Nesta Helen Webster

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Political views

The publication of the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion led Webster to believe that Jews were the driving force behind an international conspiracy, which in World Revolution: the Plot Against Civilization she developed into a "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy behind international finance and responsible for the Bolshevik revolution. Following this, she became the leading writer of The Patriot, an antisemitic paper financed by Alan Percy.

Winston Churchill praised her in a 1920 article entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," in which he wrote "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 world-wide 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. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution."

Webster became involved in several far-right groups including the British Fascists, the Anti-Socialist Union, The Link, and the British Union of Fascists. In her books, Webster argued that Bolshevism was part of a much older and more secret, self-perpetuating conspiracy. She described three possible sources for this conspiracy: Zionism, Pan-Germanism or "the occult power". She claimed that even if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fake, they still described how Jews behave. Webster dismissed much of the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany as exaggeration and propaganda, having abandoned her anti-German views due to her initial admiration of Adolf Hitler. She came to oppose Hitler after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Webster favoured "traditional roles for women and believed women should primarily influence men to be better men", but was frustrated by limits on the careers open to women because she believed jobs should not just be for the money but should be purposeful professions. She saw marriage as limiting her choices, although her wedding financially allowed her to be a writer. She believed in raising women's education, and that the education they had been receiving was inferior to men's, making women less capable than they could be. She believed that, with better education, women would have substantial political capabilities to a degree considered "non-traditional", but without that education they'd be only as men imagined all women to be, the suppliers of men's and children's "material needs". "[S]he implied ... [that] women and men might well be true equals." She believed there had been "women's supremacy ... [in] pre-revolutionary France, when powerful women never attempted to compete directly with men, but instead drew strength from other areas where they excelled. She favoured women being allowed to vote and favoured keeping the British Parliamentary system for the benefit of both women and men, although doubted that voting would provide everything women needed, and thus did not join the suffrage movement. After the partial women's franchise was granted in 1918, she attacked proposals to lower the voting age for women from 30 to 21. In the 1920s, "her views on women had become more conservative", and she made them secondary to her conspiracy writing.

Much of her conspiracy theories and theorizing was anti-German in nature, often in combination with anti-Communism, claiming that Germans were allied with the Soviet Union. Within her obsession with secret societies, the German Vereinigung Vergewaltigter Völker (League of Oppressed People) and Druidenorden (International Grand Lodge of Druidism) were among her obsessions. According to Webster, both organisations had a pro-Soviet bent. With regards to the VVV, she alleged that it derived from the League for Small and Subject Nationalities and was secretly funded by a mysterious American financier, John de Kay. The founder of the League for Small and Small Subject Nationalities, Dudley Field Malone, was rumoured to have been an attorney for the first Soviet Embassy in America. Similarly, the Druidenorden, according to Webster, was secretly led by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who had served both as Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic and as the ambassador to the Soviet Union. The activities she blamed the Druidenorden for included the nascent Zionist movement in Mandatory Palestine, as well as the activities of the Irish Republican Army. She went so far that when the Treaty of Rapallo was signed, she placed her anti-German views above her antisemitic views, explicitly rejecting any claim that of a Jewish conspiracy behind it and argued that the Jews "from the time of Frederick the Great had frequently acted as Prussia's most faithful and efficient agents."

Historian Markku Ruotsila argues that Webster's conspiratorial framework was rooted in her upbringing in the dispensational premillennialist theological context popularized in the previous decades by influential Plymouth Brethren figure John Nelson Darby. The Illuminati, he argues, was a secular form of the Antichrist in Webster's thinking.

Webster came to depict world events as manifestations of a basic transcendental struggle between Christ and Satan. She forged out of the archetypal materials of her Christian heritage a highly appealing, prescriptive matrix of interpretations that placed contemporary radical movements in the context of premillennialist eschatology, dispensed with the original meanings of that eschatology, and put in their place her own version of the Satanic cast of the end-times. Doctrinally, the Illuminati theory that she constructed and successfully disseminated was in many ways a perversion of premillennialist Christian eschatology. Yet, on another level, it was deeply indebted both to the latter's categories and to its historical sequencing.

Works

The Chevalier De Boufflers. A Romance of the French Revolution, E.P. Dutton and Company, 1927. [1st Pub. London, John Murray, 1910. Reprints: 1916; 1920; 1924; 1925; E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1926].

Britain's Call to Arms: An Appeal to Our Women. London, Hugh Rees, 1914.

The Sheep Track. An Aspect of London Society. London: John Murray (1914).

The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy. London: Constable & Co. (1919).

The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism. London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1920) [?]. OCLC 22692582.

World Revolution. The Plot Against Civilization, Small, Maynard & Company, 1921 [1st Pub. London, Constable & Co., 1921. Reprints: Constable, 1922; Chawleigh, The Britons Publishing Co., 1971; Sudbury, Bloomfield Books, 1990?].

The Revolution of 1848, Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

The Past History of the World Revolution. A Lecture, Woolwich, Royal Artillery Institution, 1921.

with Kurt Kerlen, Boche and Bolshevik, being a series of articles from the Morning Post of London, reprinted for distribution in the United States, New York, Beckwith, 1923. Reprint: Sudbury, Bloomfield Books [1990?]. ISBN 1-4179-7949-6.

Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. London, 1924. Reprints: Boswell, 1928 and 1936; London, The Britons Publishing Co., London, 1955 and 1964; Palmdale, Christian Book Club of America and Sudbury and Sudbury, Bloomfield Books, 198 [?]; Kessinger Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-7661-3066-5.

The Socialist Network. London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1926).

Reprinted: Boswell (1933); Sudbury, Bloomfield (1989?); Noontide Press (2000). ISBN 0913022063.

The Need for Fascism in Britain. London: British Fascists, Pamphlet no. 17 (1926).

The Surrender of an Empire. London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1931).

Reprinted: Angriff Press (1972); Gordon Press Publishers (1973); Sudbury, Bloomfield Books (1990?).

The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution. London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1932).

(with the pseudonym of Julian Sterne). The Secret of the Zodiac, London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1933).

Germany and England. London: Boswell Publishing Co. (1938). Revised and reprinted from The Patriot.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Before the Revolution. London: Constable & Co. (1936).

Spacious Days: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson (1949).

Crowded Hours: Part Two of her Autobiography. The manuscript "disappeared from her publisher's office." It remains unpublished.

Marie-Antoinette Intime (in French). Paris: La Table ronde (1981). ISBN 2710300613.

Nesta Helen Webster

Nesta Helen Webster

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Notable quotes

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Early years

Writing

Political views

Criticism

Influence

Works

Selected articles

Notable quotes

About Nesta Helen Webster

About Nesta Helen Webster

Article

Notable quotes

Related journals

Live room · 1 here

Related journals

Article

Early years

Writing

Political views

Criticism

Influence

Works

Selected articles

Notable quotes