The Zionist Factor: A Study of the Jewish Presence in 20th Century History

vor Benson -- author, journalist and current affairs analyst, and a good friend of the Institute for Historical Review -- died in mid-January in a small market town in West Suffolk, England, where he and his wife had lived for nearly eight years. He was in his 86th year. Benson was born of Swedish parents in November 1907 in South Africa (Orange Free State), and grew up in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His writing career began as a teenage reporter with the Natal Mercury in Durban (South Africa). After work for the London Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, he became chief assistant editor of the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail, then South Africa's leading morning paper. He resigned that post because of what he regarded as the paper's entrenched misrepresentation of truth. He also served as assistant editor of the Sunday Tribune in Durban. During the early months of the Second World War, he worked as a freelance journalist in Poland, Finland and Sweden. He left Norway just ahead of the occupying German forces. After returning to South Africa to enlist, he served with distinction as an officer under British command in tank and armored car units in north Africa and Italy. In 1960, he was the last journalist to leave the embattled Congolese city of Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi). His exclusive first-hand reports on the chaos and bloody fighting there appeared in newspapers around the world. In 1963 he delivered a series of acclaimed weekly broadcasts of news analysis and commentary over the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Then, from 1964 to 1966, he served as Information Advisor to the government of Rhodesia (then headed by Ian Smith). For most of the rest of his life, he was an independent political analyst and commentator on world affairs. For 15 years until his death, he wrote and published Behind the News, a courageous and well-written monthly newsletter that enjoyed an influence out of all proportion to its modest circulation.