emblem was changed to the National Unity Party’s flaming torch, he sent a telegram of loyalty to the Governor-General.  Today he expresses immense admiration for British institutions and history as a “civilizing force.”  He wants to save the Empire for himself and his fellow Canadians by, he says, “taking it out of the hands of the Jews who are slowly gaining control of it to smash it.”

__________
(Download a free copy of the original article, “Stronger Than Ever Here”.)

FOOTNOTES

1.  In 1938, war hadn’t been declared yet; and federal elections were ultimately called for March 26, 1940; so Arcand’s “march on Ottawa” was a figure of speech for the slogan in his 1938 party brochure on corporatism, “Heading for Ottawa!”.  The 1945 federal election was held in June; the 1940 election seems to have been held a couple of months early.

2.  “Alleged” violation; no violation was ever proved, he had no trial.  And after the war, it was admitted that there was no evidence.  I’ll go into this in more detail in the Memorandum and Request ebook and post that I’m still developing.

3.  We have a fact that needs to be checked.  David Rajotte of Library and Archives Canada seems to have been under the impression that Arcand’s eldest son (Yves) had in fact gone to war.  In his research article, “L’État canadien contre le Parti de l’unité nationale et Adrien Arcand” (“The Canadian State Versus The National Unity Party And Adrien Arcand”), Rajotte says:  “Le fils aîné d’Arcand a aussi rejoint l’armée en 1944” (“Arcand’s eldest son also joined the army in 1944.”)  And at his footnote 59 attached to that statement, Rajotte says:

Les dossiers de service des soldats ayant servi durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale ne sont accessibles au public que 20 ans après la mort du militaire.  Yves Arcand étant décédé en 2002, il n’est pas encore possible de connaître ses faits d’armes exacts. Voir: Anonyme, «Notice nécrologique de Yves Arcand», L’expression de Lanaudière, 29 septembre 2002, p. 60.

The service records of soldiers who served during the Second World War are only accessible to the public 20 years after the death of the soldier. Yves Arcand died in 2002, it is not yet possible to know his exact feats of arms. See: Anonymous, “Yves Arcand’s obituary”, L’expression de Lanaudière, September 29, 2002, p. 60.

The proper cite for that article would be:  Rajotte, D. (2018). L’État canadien contre le Parti de l’unité nationale et Adrien
Arcand. Bulletin d’histoire politique, 26 (3), 189–211.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1046920ar

“Mr. Arcand, Canada’s Own Mosley Thinks The Sun Wronged Him” By Adrien Arcand (1947)


FOREWORD

Canada’s own Mosley Thinks The Sun Wronged Him by Adrien Arcand, Vancouver Sun, Letters to the Editor, 4 December 1947

Newspapers.com is double-dealing, and double-dipping.  I ran a search and was asked to pay to view the search results.  I chose the cheapest option presented, $7.95 USD for one month.  Newspapers.com happily took my money.  I then found 99% of the results on the results page blocked off, and a message popped up demanding an upgrade to see the items I had already paid to see.  Minimum charge of the so-called “Publisher Extra Upgrade”: $19.90 USD.  And this, IN ADDITION to the $7.95 USD already paid.  In other words, they’re the “Publisher” and I must fork over the “Extra”.  Total cost of one month to look at newspaper clippings:  $39.26 CAD.  I hope I have enough time this month to make the extortion worthwhile.

UPDATE.  I stand corrected.  Newspapers.com voluntarily notified me (without my asking) that “We have refunded the Basic charge of $7.95 to your card.  It will post to your account ending in 2477 in 3-5 business days.”  That brings the real cost for one month’s access to $19.90 USD or 27.85 CAD.  Still a pretty penny.


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Mr. Arcand, Canada’s Own Mosley

Thinks The Sun Wronged Him

By Adrien Arcand

THE VANCOUVER SUN, DEC 4, 1947


Editor, The Sun:  Sir,— I have read with amazement and amusement your editorial of November 24, entitled “The Menace of Arcand,” because I still ignored that editorials could be based on inaccuracies, untruths, misinformation, distortion and propaganda platitudes in a daily paper claiming some importance.  When one has truth or complete knowledge, he has not to resort to such proceedings.  Here are some of your affirmations and the truth about them:

1.  I was leader of the Canadian Unity Party.  The so-called party, quite distinct from the National Unity Party on many grounds, existed only in a section of the Canadian West and Mrs. Dorise Nielsen was its representative in the House of Commons.

2.  The National Unity Party never had black shirts.

3.  I am holding no public meetings, nor have done so in the last two years.

4.  I never believed in a “rigidly disciplined dictatorship” as “the most efficient form of human government.”  I believe in corporatism, wherein national classes, such as agriculture, labor, trade, fishing, etc., replacing political partis (even mine), elect their own representatives who choose among themselves their own ministers for representation in the government, and who in the House look after their own financial, economic, professional interests, thus allowing people more freedom, more initiative and more security than they are “enjoying” now or under the knout-rule1 of a few gangsters in the “workers’ paradise.”

5.  The men around me, whom you call “fanatical zealots who live to agitate, whose frustrations and resentments and dreams of future power,” are cool-headed people, not frustrated, having no resentments nor hatreds; they are good Canadians, law-abiding and orderly, who refuse to believe in the negative propaganda of those eternally against, be it religion, patriotism, tradition, property, family, in the propaganda of envy and jealousy, or destruction and revenge.

6.  Mr. Arcand, you note, is astute enough to range behind him all the more extreme advocates of separatism, playing upon the distorted grievances of French-Canadian Nationalists.  Yet, the Montreal Herald of November 012, 1947, gloated over the fact that Quebec Separatists were against the National Unity Party; the official organ of the Separatists, La Nation, anathematized me because our program made French Canadians empire-conscious, called for a “more immediate co-operation with the British Empire,” and for such the same paper called me an agent and stooge of the British Intelligence Service, a “man playing the game of English Freemasonry,” while at the same time the CCF Commonwealth wrote that I was an agent of … the Pope and financed with Vatican funds, while L’Autorité Nouvelle made me an agent of the Mikado, the Clarion of Fred Rose made me an agent and spy of Mussolini, and the Canadian Jewish Congress boasted of “identifying Arcand in the public mind with the sinister forces of German Naziism.”

7.  You find it disquieting that “a recent Arcand rally was held in a church hall, with anti-Semitic speeches.”  It was not a political rally and it was not held in a church hall, but an anniversary private gathering held in a hall located two blocks away from any church and belonging to the Corporation of the parishioners of St. Stanislaus.  As to my “anti-Semitic” speech, it consisted in anti-Gentile quotations extracted from Jewish authors. … To Jewish threats and plots against the Gentile culture and way of life, I answered that we Gentiles must all unite and see to it that we can frustrate the conspiracy.  If there is anti-Semitism in it all, well!  Gentiles did not start it.  And if Jews have a right in opposing unjustified anti-Semitism, Gentiles have an equal right to oppose anti-Gentilism in action, whether under the form of financial, economic, revolutionary, terror or smear oppression.

8.  You claim that the best way to combat my “menace” is by exposing my doings and ideas in the open.  It is exactly with the purpose of helping you do so that I am addressing this letter to you.

ADRIEN ARCAND.
Lanoraie, Que.

__________

1.  Knout:  a whip used to inflict punishment, often causing death.
2.  The first digit of the day in the date of the issue of the Montreal Herald is whited out in the news clipping.  Only the second digit appears, the “1”.

Old-Time Fascist Scornful of New Canadian Nazi Party”, Gazette, November 10, 1960

Old-Time Fascist Scornful of New Canadian Nazi Party

“Old-Time Fascist Scornful of New Canadian Nazi Party” by Alexander Farrell, CP, The Montreal Gazette, Thursday, November 10, 1960, page 16. Google Newspaper Archives.


OLD-TIME FASCIST SCORNFUL OF NEW CANADIAN NAZI PARTY

BY ALEXANDER FARRELL

Source:  The Gazette. Google Newspaper Archives


LANORAIE, Que. ― CP ― The flurry caused by recent reports of Fascist organization in Canada leaves one-time Fuehrer Adrien Arcand cold.

“This Sorel fellow is just a hoax,” he says of Fuehrer-Come-Lately André Bellefeuille.

Almost forgotten except for a handful of followers who still come to his white-brick house in this farm village on the north shore of the St. Lawrence 40 miles from Montreal, Arcand’s name was recalled when the CBC showed some film of Bellefeuille in a telecast Oct. 20.

The 29-year-old Bellefeuille, now suspended from his Federal Transport Department job as a draughtsman at Sorel, Que., told on the program of his party activities and his anti-Semitism.

Arcand, who once headed the Nazi-like Partie de l’Unité Nationale [sic] (National Unity Party) and spent five wartime years behind the barbed wire of an internment camp, also still talks of the “Jewish danger” but he has decided there is not much he can do about it.

Arcand, now 61, once claimed thousands of blue-shirted followers and surrounded himself with a highly-trained Iron Guard1, the counterpart of Hitler’s storm troopers. They boasted 20 years ago they would take over the Dominion.

Now L’Unité Nationale, revived by its leader after the war, has no program of political action.

“We are not a party now,” Arcand said.  “We are just a study group.

“There are a few hundred of us.  We have fun.  We look at what is going on, and try to see what is coming.”

ARCAND SAYS BELLEFEUILLE IS A HOAX

Turning to Bellefeuille, he said the Sorel man once tried to join his movement but there was no place for him.

“Knowledge counts with us,” Arcand said.  “We want nothing to do with people who lack deep convictions and just shout at the tops of their voices.”

Meanwhile, in Sorel, Bellefeuille was lying low.  His wife and a self-styled “press attache” told reporters he was not well and could see no one.  The press attache said the young draughtsman was “upset by the publicity given his declarations and is giving it all up.”

Arcand gave this reporter his own impression about all the fuss about Bellefeuille.

Seated before a typewriter in his living-room chair, surrounded by books and magazines, he looked out without relish upon the world scene but said, “I have done my share.”

He did not regret having spoken out against “the plans of international Jewry to dominate the world” and said his views have not changed.

He felt, in effect, that he has spoken his piece and “paid the price for it, with my liberty, my health and my reputation.”

His wartime internment he considered “unjust, for I committed no crime, I was simply put away as a danger to the state.”  He was not treated roughly during the years he spent in Petawawa, Ont., and Fredericton internment camps, he said, but his health was nevertheless ruined.

During that time he had no means of supporting his wife and three sons.  “They lived with the help of friends.”

His oldest son enlisted in the Army on reaching military age in 1944 and was on his way overseas when the war ended.

The gaunt, six-foot Arcand lives austerely, by his own account, eating but two meals a day and spending most of his time reading, writing and translating, his chief remunerative occupation.  He speaks French, English, Italian, and can read German.

He rarely leaves his home, a stone’s throw from the river, except to go to Montreal for “study sessions” with his followers.

His routine is frequently interrupted, however, by visitors coming to discuss “politics and problems.”

He said he has always counselled against the use of violence.  “Neither the Jewish problem nor any other problem can ever be settled by murder.  A people seeking to dominate the world must be challenged, but not condemned to death.

“Our rules provide for the immediate expulsion of any member who uses force, or even carries any kind of weapon or liquor to a meeting.”

He wanted also to stress his loyalty to Canada.

“It is wrong to say I thought Hitler had the answers to the world’s problems.  I had no association with the Nazi movement.  In fact, the only German I ever corresponded with in those days was a philology professor who shared my interest in languages without sharing my interest in politics.”

At this point, Mme. Arcand, a strikingly attractive woman, came in with coffee and the conversation turned effortlessly to less controversial topics.

Arcand said he greatly admires the United States, “the country in the world which has had the most liberty for the last century and a half.

“American society, greatly superior to the Russian in his view, is the product of “the free activity of free men with initiative.”

The trouble was that the Americans had not succeeded in convincing many foreigners of this.

__________

1.  Translator’s note:  Adrien Arcand’s “Iron Guard” is a topic I would like to have more time to research.  The equivalence Farrell made with Hitler’s stormtroopers is a step removed from what appears to be the real inspiration for Arcand’s Legionnaires:  the Legionaries and Iron Guard of Romanian patriot Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, born in 1899, the same year as Arcand.  Codreanu, also in his turn, had been inspired by a slightly earlier Romanian Christian Defense movement whose members wore blue shirts.

Codreanu’s movement was Orthodox Catholic; it had a version of the Swastika as an emblem, and took the Archangel Michael for its patron.  The Archangel Michael in Christian iconography led God’s armies against Satan and his armies.  That would certainly have appealed to strict Roman Catholic, Adrien Arcand, who discusses Lucifer in his short book, The Universal Republic:  “We call Lucifer, who was the brightest, most radiant of created beings, the ‘Prince of Darkness’.  What could cause so total a reversal of this same being, a fall from the pinnacle of light to the depths of darkness, the collapse from one extreme at the summit to another extreme in the abyss?”  Arcand links his Catholic understanding with politics when he goes on to say that Lucifer “proclaimed” the “liberal principle” when he defied the supremacy of God by crying “I will not serve!” (non serviam).

A study needs to be done of the sources of inspiration for Arcand’s choice of symbols and institutions; and to then contrast the way these were deployed and the differences between Arcand’s movement, the source movements, and parallel movements.  To say that Arcand’s concepts are the “counterparts” of different ones chosen by Hitler, for example, does not answer the particular question of their real origin and of Arcand’s motivations, or of the particular way Arcand chose to use them.  As Professor Pierre Trépanier has said, (translation:)  “Despite the common features that link them, nationalisms are not conceived as exportable because each one is rooted in an original history and responds to particular conditions.  They are all poles apart from Marxist internationalism.”  Trépanier, P. (1991). La religion dans la pensée d’Adrien Arcand. Les Cahiers des dix, (46), 207-247. https://doi.org/10.7202/1015587ar (En dépit des traits communs qui les rapprochent, les nationalismes ne se conçoi¬vent pas comme exportables car chacun s’enracine dans une histoire originale et répond à des conditions particulières.  C’est dire qu’ils se savent aux antipodes de l’internationalisme marxiste.)

– 30 –

Canada’s ‘fuehrer’ dies at 67

<b>Adrien Arcand</b><br/>”<i>Jewish danger</i>”

Adrien Arcand
Jewish danger

FOREWORD:  I’ve chosen this article from The Ottawa Citizen of Wednesday, August 2nd, 1967, because unlike many of the press accounts of Arcand’s passing, this one seems to be a little bit respectful and a bit more realistic.  Today is June 16th, 2020; i’m backdating its publishing to 24 February 2020, back-to-back with the existing post on Arcand’s Last Will and Testament.

Adrien Arcand in the post-war years

Adrien Arcand in the post-war years

This one, like other articles over the years of coverage, calls him “gaunt”. Arcand had somewhat frail health all his life.  After nine months bedridden as a youth, he survived a deadly Spanish influenza epidemic, which undoubtedly took a toll on his health.  In his younger photos, Arcand is not gaunt.  But, in the Great Depression when so many others also were gaunt, he appears gaunt while leading his political parties.  He was gaunt on emerging from a 5-year and 5-week stint in Canadian concentration camps where the fare was not elegant; and he also, while in the camps, survived an attempt on his life, apparently by poisoning, which may have led to his cancer later in life.  In the years before his 1960 surgery for cancer, Arcand appears more like himself, with flesh on his bones and his cheeks filled out.  As the 1960s progressed, he became gaunt again, obviously while dying from cancer.

I make these observations because it often seems to me that authors draw attention to his physical appearance as though his gauntness were grounds for a slur against him.  In fact, it more likely proves his extraordinary stamina, in spite of the difficult and demanding life he led, and all the assaults on his health over the years.


Canada’s ‘fuehrer’ dies at 67

THE OTTAWA CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, 2 AUGUST 1967, PAGE 23


MONTREAL (CP) — Adrien Arcand, 67, wartime leader of Canada’s Fascist-like National Unity party, who spent a lifetime warning about a “Jewish danger,” died Tuesday in hospital after a six-month illness.

His proud boast once was that he would march his blue-shirted legions to Ottawa in 1940 and take control of the country.  But Arcand, branded the “Canadian fuehrer,” was arrested at the outbreak of the Second World War and spent five years in a concentration camp.

The gaunt, intense man first attracted national attention in 1938 when his party came into the open.  Membership at the beginning was claimed to be over 100,000.  Thousands crammed public rallies in Montreal to hear him.

He was a dazzling speaker, leaping over the centuries of history to illustrate a point with a reference to some English King, discussing some minor figure of the Russian revolution; then switching to present-day Canada.

The National Unity party still exists.  But there is no evidence its influence or following is more than negligible.