Is it fascist or anti-fascist to quote G.K. Chesterton, or neither?
The columnist Allison Pearson even tweeted: ‘Funny kind of “fascist” quoting G.K. Chesterton.’ Well, yes and no. Chesterton wasn’t a fascist in the Italian or even the German tradition – for a start, he loathed modernism and all its works, and would have had none of your Marinetti-style worship of the machine. And he never dug Hitler. But he did hold some views that could be charitably described as ‘fash-curious’. ‘Fascism is worth looking at,’ he once wrote, ‘whereas parliamentarianism is not worth looking at.’ He may, indeed, be fondly remembered in certain Italian political circles for hobnobbing with Mussolini and refusing to condemn Il Duce’s expedition into Abyssinia.
Chesterton spoke openly and often about the ‘Jewish problem’ – they ‘control other nations as well as their own’ – and wanted British Jews to be deported to Palestine (‘should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism’). If they were to continue walking these rolling English roads, in the meantime, they should be made to wear ‘Arab dress’ so ‘we should know where we are’. Turns out it was a bit of a family business. Chesterton’s brother Cecil banged on about the ‘Jewish problem’ too, and his second cousin founded what became the National Front.
Read the article by Sam Leith in The Spectator.