PRETORIA – An article published last Friday in the South African Mail &
Guardian reveals that a director of the country’s reserve bank has publicly
expressed pro-Nazi rhetoric.
According to the news piece, Stephen
Goodson, a “non-executive’’ director at the reserve bank since 2003, supports
extreme right-wing views and lauds the economic policies of the Third
Reich.
Goodson authored a 2004 book titled Bonaparte & Hitler Versus
the International Bankers, where he writes that Germany’s economic success story
as opposed to “human rights issues’’ provoked World War II.
In other
academic articles, Goodson criticizes the undue influence of Jewish bankers on
British politics and on the prewar German regime. These texts can be found on
several Holocaust denial and anti- Semitic websites, alongside Holocaust deniers
such as David Irwing and Ingrid Rimland Zundel.
In a 2010 radio
interview, Goodson refers to “ritual murder” committed by Jews in the early
centuries. He blames Jews for controlling world banking and media, saying,
“they’ve [Jews] been expelled from over 70 countries, some of them several
times. But unfortunately they have such a tight control of the media. Well,
there is a small window of hope in that the Internet can provide alternative
views, but even there they are trying to exercise supervision.”
Goodson
also said in that interview that the Holocaust was “a huge lie,” designed by the
Jews to extort money from Germany: “Of course, the principle is to extract
enormous sums of money from the Germans as compensation... they [international
bankers] tarnished that whole period as being one of great evil in order to keep
you blind to what is possible.”
Mary Kluk, the chairwoman of the South
African Jewish federation, condemned Goodson’s opinions yesterday.
“The
views purportedly disseminated by Stephen Goodson are hurtful and offensive, not
only in the way they give credence to the pernicious theory that Jews fabricated
the Holocaust in order to extort money from Germany but in how they serve to
glorify the legacy of the hateful Nazi regime,” Kluk said.
“Such views
serve only to distort the historical record, falsely denying a time when
ideologies of racial hatred caused untold suffering to millions and insulting
the memory of the innocent victims of those times.”
In response to the
allegations, the South African Reserve Bank said that Goodson’s board member
tenure ends in July. The bank does not intend to extend his candidacy for
another term.
The financial institution declined to respond to Kluk’s
statement.