A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain's Extreme Right, 1933-1973 by Luke LeCras

Author:Luke LeCras [LeCras, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, Democracy, Fascism & Totalitarianism, Political Ideologies, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process, Nationalism & Patriotism, General
ISBN: 9780429792311
Google: q0LBDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52721005
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

In David Baker’s Ideology of Obsession, this passage served as an epitaph of sorts to Chesterton’s involvement with fascism after 1940 – a ‘comfortable fiction’ that allowed him to retain the prospect of fascist revival as a ‘last ditch defence against British collapse in the face of a militant international finance-capitalism’.115 ‘For the rest of his life’, Baker thus concluded, ‘Chesterton was able to persuade himself that the point had not been reached where such radical action was necessary’.116 In a superficial sense, this was correct, as Chesterton showed no further inclination towards the style of mass-party fascism that he had pursued under Mosley. Yet there is little indication that Chesterton’s understanding of the crisis precipitating fascism in the 1930s had changed significantly by 1945. Cultural decadence, class conflict and the twin perils of international finance and international Bolshevism were still dominant themes in his ideology. Another snippet of dialogue between ‘Tom and Dick’ suggested that Chesterton’s critique of liberalism also remained firmly in place: ‘democracy will only work so long as there are no dissident elements sufficiently strong and lawless to prevent it from working’.117 His proposed solution to the economic and social problems caused by ‘lawless’ capitalism was still essentially corporatist, entailing a system of private enterprise under ‘corporate control by employer, employee and consumer, with the court of law as referees’.118

The After-Victory movement was, in many respects, an exercise in nostalgic fascism, a failed attempt to rekindle the spirit and function of the interwar movement under a different guise.119 Despite his ongoing entanglement with the ideas and personalities of British fascism after 1940, however, not all of the changes in Chesterton’s political orientation after this point can be dismissed as cynical or self-delusional attempts to reconstitute the fascism of the 1930s. As it became clear that post-war Britain would not yield the kind of spontaneous, revolutionary ferment that Chesterton and his colleagues anticipated, he was forced to reconsider the militant, uncompromising approach to political organization that had characterized his involvement with interwar fascism. While still a radical in the ideological sense, Chesterton’s fruitful relationship with Brooks showed his increasing willingness to work within the territory between the extreme right and conservatism. Finally, the substantive shifts in global politics after 1945 – decolonization, nuclear proliferation and the Cold War – all contributed to the increasing elaboration of Chesterton’s work as a conspiracy theorist.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.