Light On Dark Water

Chesterton, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism

I started to link to this in a comment on the previous Chesterton post, but it merits a post of its own: an excellent treatment of the subject by Stratford Caldecott. He quotes Chesterton in a 1932 interview: 

…the Hitlerite atrocities…[are] quite obviously the expedient of a man who, not knowing quite what to do to carry out his wild promises to a sorely-tried people, has been driven to finding a scapegoat, and has found, with relief, the most famous scapegoat in European history – the Jewish people. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and myself will die defending the last Jew inEurope. 

If he was saying that as early as 1932, I don't think he can reasonably be accused of Nazi sympathies. Once again Hitchens appears sloppy at best. As I said in comments on that post, Chesterton did say some things that can only be construed as anti-Semitic, but they're not Nazi-level, though it is the legacy of the Holocaust that any negative statement about Jews inevitably seems to us now of the same ilk as Hitler's. As Caldecott quotes a Jewish source as saying, "With Chesterton we’ve never thought of a man who was seriously anti-Semitic." 

Maclin Horton
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23 responses to “Chesterton, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism”

  1. Marianne

    I certainly don’t think Chesterton was on the same level as Hitler in his anti-Semitism. But I think he bears some responsibility for the hideous anti-Jew tenor of the times pre-Hitler, if for no other reason than that he was a wildly popular author. And his admirers should own up to this.
    But two New York rabbis said it best in the NY Times in 1921, when they denounced The New Jerusalem. They said, for instance: “This work is a brilliant book, disfigured by a constitutional Jew-baiting, which in its disgracefulness is simply disheartening. It is one of those books which, because of the magnificent powers of the writer, do the most harm, for it is thoroughly vitiated by an unreasoning and immoral persecution of the Jew.”
    You can access, for free, a PDF file of their piece here http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60C11F63B5B11728DDDA80B94D9405B818EF1D3

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  2. Mac

    I don’t think we’re all that far apart. We agree that the anti-Semitism and the sympathy for Italian fascism are definite marks against Chesterton. Maybe we differ on the importance which should be attached to it relative to his other qualities. Without having read The New Jerusalem, I’m inclined to agree with that reviewer–“reactionary romanticism” is definitely part of GKC’s general makeup.
    I doubt that he had any particular influence on Nazism–I don’t think they needed his help. Maybe we disagree about that. Mein Kampf was published in 1924 and Hitler’s anti-Semitism was in full bloom already. At a quick look I can’t find any information about whether The New Jerusalem was translated into German.

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  3. Marianne

    According to worldcat.org, Das neue Jerusalem was published in Bremen by Schünemann in 1930. So, available to the German reader, but a bit late to be part of Hitler’s formative reading.
    I guess I have to read more of Chesterton’s other work in the interest of fairness. But it will darn hard for me to get past this major flaw — which is probably a major flaw on my part.

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  4. Paul

    I suppose whoever wrote One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations (in 1937), or for that matter This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States) . . . this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. (in 1920) would probably have been even further on the wrong side of the struggle against Nazism.

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  5. Mac

    Marianne, have you not read things like Orthodoxy and The Well and the Shallows? Or maybe the book on Aquinas, or the one on St. Francis? If not, when you do, you’ll probably see why people aren’t willing to let the anti-Semitic stuff define him.
    Ok, Paul, let’s hear it.:-) — who are you quoting?

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  6. Rob G

    I’ll hazard a guess — I think it might be Churchill.

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  7. Paul

    Rob wins first prize. 😉
    There’s no more reason to define Chesterton by a pot-boiler produced after a trip to Palestine in 1920 (at a time when pretty much half the public figures in Europe blamed the revolutions of 1917-1919 on an international conspiracy in which Jews were prominent players) than there is to define Churchill by a book-review produced at pretty much the same time.
    Just as, it’s as important not to gloss over Churchill’s 1920s anti-semitism as it is to remember Chesterton’s.

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  8. Mac

    I had no idea but I figured it must be somebody of that stature. A search for “churchill anti-semitism” brings up some other pretty juicy quotes, but most of them are not sourced. While looking, I ran across this bit from another surprising (?) person.

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  9. Louise on the iPod

    Surely “anti-semitism” is a much more loaded word and concept for those of us born since WW2. Had we been born earlier we might have said many of the same things as GKC and co.

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  10. Paul

    It is worth making a distinction between people who, as it were, breathe an atmosphere (which, since we breathe a different one, we really can’t be too judgemental about – who knows what we would have thought and said if our formative influences had been different?), and those who actively seek to promote one.
    With regard to anti-semitism Chesterton does, I think, fall mainly into the first category, but also at times into the second. And every now and then he shows himself an enemy of the persecution of Jews, as in everything he wrote about Tsarist pogroms and about the Nazis, and even some of what he wrote about the Dreyfus Affair.
    So simply to dismiss him because some of what he wrote is undoubtedly antisemitic is rather like doing the same with Churchill, or Keynes, or Orwell.
    Even these days, some criticism of Israeli policy crosses the line into anti-semitism; that’s bad, but it doesn’t make the critics Nazis, and it doesn’t excuse us from listening to what kind of a case they can make that isn’t anti-semitic.

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  11. Paul

    I suppose this sort of thing really annoys me because it reminds me of how as an undergraduate I tried to get out of writing an essay on T.S.Eliot because of his anti-semitism and fascist sympathies, even though I knew that really wasn’t intellectually honest, just lazy. So when I see other people saying things like this I suspect they must also know that it isn’t honest, just lazy.

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  12. Mac

    Y’all are touching on something I’ve often thought about, and thought about writing about, but haven’t because it’s a pretty big and delicate subject. But one point: aside from the difference in the way things looked in pre- and post-Nazi, a thing like anti-Semitism or racism is not a binary condition, in which you’re either pure or a near-Nazi, in the first case, or pure or a near-Klansman, in the second case. But media-driven perceptions work tend to erase all those distinctions and gradations.
    So, if it’s in your ideological or political interests to do so, it becomes similar to the old Southern way of looking at race: either you were White–of absolutely pure European ancestry–or you were Black. (This is a big factor in the plot of Absalom, Absalom.) If you can show that your opponent is “Black” in this way, you win. It doesn’t matter what else he said or did–you’ve put him firmly on the side of evil, and everything else he says or does is more or less irrelevant. Certainly you don’t have to reason with him.
    This is in essence my complaint against Hitchens re Chesterton. Not to deny, as Marianne originally said, that he has a point–a full picture of GKC can’t leave these things out–but that it’s wrong to make that point the last word.

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  13. Louise on the iPod

    I would be very loathe to say anything negative whatever about the Jews, but is not this a little extreme? I mean, surely it must be possible to criticize this or any other group without being necessarily a bigot. What if the criticism is just? The possibility that many people would not likely ever say anything against the Jews is a little problematic if the truth ever required it.

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  14. Mac

    The rules of polite society are that you can say something positive about a group regarded as historical victims, but not something negative. You can attribute positive characteristics or actions to the group as a whole, but negative things may only be attributed to individuals. And you have to be careful about that–for instance, there’s a large or at least vocal contingent that will denounce most criticism of President Obama as racist. You can pretty much say what you like about groups regarded as historical oppressors.

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  15. janet

    Most especially the Church, of course.
    AMDG

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  16. Mac

    That may even score you a few points in some quarters.

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  17. Marianne

    Adam Gopnik wrote a piece on Chesterton in the New Yorker back in 2008. Like Hitchens, he has problems with Chesterton, but he doesn’t completely dismiss him. I read the piece when it first came out and just read it again. This passage jumped out at me:
    The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is that the anti-Semitism is not incidental: it rises from the logic of his poetic position. The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit that leads to it–the suspicion of the alien, the extreme localism, the favoring of national instinct over rational argument, the distaste for “parasitic” middlemen, and the preference for the simple organ-grinding music of the folk.
    Don’t know quite what to add to that, except to say that it’s going to make it harder for me to read more widely in Chesterton’s work.
    I recommend the Gopnik piece (“The Back of the World,” July 7, 2008) because it’s got some other interesting insights into his writing, but it’s now only available for free to subscribers of the New Yorker. I was able to access an electronic copy through my library’s website. Most public libraries subscribe to magazine databases, like Academic OneFile or Gale’s General OneFile, so a copy shouldn’t be hard to come by, if you’re interested.

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  18. Mac

    That’s a fair criticism, pretty much. Better than Hitchens’s. This kind of thing is part of what I had in mind in the original post, where I mentioned my reservations about Chesterton’s politics, specifically the sentimental aspect. He does very much sentimentalize and romanticize the local, small, traditional, etc. And those things do have a dark side, at least potentially. And somebody who’s serious about politics ought to consider them. But I wonder if Gopnik recognizes the same danger in all the similar impulses on the left.

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  19. Mac

    Another point worth making, I think: it’s true that Christian societies had a long history of abusing Jews, but it took the sort of military-industrial machine that Chesterton loathed to produce Nazism and make its crimes possible.

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  20. Janet

    Speaking of Chesterton, Dale Ahlquist is going to be lecturing at the seminary where I teach on April 17 & 18.
    And then, Peter Kreeft is going to be at the university where my husband works on April 20.
    This must be Breath of Fresh Air week.
    AMDG

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  21. Mac

    Indeed. Savor it.

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  22. Paul

    And blog about it?

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  23. Janet

    Who knows.
    AMDG

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