Eric Dudley Butler was an Australian political activist and journalist, who in 1946 founded the far-right Australian League of Rights, which he led until 1992.
14 Facts About Eric Butler
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Eric Butler was known as a staunch anti-communist and virulent anti-Semite.
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Eric Butler was a member of the John Birch Society, the organization co-founded by Fred C Koch, father of the billionaire Koch Brothers.
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From 1938 Eric Butler wrote for the Australian Social Credit newspaper New Times.
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Eric Butler served in the Australian Army during World War II.
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In 1946 Butler published The International Jew, in which he claimed that Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and John Curtin were covert communists, that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish plot and that the Nazi Holocaust was a myth.
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Eric Butler founded the South Australian League of Rights in 1946, centred on the anti-bank nationalisation campaign, and subsequently other state branches were formed, before the national Australian League of Rights was established in 1960.
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Eric Butler served as the League's National Director until his retirement in 1992.
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In 1949 Eric Butler began contributing articles on national and international affairs to the Melbourne morning newspaper The Argus, then a conservative paper, but when it was revealed that the articles were based on a League of Rights study course, the series was cancelled.
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Eric Butler traveled on multiple occasions to Rhodesia and South Africa, then governed under apartheid.
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In July 1972 Eric Butler achieved some public attention when he debated Max Teichmann, senior lecturer in politics at Monash University, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Monday Conference program.
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Eric Butler complained that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party had stolen his policies.
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Eric Butler lived most of his life in rural Victoria, in his later years on a farm at Panton Hill, where his home was used as a meeting place for League and other extreme right activists.
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Eric Butler retired as League Director in 1992, handing control of the organisation to David Thompson, but remained politically active until shortly before his death.