Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2018

The Current Transcript for August 9, 2018

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Saudi Arabia has been spending quite a bit of time telling the international community that things are changing. These aggressive retaliatory moves against Canada demonstrate exactly the opposite.

LAURA LYNCH: Amnesty International's Alex Neve like Prime Minister Trudeau isn't backing away from criticizing Saudi Arabia. That's in spite of the escalation of measures taken by the kingdom to punish Canada for speaking out about the arrest of a human rights activist. This morning we'll focus on plans to remove Saudi doctors in training from Canadian hospitals. The impact both to them and to health care here. And then...

SOUNDCLIP

This whole thing with you know tampering with the brain was seen as basically an assault on people. And on their souls. And on their beings.

LL: Much is being made of the benefits of a technique called deep brain stimulation to help Parkinson's patients for one, but little known is the story of the man who invented it decades ago and ended up being shunned for his efforts. And in our last half hour...

SOUNDCLIP

They were going to kidnap 20 major Jewish figures including the director Busby Berkeley. They were going to bring them to an abandoned park and hang them there.

LL: Seemingly wild tales of dark plots to murder of widespread networks of fascist spies and of operatives trying to disrupt Hollywood and destabilize the United States. This was real in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power in Germany, a small band of women and men risked their lives to infiltrate those networks led by one American Jew who saw the growing threat. I'm Laura Lynch and this is the summer edition of The Current.

Activist says Saudi police threatened his family after he tweeted about diplomatic row with Canada

Guests: Dr. Brian Hodges, Omar Abdul-Aziz, Mehdi Hasan

SOUNDCLIP

PRIME MINISTER JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We continue to engage diplomatically and politically with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have respect for their importance in the world and recognize that they have made progress on a number of important issues but we will at the same time continue to speak clearly and firmly on issues of human rights at home and abroad wherever we see the need.

LL: That was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday responding to the escalating confrontation between Canada and Saudi Arabia. What sparked the showdown was a tweet last Friday from Global Affairs Canada's Twitter account expressing concerns about human rights in Saudi Arabia and calling for the release of activists. Since then, Saudi Arabia has: expelled the Canadian ambassador, recalled its own, suspended trade and investment, cancelled purchases of Canadian wheat and barley, ended flights to Toronto, and ordered its central bank to sell off Canadian assets. Also caught in the middle of this dispute are patients and medical professionals in Canadian hospitals. Saudi patients in Canada have been told to seek treatment elsewhere. And Saudi medical residents and fellows have been told to leave Canada. To help explain what their departure would mean for Canada I'm joined by Dr. Brian Hodges. He's the Executive-Vice President of Education at the University Health Network which operates several major teaching hospitals in Toronto and he's with me in studio. Hello.

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Good morning Laura.

LL: What have you been hearing from Saudi medical residents and fellows who are affected by the move?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Well the predominant feeling is one of distress and anxiety. It's a very sudden move for them. Many of these people have been in Canada for a long time. Medical training is a long program and it's 2 to 5 years for most specialists. So many of them particularly in 3rd, 4th, 5th years are close to their final exams. So the idea of picking up of uprooting family members and moving at a short notice is certainly unsettling.

LL: Where will they go?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: This is not clear. It's important to say as well we don't have an absolute certainty of the departure. The Saudi Cultural Bureau has communicated with teachers and with the Saudi citizens in Canada training, that the end of summer is the target. It's important to know though that some have already begun to depart because they feel the pressure.

LL: Already?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Yes.

LL: And where have they gone? Back to Saudi Arabia?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Yes as far as we know the formal communications have suggested that there will be an effort to find new placements in other countries with similar training systems such as the United Kingdom or the United States. But we've heard nothing that there's a formal arrangement for that.

LL: Do you have any sense of why they chose to leave so quickly?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: It's a directive from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And the residents and fellows I've spoken to that we've heard from take that very seriously.

LL: Let's talk about what these people do. How many Saudi medical residents and fellows provide care at the University Health Network?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: There are 100. It took us a few days to get the exact number. The same across Canada. I've seen many reports in the media but we had a national teleconference last night with all the faculties of medicine. It's a 1000 in Canada. Around 200 and 250 in Toronto and Montreal. And a 100 of those at the University Health Network.

LL: And what kind of work do they do?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: They are in all clinical departments. Surgery. Mental Health. Family Medicine. Laboratory sciences. Radiology. Essentially every area of medical training.

LL: But they're not just looking and learning, they're also actively involved in care?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Oh yes. They join us for the full program of either the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada the Specialty medicine training program, a fellowship which is a subspecialty program, or a family medicine program under the College of Family Physicians of Canada. Exactly the same experience that a Canadian or any international resident or fellow would have in medical training.

LL: Well then what impact is losing so many of them at once going to have on the ability to provide care?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: It depends how precipitate it is. If it all happens at once, and there's some indication as I mentioned that some are already preparing to leave completely understandable with restrictions on flights and other things, it would be a little bit like having an outbreak of the flu or many people calling in sick. Of course I give you the numbers to put it in context. A 100 is a lot. It is a lot. But I'll tell you at UHN, University Health Network, we do have 520 fellows of which 50 are Saudi and we have about 1300 residents of which about 40 or so are Saudi. So those are large numbers and certainly have an impact on clinical service delivery but they're not so extraordinary that we worry about causing problems in terms of coverage for patients.

LL: Will patients notice though?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Well I don't think so. I mean we're in health care, if we do anything well it's resilience in the face of challenges. I work in the emergency department and many of us intensive care and other areas. We have a coverage system. It's important for Canadians, Ontarians, to know that and never would a trainee be solely responsible for a patient. There's always a most responsible physician who is in charge. Everyone in training is under supervision. So first of all there's always a Canadian trained physician in charge. Also we work in teams. If anyone who's being in a family practice clinic or a hospital will recognize that a team provides care. Not just physicians as well of course but among the physician group it's tiered hierarchy with fellows, residents, medical students. So cross coverage is what we're planning of course, to cover if someone is suddenly away for on call or in a clinic we will ask other residents and fellows and staff faculty to cover.

LL: You said there's a 1000 across the country.

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Yes.

LL: Why are there so many Saudi students coming to Canada?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: It has a very long history with Canada since 1980. Almost 40 years of partnership. We accept many international students. Again the numbers sound extraordinary. It is one of the largest groups but there are hundreds and thousands of international trainees in medicine in Canada. It's a very international education system. The relationship with Saudi Arabia is a particularly strong one and two thirds of all doctors in Saudi Arabia are trained in Canada.

LL: Really why? What's the attraction?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Well I think first of all it's credit to us for having established an excellent high quality system recognized everywhere in the world. Secondly, Canada is understood to be a welcoming environment for students who come. And I've heard from residents themselves that although there's a cultural adjustment, they find it a place where they learn a great deal and being very multicultural, they find it a little easier to adapt than in other places in the world. And because of the referral network medicine is a tight world and with all of those graduates having leadership positions in Saudi Arabia being the Deans and Chairs and CEOs they of course wish to send their next generation to train where they did.

LL: So what is at stake here than if the fight isn't resolved and all of the doctors in training leave?

DR. BRIAN HODGES: It's very significant I think. First of all our main concern is with the experience of the trainees. These are our colleagues. We work with them every day. They're very close with us. The very first concern is that they finish their training. Some of them are very close to their final exams and although there's been discussion of alternate training sites that's not as easy as it sounds. Very difficult to get one's Canadian certification exams done from another country. And of course completing the required rotations would be tricky. That and the personal side where in University of Toronto we have a wellness center for residents and in our hospital we're trying to support people as we can and their families. But there's a big impact on them. We hope it's short lived but if it isn't it will be very disruptive.

LL: And also just briefly it will have an impact on Saudi Arabia in terms of the doctors who are getting trained.

DR. BRIAN HODGES: Oh undoubtedly. We are by far the greatest supplier of medical trainees and I think it's an important note to strike that in the world of international relations it's a very major impact on the relationship between our two countries to have such a huge workforce in a prestigious profession trained largely in Canada.

LL: Dr. Hodges thank you for coming in.

DR. BRIAN HODGES: It's my pleasure thank you.

LL: Dr. Brian Hodges is Executive-Vice President of Education at the University Health Network which operates several major teaching hospitals in Toronto and he was with me here in our studio. Well also caught in the middle of this intensifying dispute, more than 8300 Saudi students enrolled in Canadian post-secondary schools. Omar Abdul-Aziz is a Saudi national who was granted asylum in Canada in 2014. He's studying political science and sociology at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec. He says he has received a deluge of messages from Saudi students worried about their futures.

SOUNDCLIP

OMAR ABDUL-AZIZ: They're freaking out. They don't know what to do. Yesterday a doctor was telling me he said, I want to make a video statement about my situation. I cannot go back home. I've been studying for almost 6-7 years. And now they're telling him to go back home. It's crazy. If you have a problem with Canada or with the Canadian authorities, do your stuff with them. You don't have to get the students involved. You spent billions of dollars on these students. And what about the people who are in the hospitals here in Canada. It's just crazy.

LL: Now we've been reaching out to Saudi students affected by the announcement but so far none have wanted to come forward publicly. For some insight into their reluctance listen to what Abdul-Aziz said happened to his brother back in Saudi Arabia last week.

SOUNDCLIP

OMAR ABDUL-AZIZ: When I started to tweet about what's going on between Saudi Arabia and Canada. Saudi forces entered my house and took my brother as a hostage and they asked him to convince me to stop tweeting about what's really going on between Canada and Saudi Arabia or they're going to send him to jail with some of our friends who used to live with me here in Canada. You know I have never experienced something like that before. I've been tweeting. I've been posting videos. I've been talking to the media since 2014. It's something new and strange.

LL: That's Omar Abdul-Aziz a Saudi national who was granted asylum in Canada in 2014 and is now a student at Bishop's University. For what this showdown with Ottawa means for Saudi Arabia's place on the world stage, I'm joined by Mehdi Hasan. He is a columnist for the news site The Intercept and a host for Al Jazeera English and he is in Washington D.C. Hello.

MEHDI HASAN: Good morning.

LL: What do you make of this move by Saudi Arabia?

MEHDI HASAN: I find it bizarre. To call it over the top I think would be an understatement. They seem to have confused Canada with the Islamic Republic of Iran or of Qatar, you know their Middle East rivals and enemies. It's just bizarre to pick a fight with the Canadian government of all the governments in the world over a tweet about human rights which basically every western government does once in a while you know does this whole Saudi Arabia you must release your prisoners. You must respect human rights. While they carry on selling weapons and doing business. And of course Canada sells a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia. So I find the whole thing bizarre and I think it'll backfire on them.

LL: Well if it is bizarre and it will backfire. What do you think the motivations are? Where is it coming from?

MEHDI HASAN: I mean the motivation is very simple which is if you want to do business with Saudi Arabia in 2018, 2019, 2020 going forward you have to shut up about human rights especially on social media which they're very sensitive about. Saudi Arabia has a very high number of young users of social media and they didn't like the fact that Canadians were doing this on Twitter. And it's coming from the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salam 'MBS' as he's known. He's very thin skinned personally according to people who study him know him. And he's taking Saudi Arabia in even a more autocratic direction than it already was. Saudi commentators like Jamal Khashoggi have pointed out that MBS the crown prince who is de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia right now, his father is pretty old and ill and has handed over most day to day powers to his son, MBS is actually consolidating power and controlling that country with far more of an iron grip that any of the Saudi kings that came before him. He has locked up his cousin. He has rounded up princes and shaking them down for cash. He has locked up women drivers. Activists. He has locked up intellectuals. Religious preachers. Journalists. Business leaders. So this is a man who doesn't like to be criticized at home and he doesn't like to be criticized abroad.

LL: And yet he's also being credited with making other reforms to the Kingdom such as allowing women to drive.

MEHDI HASAN: Indeed and that's the whole paradox. Because he sold himself especially in the Western media especially on his recent tour of the U.K. and the U.S., as this great reformer the savior of the Middle East a champion of moderate Islam. And yet the same time he's been accused of carrying out war crimes in Yemen. As I say he doesn't tolerate any dissent back home. And worst of all is that on the one hand, he says okay women you can finally drive in Saudi Arabia the only country in the world that banned women from driving, but the women who campaigned for that change you know I'm going to lock you up because I'll decide when these changes happen and I'll decide the extent of these changes.

LL: Now two things have happened in the last 24 hours that I want to highlight. One is that the Prime Minister did not back away. Prime Minister Trudeau. And he also informed us that our foreign minister spoke to Saudi's foreign minister. Had a long conversation. Prime Minister Trudeau also said in his statement yesterday that the kingdom has made progress on human rights. Is that enough of an olive branch to try to resolve this?

MEHDI HASAN: Well apparently not so far. I mean look Mr. Trudeau, your prime minister, is being very polite. I think his phrase was you know we speak strongly, firmly, clearly, and politely. And the Canadians are speaking very politely. You know the Saudis [inaudible] with Sweden a few years ago over a very similar issue where the Swedes and the Swedish foreign minister, who also was a woman by the way at the time, who came out and said the Saudis are behaving in a medieval manner. She called the Saudi government a dictatorship. And they went crazy and they withdrew their ambassador and made threats. And the Swedes ended up basically backing down and within a year or two under pressure from the local business community etc. Whether the Canadians do that now remains to be seen. I hope they don't. I hope Prime Minister Trudeau and Foreign Minister Freeland stick to their guns. The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia came out yesterday and said, no there has been no change and the Canadians have made a huge mistake and they need to fix that mistake. Now what is that mistake? What's bizarre is. What is that mistake? Are the Saudis saying that no Western government can ever publicly criticize them again? Which is bizarre. Because even the United States, their best friend, publish a human rights report every year which criticizes Saudi Arabia. Every Western foreign minister while selling arms to Saudi always does a whole kind of you know, oh I spoke to them about their beheadings and we did talk about human rights behind the scenes. So it just feels like they've bitten off more than they can chew. It's a good deal they have right now, the Saudis. They get Western governments to turn a blind eye to their human rights in practice. They get to buy lots of weapons and do lots of investments. And now they're basically saying no no we're going to do all that and you must say even one word on Twitter.

LL: In fact what it had been buying from Canada, it wasn't weapons per se, but light armored vehicles and that deal now seems to be somewhat in question. But you anticipated me Mehdi I want to play some tape of the Saudi foreign minister talking about Canada and Canada's criticism of his country's human rights record.

SOUNDCLIP

Canada knows what it needs to do. Canada started this and it's up to Canada to find a way out of it. A mistake was made. A mistake needs to be corrected. Very simple. There's nothing to [inaudible].

LL: Okay so he's standing firm. You're encouraging Canada to stand firm but Canada's standing firm so far seems to be Canada's standing pretty much alone. Western allies don't seem to be jumping in to defend Canada. Why?

MEHDI HASAN: It's shameful. It's because the same Western governments they do business with Saudi Arabia. They don't want to upset the Saudis. They've seen the Saudi overreaction. Although I will say let's see how this plays out over time because if you're a European government, if you're the European Union, I mean we can't expect anything of the Trump administration they are totally in Saudi's corner and one of the reasons MBS has been so emboldened in recent months is because Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner who is good friends with the crown prince have basically given a green light to the Saudis to do whatever they want. Whether that's blockade Qatar. Whether that's carry on their war crimes in Yemen, etc etc. But I would say this European Union and European Union member countries will I hope be paying attention to this to see what kind of precedent this sets. Because if Canada is forced to back down because it has no friends you know what does that say for the future of Western country relations with Middle East autocracies or African dictatorships or whatever or any kind of human rights situation around the world. It's a real challenge. And it's shameful to see the United States and European countries saying, well both countries are our allies they should sort out between themselves. You listen to the Saudi foreign minister there saying, well Canada started it. Well no they didn't start it. The Saudis started it by detaining a bunch of human rights activists including Samar Badawi, sister of Raif Badawi, whose family are Canadian citizens now. So I just find the whole thing bizarre. And the Saudi overreaction to Canada is what I think will damage Saudi in the long run. They could have just made a song and dance about this and you know put out some statements. No, they are pulling out their patients. Pulling out their students. Saudi TV is running documentaries accusing Canada of being human rights abuser. A Saudi general laughably accused Canada of supporting terrorism. This is ludicrously over the top rhetoric.

LL: And yet as you said and we've noted there has been relatively little comment from European countries.

MEHDI HASAN: From governments. But look at the public opinion. I would argue that public opinion is slowly but surely changing on Saudi Arabia. If you look around the western world even in Canada, a majority of Canadians opposed Prime Minister Trudeau's arms sale deal last year. The majority of Britons oppose the British government's very close financial military relation with Saudi Arabia. In America, Saudi Arabia is hugely unpopular with the public and even with the media. The Washington Post, establishment newspaper in the U.S. very supportive normally of U.S. foreign policy intervention, put out a stinging editorial yesterday saying every Western government should stand with Canada or against Saudi Arabia. I do think slowly but surely public opinion is changing a lot about Saudi Arabia and that's why it's such a huge mistake. In the short term, they may get their victory. They may bully your government into backing down. I think in the long run they've done massive damage to their image in the West where they're supposed to be an ally. But a lot of people are now questioning whether they are.

LL: Well we will leave it there. Thank you.

MEHDI HASAN: Thank you.

LL: Mehdi Hasan is a columnist for the news site The Intercept. He's also a host for Al Jazeera English and he was in Washington D.C. Now we did reach out to the Saudi Embassy in Ottawa but we did not hear back. The CBC News is next. Then, the forgotten story of the neuroscientist whose idea of stimulating the brain has been stimulating controversy over decades. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Why the origins of deep brain stimulation fell into obscurity

Guests: Lone Frank

LL: Hello I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. Still to come, how Hollywood took on Hitler's firing in the run up to the Second World War. But first, remembering the scientist who introduced the world to deep brain stimulation and the ethical concerns his work provoked.

SOUNDCLIP

OLIVIA CHOY: And it's really not as crazy as most people think. In fact it's not a new technique. It has been used as a promising treatment for things like depression and also simply to enhance cognitive functioning.

LL: That is Olivia Choy a criminologist from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore talking about the technique of deep brain stimulation, implanting electrodes to stimulate certain parts of the brain. Choy's work focuses on whether this technique could affect someone's likelihood of committing violent acts. She and her colleagues published research's results earlier this summer. Here's what she told CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks about what they found.

SOUNDCLIP

OLIVIA CHOY: Well our key finding was that you know enhancing activity in the prefrontal part of the brain reduces people's intentions to commit aggressive acts the next day. On top of that it seems that what's accounting for that is enhanced perceptions of how morally wrongful those acts are.

LL: Now as she mentioned, this is not a new technique. Deep brain stimulation has already been used to treat more than 150,000 patients to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. There are also experiments going on to see whether it could work to treat depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. But the technique isn't without controversy, as ethicists grapple with the dilemma of whether deep brain stimulation amounts to tinkering with a person's fundamental identity. My next guest says the whole debate began many decades ago when an American scientist named Robert Heath first experimented with the technique. Lone Frank has written a new book about Heath's work called The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor. It documents how Robert Heath went from a scientific superstar in the 1950s, to a highly polarizing figure, to someone who's now largely forgotten by scientists in his field. Lone Frank is a science journalist and a neurobiologist. She is in Copenhagen, Denmark. Hello.

LONE FRANK: Hi there.

LL: What made you want to look into the story of Robert Heath and his invention of deep brain stimulation?

LONE FRANK: Well I have to go back a few years there. I was sitting at my desk, my day job as a science journalist here in Denmark with my newspaper [inaudible] I was getting interested in this new technology as it was called deep brain stimulation and I looked into what it was used for. And then I saw this one little link on the internet saying something about a Robert Galbraith Heath who had been working in New Orleans with this kind of technology in 1950. And I asked around, I mean I'm a neurobiologist: I've written about neurobiology, I've read about you know the history of psychiatry, I had never heard about this man and nobody I talked to in the field of deep brain stimulation had heard of him. So I started to look into what on earth this was about. And it turned out to be a really fascinating history of a technology that is coming back but that everybody thinks is new.

LL: So let's start with that, you open this door. You started researching. How did his work on deep brain stimulation begin?

LONE FRANK: Well he was this young upcoming star in American psychiatry in the late 40s. He was trained at Columbia University in both neurology and psychiatry. And he was involved in the first big examination of patients who had a lobotomy, a frontal lobotomy, for schizophrenia. He was involved in showing that lobotomy was in fact not really doing anything for schizophrenia symptoms. So he was very much against using lobotomy. But he had this idea and this was thoughts that were floating around at the time that the central symptom of schizophrenia is not you know hallucinations and stuff like that it's really anhedonia. So the inability to feel pleasure and feel anything positive. And what he thought was, well if we can stimulate parts of the brain that have to do with the feeling of pleasure we might get these people out of their schizophrenic stupor and actually make them amenable to talk therapy. So he started to work with cats to figure out where were these centres in the brain located. And he had the idea that you had to go deeper than the frontal cortex, which is what you hit when you go in and do a frontal lobotomy.

LL: Right. So is that the difference between what he was doing and shock therapy?

LONE FRANK: Shock therapy is quite different. That was available at the time. And that is simply you know applying electrodes to the scalp of a person. And what you do is you shock them. They're sedated of course. You shock them and then you induce basically a grand mal epileptic seizure and that sort of resets the brain or reboots the system. We don't actually know what it does. But this is something quite different, deep brain stimulation is about using the brain's language which is really electricity. I mean cells are talking to each other by chemical and electrical means. So if you go in with a microelectrode, you implant an electrode deep into the brain and apply a little bit of current to a brain area where you know current is actually missing or the activity is corrected by this application of current, then what happens is the person doesn't feel the shocks or these currents. You just feel different because your brain activity is affected.

LL: So in general then how promising were the early results of his work?

LONE FRANK: Well they pointed to the fact that you could certainly do something positive of schizophrenic symptoms. The first round of experiments were 22 schizophrenic patients that they operated on at Tulane University in New Orleans and what they saw is roughly half of them were clearly better afterwards. And some of them who had been looking at you know a lifetime in a mental institution were able to come home.

LL: And given that then how were people reacting to his work in those early days?

LONE FRANK: Not very positively well. Some were very interested. He had built up a group at Columbia at a very young age. He had been made chief of neurology and psychiatry and he had a really interesting group of both you know neurophysiologist, psychiatrist, even you know a Freudian analyst working together on this. But in a lot of other places around the country and around the world there were skeptics because it was the time of Freudianism. And it was before biological psychiatry really and he was one of the first truly biological psychiatrists saying out loud that you know schizophrenia and other mental disorders were not something about you know upbringing and bad character or something like that. It was you know a matter of illness in the brain.

LL: So as things went forward tell me more about patient B-19. This person became a bit of a catalyst for public protest against Heath's techniques.

LONE FRANK: Yes. If anyone knows about him today it's probably because they have read about this one experiment with patient B-19. It was carried out around 1970. It was a homosexual young man who was extremely depressed and suicidal and who basically wanted to be rid of his sexuality. His homosexuality. He wanted to be quote unquote normal. He wanted to be heterosexual. And Heath made this you know you could call it a conditioning experiment trying to see if his method which was you know stimulating pleasure areas of the brain and getting pleasure connected with some kind of wanted behavior, if that could work. So this man B-19 had an electrode implanted in his you know one of his pleasure centres, and so he got use to, he had a cell stimulator so he could turn on this you know feeling of pleasure. He got used to first watching heterosexual pornographic movies and while stimulating himself and at a certain point he told the researchers, well I would actually like to meet a woman. See if this works for me. And so they procured a prostitute. And this is not hearsay. This is something that is actually described in detail in a scientific journal and what came out of it was that it so to speak, it worked. And the scientist Robert Heath and his colleagues describe how you know this is an interesting study that opens up the possibilities that you know this pleasure conditioning can be used for correcting unwanted behavior.

LL: Okay let's emphasize a few things around this particular patient. He wanted this. We have to remember the tenure of the times back then, much different than it is today. And these days there's lots of condemnation about things like so-called conversion therapy for people who are gay. So how did the public react back then to what he was doing?

LONE FRANK: Well it's interesting because there wasn't any you know big reaction in the scientific community. Probably you know some people would shake their heads a bit but it was basically that a you know a gay activist community was growing at that time and this was still a time I should say when homosexuality was in the psychiatric disease manual, but it was of course a time when things were changing. And this gay community in New Orleans, a few people got hold of this article and were incensed and they started writing about you know Nazi science going on at Tulane. And so locally it was a thing, but nationally this didn't you know raise any eyebrows.

LL: Now there was a film made in 1974 called The Terminal Man based on Michael Crichton's science fiction novel and it was inspired by one of the scientist's who worked with Robert Heath. And I just want to listen to an excerpt from that right now.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: His name is Harry Benson. He is 34 years old. He's the first human being of his kind.

VOICE 2: They are really going to put wires.

VOICE 1: Harry Benson is the first human being of his kind. [Dialing noises] The first Terminal Man.

LL: Okay so you hear from that, it sounds kind of spooky and science fiction like. How did that film reflect the public's changing attitudes towards brain stimulation at the time?

LONE FRANK: I think what it really reflected was that people were at this time, remember this is also when One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest came out and there was this atmosphere of you know psychiatry it's a bad field. You know these doctors are evil and monstrous. And what they're doing is really behavioral control. Mind control. It's not treating patients. So there was this suspicion of psychiatry at the time and there was certainly this suspicion of psychosurgery brought on by in fact lobotomies and that past history. And so this whole thing with you know tampering with the brain was seen as basically an assault on people. And on their souls. And on their beings.

LL: Now you actually met with one of Robert Heath's most famous patient's David Merrick. Tell me more about the experiments that Heath did with Merrick.

LONE FRANK: This was a little later. This was actually the last point of his career. In 1976 he had found out at that point, doing an awful lot of experiments on monkeys and rats and other animals, that you could reach the far recesses of the limbic system the emotional system by in fact just applying electrical currents to the cerebellum. So almost the surface of the cerebellum in the back of the neck. And this was much easier than operating on people and sticking electrodes deep in their brains. And so he had constructed a what he called a brain pacemaker, which would then give impulses to deep emotional areas. And there was this young boy David Merrick who was known as the most violent and aggressive mental patients in the state of Louisiana. He had been you know violent towards his family, towards you know other people since his early childhood. He was a major problem. He was now at the age of 17, basically tied to a hospital bed and drugged at the same time and nobody could see you know how he would ever get away from there. So his parents came to Robert Heath because they had heard that you know he was this doctor who would try out extreme measures. And they asked him if he could do something for David and he thought that he could with this brain pacemaker. And he operated on David and it actually it took away the aggressiveness. The violence. And I met David. You know what is it. Two years ago.

LL: How old is he now?

LONE FRANK: He's 60 something and he still has the implant. It still works. He had the battery changed actually when I was there because it was running out. It's really amazing to see how you know when this stimulator doesn't work David immediately feels you know tense and he wants to lash out at people. When it's working, he stops.

LL: So he has been using this for many years. What is known about the long term impact of using these devices?

LONE FRANK: I would say basically nothing. That is the thing with when you talk about deep brain stimulation and its use today where you know as you said it has been used for about 150,000 patients with Parkinson's. We know quite a bit about Parkinson's. But when you talk about implanting these things in depressed patients, OCD patients, you know other people or Tourette's syndrome, anorexics, you know all these diseases that they're trying to use deep brain stimulation for, nobody knows what's going to happen in 5, 10 or 15 years because we simply don't have the data. And the problem is, when I've been to these conferences where surgeons meet, the data isn't really being gathered it seems. You don't see you know studies coming out talking about: so we had this first group of OCD patients, this was the original result we got with them, now five years later this is what it looks like. Those papers just aren't being written.

LL: Now the archives of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons has an interview with Robert Heath. It's from the 1980s after he had retired and I'm just going to play a bit of it. He sums up why his work was so controversial.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: To come up with some evidence that the biological basis for behavior was sort of heresy during that peroid. There were these exaggerated concerns about what could be done by physical manipulation of the brain.

VOICE 2: Mind control sort of thing.

VOICE 1: The mind control issue was a highly emotional one. That we would make zombies out of people and put them under our control and so on. And none of which can happen.

VOICE 2: No. It's nonsense.

LL: Now eventually the profession did turn its back on him. When did scientists start reviving the idea of deep brain stimulation?

LONE FRANK: Well actually in the early 1980s a surgeon called (Alim) Benabid was working in Geneva as far as I can remember. And he was doing operations. He was removing bits of the brain in Parkinson's patients because that was known to alleviate their symptoms. And for some reason he was using electrodes to figure out where is the exact spot that I should go in and remove. And then one day he simply used you know some new parameters for stimulating the brain and saw that you know with these parameters suddenly his patient just stopped shaking in the operating room as he was stimulating him electrically. So that was the start of the idea well why don't we instead of removing pieces of the brain just implant an electrode and you know connect it to a battery and see what that can do? And of course that is now FDA approved and it has been working since the early 80s.

LL: Now how much though can deep brain stimulation actually change things that we tend to ascribe to someone's character or personality that we think of as someone's entrenched characteristics?

LONE FRANK: Well I would say that if you go into the brain and stimulate it be it with drugs or with you know electrical current you change the brain's activity. It could be if you're in movement areas of the brain you just you know stimulate movement or do something for Parkinson's patients. If you're in other areas that have to do with your let's say has influence on your personality, of course you also change the personality of a person. And as the scientist from Singapore was telling us before, you can if you are in the right area so to speak, you can affect people's moral reasoning. Moral thinking. It just depends on where you stimulate.

LL: Okay you can do it. You might be able to do it. But it raises questions about human identity doesn't it?

LONE FRANK: Well certainly. But I think you know what is human identity? If you look at neuroscience and what it has been telling us for the last couple of decades is that you know human identity it isn't something that you have in a certain place in the brain and that is where your essential self is. Yourself, what you regard as you, what other people will see as you, is a matter of your you know your collected brain state. So if the state of your brain changes, you become a different person.

LL: So this must raise ethical questions.

LONE FRANK: Yes it does of course. I mean it raises questions about, is there anything in a human being, in a brain, that you should not change? Who should be able to change your brain? Is that only you who can decide? Is it other people? Could it be your parents? Could it be you know a legal system? There are all kinds of questions. And I really hope, and that was you know one of the points in writing this book The Pleasure Shock where I discuss both the history and you know that the new beginning and what is happening right now and what will happen in the future with deep brain stimulation, one of the points is to get a public debate going about this because very few people actually know you know how far along we are.

LL: And coming to it right away thinking about things like someone who may have violent tendencies. Who may be a criminal. Some people might just automatically say, well get in there and fix it. What's wrong with that? Is that an easy question to answer?

LONE FRANK: I don't think it's that easy. It depends on how you look at you know autonomy versus the public good for example. I mean you might talk about and we do talk a lot about and we do write a lot about psychopaths, sociopaths, and how you know their brains are different so they don't empathize. They simply can't feel empathy the same way that we do. They can't help themselves in a way. And so what are we to do? What we do is you know incarcerate some of them. But what if you could make them empathize for example. Would that be better or worse than incarceration?

LL: Let's go back to Robert Heath again. You found that very few people who work in the field know all that much about his role in inventing deep brain stimulation and those that do still tend to see him in a bad light. One researcher even referred to him as a monster. What do you think that contemporary practitioners of this technique could learn from the story of Robert Heath as we go forward?

LONE FRANK: I think what they could learn is to self monitor. To really always you know look at themselves and you know try to see are we really only doing this because we want to help people right now? Or are we mixing our own egos into this perhaps? Are we going places where we shouldn't go? It's simply a question of realizing that everyone can be looked at as monstrous. If you go into the future and the culture has changed, the ethics have changed, and we are always I mean scientists are always at the very front of something and they're driven by both ambition and wanting to help and all this, and then some of them end up as monsters. And so simply using this story to reflect on what they're doing and really scrutinized themselves I would hope that the book could do that.

LL: Well I'm quite certain you've started the discussion. It's been fascinating, thank you.

LONE FRANK: Thank you for having me.

LL: Lone Frank is the author of The Pleasures Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor. She joined us from Copenhagen, Denmark. Coming up in our next half hour, the incredible story of how a handful of Jewish activists and anti fascists fought a covert war against Nazi Germany's secret agents in Los Angeles. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Hitler in L.A.: How private Jewish spies foiled a Nazi Hollywood takeover

Guest: Steven Ross

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. Earlier this year I spoke to author Steven Ross about a dark and little known chapter of American history. We're going to replay that conversation in a few moments. But first we're going back to February the 20th, 1939 and an ugly moment in New York City.

SOUNDCLIP

We the German American Bund organized as American citizens with American ideals, and determined to protect ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the conspirators who will change this glorious republic into the infernal of a Bolshevik paradise. We, I say will not fail you when called upon to give every lawful support in our power in the fight to break the grip and the parasite hand of Jewish communisms in our schools, our universities, our very homes.

LL: That was Fritz Kuhn the German born leader at the German American Bund speaking to 22,000 Hitlerites at Madison Square Garden in the tense months leading up to World War 2. The Bund was the biggest and best known of the American Nazi organization's secretly sponsored by the Third Reich. But there were others. And one of the cities that most interested Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels was Hollywood, California. And like something out of a Hollywood thriller, a Jewish spy ring, financed by big movie moguls, carried on a secret war infiltration and disruption against the Nazis and fascists that secretly plotted revolution and murder on US soil. Steven Ross is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and he tells this story in his new book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America. I spoke to him in February and I began our conversation by asking how he happened upon this strange story.

STEVEN ROSS: Well the previous book I did was called Hollywood Left Right: How Movie stars Shaped American Politics and I was writing a chapter. Edward G Robinson and I got very interested in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League which was really the first major political uprising of Hollywood after 1932 in the presidential election. And I thought I am going to come back to it. I discovered it was the story of a spy ring that was run by this Jewish attorney Leon Lewis from August 1933 until the end of World War 2. I knew I had a book.

LL: So let's start with Leon Lewis. Tell me more about him.

STEVEN ROSS: Well Leon Lewis was born in Wisconsin in the late 80s, went to university, got a law degree from Chicago in 1913. Then rather than go to work in a law firm, he believed in the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam which has healed the world. He became the founding executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League that was founded the same year he graduated law school. So he worked in the Anti-Defamation League, went off to war, came back and persuaded the rest of the league that they needed to open international division to monitor the rise of hate groups in Europe and particularly the rise of these brown shirts in Germany. So there was no one in the United States who was monitoring Hitler's rise to power more closely during the 1920s than Leon Lewis. During this time he lived in Chicago. He eventually moved to L.A. around 1930-31 and then Hitler becomes Reich's Chancellor in January 1933. While Jewish groups are debating, they actually do have strategies but they're very divided. Well Leon Lewis is willing to tolerate that until July 26, 1933 Nazis hold their first open meeting and like your opening clip from Fritz Kuhn, they tell those were gathered that they are going to save America from its two greatest threats Jews and communists. Once he hears about this Leon Lewis goes to patriotic hall which had been founded by the county supervisors of LA to house all the veteran groups. And he proceeded to recruit four World War One veterans and their wives to go undercover and spy on every Nazi and fascist group.

LL: Was this a moment where he sort of had a light bulb go on and he thought 'I have to create a spy network?

STEVEN ROSS: It was a moment when he felt no one in authority seemed to be taking the Nazi seriously. Again having studied their rise in Europe he was afraid Hitler was trying to duplicate the strange strategy in the U.S. which is to recruit disgruntled World War One veterans who had had their military benefits cut by the government. And that's why he recruited military veterans to join these groups because the Nazis wanted to build an army of unhappy American war veterans so they could persuade to rise up to defend their country against communism and Jews.

LL: So who was the first spy that Leon Lewis recruited?

STEVEN ROSS: It was John Schmidt who was a captain and he was particularly intriguing to the Nazis because he is a German born American citizen whose father had been a general in the Bavarian Army. His brother was a officer in the German army. He had in fact been a German cadet until age 16. Then he went to America fought with [unintelligible] in Mexico and then fought against his own relatives in World War One. He is persuaded by Lewis that the Nazi threat is real. He hates what the Nazis have done to Germany and so he agrees to go undercover in spy, along with his wife who also speaks German.

LL: What sort of plots did he learn were being hatched by the Nazis in California?

STEVEN ROSS: Well the first plot they discovered within weeks of joining the friends in new Germany, the four spies discovered they meet this man Dietrich Geffken who had fled Germany in the twenties after murdering two communists and wound up joining the National Guard in San Francisco. He had told them how he had created a blueprint of the National Guard armory in San Francisco. He knew where all the weapons were, where all the ammunition were, where the hospice's quarters were. And he had also obtained plans down in San Diego and now he wanted the four spies to get him the plans for the LA armory and to get him machine guns. And the plot was on an appointed day, Nazis and their American fascist allies, the Silver Shirts, were going to rise up and seize the armouries in San Francisco, L.A., San Diego and he told them that any soldier who were to join their cause would be welcome and any soldier who resisted would be shot on the spot. And Geffken was convinced that when the public heard about the narratives rising up seizing the armoury and then beginning to kill Jews that there would be pogroms throughout America and that all Americans would rise up against - as Geffken called it - the Judaeo and overthrow the Roosevelt government.

LL: That obviously criminal activity, was local law enforcement told about the plans?

STEVEN ROSS: Yes the first thing Leon Lewis did is he never planned to be this long term spymaster. He figured he would go to the authorities and then they would take over the spying. And he did. He went to the police chief and about two minutes into describing Geffken plot, the police chief stopped him and said 'You don't get it. Hitler is only doing what he has to do to save Germany from the Jewish problem and that in L.A. the real threat is not the Nazis'. The real threats are all those Jews and communists who live in Boyle Heights - which was then the Jewish neighbourhood. He basically throws Lewis out of his office and then Lewis goes to the sheriff who equally doesn't care. And finally he goes to the Justice Department and they tell him that they cannot do anything unless they were ordered to by Washington. But J. Edgar Hoover was so obsessed with jailing communists that he refuses to put any of his FBI agents dedicated to tailing the Nazis. So Leon Lewis has to keep his spy ring going.

LL: During the 1930s there were a number of fascists, racist, paramilitary organisations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, cleared of coordination between the Nazi agents and these other homegrown racists?

STEVEN ROSS: There is a great deal of coordination. Many of these groups adopted patriotic sounding names like the American Nationalist Party, the American Rangers, the American Blue Buds. And by the mid-30s they formed what I call a fascist front that is led by Herman Schuman who was the head of the friends of new Germany that 1936 renamed itself the German American Bund and they held the meetings with the Silver Shirts, the Nazis, the White Russians and all these homegrown, the Klan and all these homegrown American fascist groups with the again idea that they collectively would ultimately create an army that they predicted would rise up to fight the communists on the day that the communists were going to try to overthrow the government. They would then defeat the communists and they would take over the government on behalf of the American people.

LL: As you say Leon Lewis had to continue his spying network. He brings in the Jewish heads of the big Hollywood studios. What role did they play in supporting Leon Lewis's work?

STEVEN ROSS: Well once he realized that no one in authority was going to do anything, and when I mean do nothing. The FBI Herman Schwinn who's the head of the Bund in L.A. is the number two Nazi in America. He's in charge and I'll leave L.A. but the entire western United States. Hoover does not allow even those agents to finally ask Hoover for permission to put him under surveillance and Hoover refuses. He doesn't tell his local agency to put Schwinn under surveillance until November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbour. Leon Lewis knows that he has no support and so he goes to one group who he thinks will be sympathetic and that the moguls. He has a very small inner circle of Irvin Folberg who's the number two person in MGM Rabbi Edgar Magnin who's the rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple which is the temple to the Jewish stars and moguls, then finally Mendel Silberberg who is the most powerful entertainment attorney in America. Those three contact the studio head and in March 1934, 40 of them show up at Hillcrest Country Club which is the Country Club Jews founded after they were kicked out of every Christian country club. They go to a private dining hall where Leon Lewis proceeded to tell them how in fact the Silver Shirts and the Nazis are firing every one of their blue collar employees secretly and replacing them with followers of either Hitler or the American fascist William Dudley Peli and that the moguls know nothing about this because all they are concerned with are their directors, their directors, their staffs. And he then proceed to tell them that some of them are on the hit lists and by the end of the evening he walks out in the equivalent of 424,000 dollars in 2018 dollars.

LL: Which is a lot of money.

STEVEN ROSS: The moguls proceed to fund while they are publicly doing business with the Hitler regime, privately they're working to undermine it in whatever way they can.

LL: Obviously this must have surprised the moguls to learn this kind of information of the people who were infiltrating their ranks. I just want to be clear. You said they were firing blue collar workers, were they specifically Jewish blue collar workers or all of them?

STEVEN ROSS: Yes. In fact he tells them Paramount is virtually 100 percent Aryan, MGM virtually 100 percent Aryan. In fact at one point because Leon Lewis alert them, Hermann fires one of its foremen on the grounds that he was "trying to introduce Hitlerism into the studios".

LL: In this environment there is also a German consul in Los Angeles during the 1930s because as we know the U.S. and Germany were not yet at war. What was his mandate from the Nazi government?

STEVEN ROSS: Yes his name is George Kisling. And he was sent by Hitler and Goebbels to Los Angeles to stop Hollywood from making any anti-Nazi, anti-German films. Hitler and Goebbels both believed that Germany had lost World War One in part because Hollywood and British film industries had been so effective in their anti-German, anti-Hun propaganda. Kisling was sent to L.A. and told to threaten the moguls with the ability to invoke Article 15 of the German Kuroda law of 1931 that said if any studio makes a film that in any way denigrates the German government or people that studio's films will be banned in Germany. And if enough films come from any single nation that the entire nations product will be banned. That was a serious threat because Germany was the number two market for Hollywood in Europe, only Great Britain did more business. And so they basically agreed and a year later Hollywood reacting to public outcry against licentiousness of American film created their own production code that heard Article 10 saying you could not make a film that attacked, marked or in any way denigrated a foreign nation or leader. So Kisling was able to prevent Hollywood until 1939 from making any Nazi film.

LL: I want to get to that. But I just want you to answer this question why would big Hollywood studios that were headed by Jews, that knew exactly what was going on, why would they buckle to this kind of pressure?

STEVEN ROSS: Because they are in industry. They are in the money making business not the consciousness raising business. They are part of corporations that answer to their stockholders. You know when we talk about collaboration [unintelligible] or sending war materials to Germany. War materials and no one is going after them but people have accused the moguls of collaboration because they do business. They also believed that Hitler would not last in office very long, that he would be such a buffoon that the people would throw me out or he would calm down his policies towards Jews and become more statesmen like. And they got it wrong.

LL: You mentioned that this happened - this kind of censorship or relation to what Germany wanted - up until 1939. And I want to play right now a bit of audio from the trailer of the 1939 movie that finally broke this mold. It was called Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

I am a Nazi spy. I am one of thousands stationed in every part of the United States to steal the secrets of your national defence. There are spy stations in all of the Navy yards in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New Port News. There are Nazi agents in the aeroplane in the ammunition factories at [unintelligible], Buffalo, Seattle, Boston. The Chief United States inspector that one of your factories is burning secret aeroplane parts is a German spy

LL: Now presumably Stephen Ross, [unintelligible] didn't like this Warner Brothers' film very much. How did Warner Brothers manage to get this made and put it in theatres?

STEVEN ROSS: The reason that they could get it made is it was based on a true story of a spy ring that had been broken by the FBI in the spring of 1938 and eighteen people were put on trial. The trial ended with the conviction in December. And a month later, Warner Brothers sent a script to the production code administration. And what's interesting is I went through the records in the letter from the censor who watched the film to the head of the production code Joseph Breen, started off by saying "technically this film meets the criterion of the code because it's not marking a government or a leader it is simply reporting on a trial of Nazi spies. Therefore it's telling a true story. But do we really want this film to be made when Hitler has done such wonderful things for the German people". And the censor suggested that the Warner Brothers be asked to back off. Well the Warners told the code that they weren't going to back off and they opened the movie in April 1939 to wide acclaim.

LL: Back to Leon Lewis as spy network. Some of his spies were unmasked in the course of doing their work, how did the Nazis and fascist groups respond when they were in that they were being infiltrated?

STEVEN ROSS: Well they knew they were being infiltrated right from the start. I am convinced they learned about it from the head of the Los Angeles police red squired William Hines who was trading information with the Nazis. Lewis, they referred to him as the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles but they didn't know who his spies were. In fact both the friends of new Germany and the Klan station people outside Lewis's downtown office. They would stand across the street waiting to see if anyone they knew went into the building. Well they never never completely knew who it was until 1939 when Neil Ness testified - one of Leon Lewis's two A spies - testified before the House on American Activities Committee, openly talking about him having infiltrated the Nazis. And the Nazis had sworn if they ever call any of Lewis spies they would be dead men. And in 1942 either 42 or early 43, I forget now. Neil Ness died under highly suspicious circumstances. A few months later, John Schmidt - the first spy who is going to testify in Washington D.C. of a sedition - trial suddenly died of stomach issues and his wife was convinced and I am convinced he was poisoned because the symptoms were the same as somebody they had discovered a few months earlier who had been poisoned by the Nazis. And a third spy, it was said he fell on the sidewalk and cracked disco. I don't believe he just fell. So three of the spies died under highly highly suspicious circumstances.

LL: And we should note that these were not spies that were trained for years in spy craft. They were doing this because of their commitment to a cause, much as Leon Lewis was. How did he manage to survive? Because I imagine he too was in danger.

STEVEN ROSS: Yes it's a question I kept asking myself, why didn't they go after Leon Lewis and I think the answer is they know where he lived. And at one point there was a plot that never came to being to kidnap his children to get him to back off. But one of the kidnappers chickened out afraid that he was going to be turned in by the other person. I think they knew Leon Lewis who is so deeply connected to the Jewish power network in LA that if they ever killed him I believe the entire Jewish community - I mean the power community from Mendell Silverbird to the studio heads - would have put the most enormous pressure you've ever seen on the city leaders to close down the Bund and I think they knew that.

LL: You talked about a plot against Leon Lewis. There or other serious plots to murder Jews in California. Tell me about those.

STEVEN ROSS: Well there were two major plots. One was they were going to kidnap 20 major Jewish figures including the director Busby Berkeley. They were going to bring them to abandoned park and hang them there, and then as they were hanging and dying they were going to shoot the bodies with machine guns so that the bodies would be destroyed. And in the morning when people came and found these bodies, these bullet ridden bodies hanging, it was going to lead other anti-Semite around America to rise up and create blood baths. And a second plot was going to be to blow up the homes of 24 major Hollywood figures. Studio heads like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer and two famous actors who they believed were too close to Jews; Charlie Chaplin and James Cagney. And the idea there was blow up the homes on the same night and this would create such outrage amongst one part of the community but it would incite anti-Semite throughout America to rise up and murder Jews. Least that's what they believed would happen. And in both cases they were foiled by Leon Lewis A spy [unintelligible].

LL: Eventually, though, Leon Lewis left the spy business behind in return to the practice of law and I'm wondering what you think his greatest legacy is.

STEVEN ROSS: Well I think his greatest legacy was protecting the city during a time it was incredibly vulnerable, that only one of all his spies - he had roughly two dozen serious spies. Only one was Jewish. You know the question I kept asking myself is why would these people do this, risk their lives for a Jew, in a Jewish cause. The answer was Leon Lewis never presented it as a Jewish cause and the spies never thought of it as a Jewish cause. What they thought of it as an American cause and what they all believed, they were upset with a group of Nazis and Fascists wielding hate and plotting murder against Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans, black Americans. And what they understood is that in these hyphenated identities everything that came before the hyphen was imaginative and that the only thing that really mattered was the noun, that they were Americans. And they were not going to allow any group whether foreigners are native born to come in and threaten to kill another group of Americans no matter who they were. This is not how we do things in America. We don't allow hate to come from the margins to the mainstream. So they were willing to protect other Americans because they believed that was the American way.

LL: Both of your parents survived the Holocaust and I was wondering when you were looking into the story of Leon Lewis and is Jewish spy network and how it all developed. Did it resonate for you as you learn more and more information about it? Did you think about your parents and what the Nazis had cost you personally?

STEVEN ROSS: Yes it certainly did. I grew up wondering how Jews could have kept silent. Then why do Jews do more to stop this, stop the rise of Nazism and fascism if not in Europe at least in America. In the course of writing the book what I realized is they did and that I had been asking the wrong question along with generations of historians and that the right question to ask is not why didn't Jews to do more, but why do American government authorities do more to stop the rise of Hitler. In the course of writing the book I both felt satisfied that people did something, that Jews did rise up to do something. Then at the same time infuriated with American authorities who simply sat back and allowed hate to fester in their country without speaking out against it.

LL: Stephen Ross it's a remarkable book and I thank you for talking to us about it.

STEVEN ROSS: Well my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today.

LL: Steven Ross is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California. His book is Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. And I spoke to him in February. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Queer Iranian-American film director Desiree Akhavan talks about her new Sundance award winning film The Miseducation of Cameron Post. It's a coming of age story about a young woman who is sent to a gay conversion camp in 1993. That is on q this morning at 10. 10:30 in Newfoundland. Well there has been a lot of scandal coming out of Washington lately from the arrest yesterday of a Republican Congressmen for insider trading to the trial of Donald Trump's campaign manager on bank and tax fraud charges. 44 years ago today, the biggest scandal in U.S. history reached its climax when President Richard Nixon resigned his office over the Watergate scandal. Here's some of Richard Nixon's good bye speech as he left the White House for the last time. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. And so I say to you on this occasion we leave. We leave proud of the people who have stood by us and worked for us and served this country. We want you to be proud of what you've done. We want you to continue to serve in government. If that is your wish. Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

Thursday August 9, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

Social Sharing

More from this episode