Magazines

“I have been called an anti-Semite myself and even mistaken for a furious one,” says G. K. Chesterton in an article on “The British Fascist” in G. K.’s Weekly of August 17. Discussing the British Fascist attitude towards Jews he continues:

“It is true that a non-Christian culture, embedded for ages in what has always been a Christian culture, acts as an irritant and to some extent as a parasite, because it trades and schemes but does not plough or produce. But what seems to me amusing about these particular Fascists is their complete ignorance of the whole British tradition and attitude in the matter. They talk as if Fascists were bound to be Tories; as if Tories were bound to support the claims of aristocrats; and to all this they add the uncomfortable necessity of being anti-Semites. Well, every step of this is all wrong; Mussolini is almost the opposite of an English Tory; he does not in the least depend on any aristocracy; and if we are going to depend on the English aristocracy (and I agree that we might do worse) one thing is certain; and that is we cannot be anti-Semites. . . .

“All the poor in the pubs talk about Jews as Jews as frankly as any Hitlerites, though perhaps a little more calmly, being English. But one society on earth where you cannot talk at large like that is the old English aristocracy; the Tory aristocracy, if possible, even less than the Whig aristocracy. For the Rothschilds were the buttress of the former long before the Samuels became the buttress of the latter. Also you cannot do it from a sense of decency and courtesy; because about half of the aristocrats have married into Jewish families. The B.F. (by which expression is intended the title of British Fascist) does not seem to know about this. Of course individuals will talk cynnically about Jews, as they will talk cynically about women—when the women have left the room. But as long as women largely run the world, and they always will, you cannot have concerted anti-Semitic action in the English aristocracy. . . .

“Cromwell brought the Jews back into England; as early as that they were bound up with the building of the Whig aristocratic state. I can understand a man believing now that this aristocratic state has brought us to ruin, or that this aristocratic state is still our only hope of avoiding ruin. But if anybody thinks that the defence of it can follow the antics of foreign fanatics who murder Jews in the street—then I tell him plainly, in crude, coarse, outspoken words, that he is a British Fascist.”

THE REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION

While most of the recent articles published in magazines throughout, at least the English-speaking world, have been taken up with the Hitler regime, for or against, there has been little said about the activities of those Germans living in Germany who are definitely antagonistic toward the new Reich. Ernest Henri, writing in the New Statesman and Nation of August 19, an English publication, tells of the efforts of a considerable majority of Germans to undermine the present regime. He says:

“There is today an extensive revolutionary press and a broad revolutionary agitation in Germany. . . . Thousands of former Social Democrats and Reichsbanner men, non-party people, Jews and even Catholics are uniting. . . . It is a political and journalistic revolution. The German revolutionary of today is first of all a technical artist, a conspiratorial genius and frequently a magician. His editorial office is any little room, which often has to be changed daily and frequently more than once in a day. He enters and leaves it at the peril of his life, or else he lives, eats and sleeps, confined in it. His printing press is only seldom a proper machine workshop, it is generally a duplicator, and a typewriter. . . .

“At the beginning of July the Hitler police discovered in the neighborhood of Neumunster, in Schleswig-Holstein, a revolutionary printing press. Some 300,000 copies of the weekly edition of the communist “Rote Fahne” are issued. This centrally printed edition is reproduced throughout Germany by local groups of from five to thirty men working with duplicators, typrewriters and by hand. . . . All this is reminiscent of the secret revolutionary press of the Germany of 1848. . . .”

Mr. Henri states that all through the German cities the most ingenuous devices have been perfected whereby the contraband news reaches its audience. Although he feels that the future results of such activity cannot be foreseen, he does state, however, that secret police can not do much against a revolutionary movement springing from the people.

HITLER AS SPIRIT MEDIUM

National Socialism is a “passionate Crusade for a regeneration from within, the whole force of which comes from below, and Hitler himself is no more than a medium in the spiritualistic sense”, writes W. Horsfall Carter in the Fortnightly Review of July, published in England. In his article, “Let Us Understand Germany”, he attempts a defense of the Nazi policy which is both incoherent and infantile. He states that National Socialism is not connected basically with Jew-baiting or Chauvinism. “It has been a movement of organic growth of which the Party has been no more than the spearhead. As such it has posed some very big problems before the world, not least that of the wandering Jew, a nation lacking a local habitation. . . . In countries like France and England, with a compact body politic, a nation united on fundamentals, the Jewish problem has not presented itself in an {SPAN}acu###{/SPAN} form. If it had, perhaps we should not so unhesitatingly condemn the discriminatory measures of the National Socialist State.”