Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is in fact the life, writings, thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works of Christian theology and apologetics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all of his books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly in-depth working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how they wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.

Only an Expert Can Deal With the Problem

The above grotesquely egotistical and pathetic display of sheer obsessive mania may be justified, hopefully, in the eyes of both God and my readers as a kind of Curriculum Vitae establishing my credentials as an Expert in the works and thought and life of G.K. Chesterton. As Chesterton himself pointed out, however, this Expertise comes with rather large disabilities, the very first of which is the absolute, unavoidable presence of what anyone would reasonably call Bias. 

This is not, alas, really avoidable: for as Chesterton rightly noted, impartiality is in fact never found in experts, but only in people unacquainted with a subject. An ordinary layman, for instance, may well be truly impartial between the theses that the Eusebians were a genuine ecclesiastical-theological party in the mid-4th century Christian Church and that the Eusebians were a mostly fictitious rhetorical strategy by Athanasius of Alexandria to defend himself from charges of public violence. As a genuine (alas) expert in fourth century Church history, though, who has read many tedious thousands of pages on the subject, it is absolutely impossible for me to regard these two theses impartially, and, in fact, entirely impossible for me to regard the latter thesis with anything but utter contempt.

Similarly, my status as someone who knows Chesterton very well makes it more or less impossible not to regard most of the criticisms of Chesterton made by people on the Internet, and sometimes scholars and writers elsewhere, with anything but bitterness and contempt. When yet another guy on Twitter reads Orthodoxy for the first time and says that, while Chesterton might be a good apologist, he's not a deep thinker who knows much about Christianity, I cannot bear it with the humor that Chesterton would want me to. In fact, I cannot bear it at all.

Nor, of course, is my bias towards Chesterton confined to the merely intellectual. I have, as you might have guessed, a great personal affection for Chesterton. Not only this, but I feel a rather profound personal debt to Chesterton: a debt grounded in the unshakeable conviction that if I had not happened to begin reading Chesterton at the age of 12 my life would have been a great deal different, a great deal worse, and most likely would not be continuing in the present day. 

Due in part to the above, I have an absolute personal conviction of Chesterton's personal sanctity grounded in the straightforward fact that upon reading him for the first time I was immediately granted access to truth and goodness and joy and peace and holiness and salvation and God in a way and to a degree I had never encountered before. I pray to Chesterton daily, and the most straightforwardly miraculous favor I have prayed for and received I owe to his intercession: I have also experienced exactly one dream in which he was mysterious present (but did not speak) and just as mysteriously had a profound and lasting effect upon me. I not only hope for but actively advocate for his canonization, and if necessary I will get canonized myself (ideally via martyrdom) just to increase the chances that people will take the idea seriously and finally do it.

So this guy is crazy! you are probably thinking. He's utterly deranged! Quite possibly. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I know more about G.K. Chesterton than you do. And it is for this reason, above all, that I am very, very, very, very, very, very angry at you for ignorantly criticizing him, a state of mind best captured (once again) by a poem by Hilaire Belloc:

Remote and ineffectual Don 
That dared attack my Chesterton,   
With that poor weapon, half-impelled,   
Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,   
Unworthy for a tilt with men—
Your quavering and corroded pen;   
Don poor at Bed and worse at Table,
Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;   
Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,   
Don nervous, Don of crudities;   
Don clerical, Don ordinary,
Don self-absorbed and solitary;   
Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;   
Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;   
Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,   
Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic;
Don hypocritical, Don bad,
Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad;   
Don (since a man must make an end),   
Don that shall never be my friend.

Thou scapegoat Don, thou Don devoted,   
Don to thine own damnation quoted,   
Perplexed to find thy trivial name
Reared in my verse to lasting shame.   
Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,   
Repulsive Don—Don past all bearing.
Don of the cold and doubtful breath,   
Don despicable, Don of death;   
Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;   
Don evil; Don that serves the devil.   
Don ugly—that makes fifty lines.   
There is a Canon which confines   
A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse   
If written in Iambic Verse
To fifty lines. I never cut;
I far prefer to end it—but
Believe me I shall soon return.
My fires are banked, but still they burn   
To write some more about the Don   
That dared attack my Chesterton.   

The Sins of Gilbert Chesterton

I have avoided writing on Chesterton explicitly for a long time, despite having about fifty books I could conceivably write on his thought; but was recently provoked into writing this post by being informed that some (as the above poems says) nervous, self-absorbed, solitary, dyspeptic people on the Internet had "cancelled" Chesterton for being "soft on Naziism." The resulting indignation has carried me into the present moment, and will hopefully carry me to the end of this essay.

I should say at the outset that not every criticism of Chesterton fills me with just indignation: and indeed that having read and absorbed him at so much length, I have plenty of (much better informed!) criticism of my own. As Chesterton himself said, it is always dangerous to conceal someone's faults, for the simple reason that they are usually very tied up with someone's virtues, so that to suppress one is very often to suppress the other. 

Chesterton himself informed a Catholic acquaintance that his chief and most-confessed sins were "laziness, and certain forms of anger"--by which he seems to have meant not personal anger (the accounts of all who knew him, especially children, emphasize how unfailingly patient he was, with many saying they had never seem him angry or lose his temper) but the more abstract righteous indignation tinged with contempt for the wealthy and powerful against whom he frequently wrote. Chesterton was very famous for being friends with and very personally friendly with virtually everyone with whom he debated or who attacked him in print: this did not extend, however, to such political figures as, say, Lloyd George, Herbert Samuel, Cecil Rhodes, William Joynson-Hicks, or Adolf Hitler, some of whom he refused to even meet in person and all of whom he referred to in terms of personal contempt even in his public writings.

Likewise, as a journalist who wrote for most of his career weekly columns for multiple newspapers, Chesterton said many things that are, in the quite literal sense, indefensible--in the precise sense that not even Chesterton would defend them. As someone who also writes a lot but knows much more than he writes, I sympathize deeply with the inevitable failings of such a position: that you must frequently say things that you know to be simplistic or slanted or half-truths at best, leave out vital information and context and counter-points and the other sides of pictures, for the sake of making a rhetorical point or conveying a broader meaning or making an interpretation or merely for the sake of keeping your writing from being so long that no one will read it. 

I have read literally hundreds of criticisms of Chesterton, beginning in his lifetime, in which someone attacked him for not knowing or saying or being interested in something about a topic that I know (from other writings) that he in fact did know and was interested in and had said somewhere--for the simple reason that he had left it out in the works they had read. Nor is this leaving out of fact and context a necessarily trivial or unavoidable sin: since, as Chesterton said, truth is always and everywhere a matter of proportion. The struggle to tell the truth while also being rhetorically effective while also emphasizing relevant points for the moment bedevils me, and certainly bedeviled Chesterton. Chesterton's writings are constantly full of rhetorical points later qualified or set against other points: but there are certainly instances where he said things that are indefensible to the point of being personally dishonest or irresponsible. 

Of course, the fact that today 90% of people who encounter Chesterton do so through out-of-context quotes does not help the matter.

It is also true that Chesterton was lazy--though not in the way that most people think. Chesterton worked virtually every day of his life for hours that anyone would find strenuous to the point of impossibility: usually amounting to six to eight hours of dictation a day, but sometimes extending much beyond that. Where he was lazy was in dealing with the realities of everyday physical life, where he so absent-minded so as to be nearly helpless but where he could certainly have put in more of an effort for the sake of his wife and others--as well as in the strenuous moral efforts required for personal confrontations, difficult conversations, and significant decisions, such as, for instance, his decision to come into the Catholic Church, which took him about two decades from the time he came to believe in the truth of Catholicism, and nearly a decade from the time he rejected Anglo-Catholicism as a possible middle ground.

One could also say, reasonably, that Chesterton was overly careless with his health: though the common charges of gluttony and/or alcoholism are absolutely false. As a matter of fact, every person who knew him or encountered him talked about both how little he ate, and and how undiscriminating he was in regards to what he ate. During dinners with friends, he was far more absorbed in conversation than in food, and reportedly ate less than half of what his companions did in twice or three times the time. Visitors frequently complained of the monotony and poor quality of the food at his house: the result of his and his wife's attachment to an elderly cook who continued to work for them into her nineties. 

While famously and proverbially fat, as a child of a friend said upon being informed of his death, "He was not so fat as he pretended." If surviving pictures are to be believed, his weight must have fluctuated rather wildly: there are pictures where he is clearly obese, and pictures where he if anything is only mildly overweight, dated sometimes to the same year. He was famously rail-thin as an adolescent and young man until his 30s: and, as his friend Bentley argued, this strongly suggests some kind of underlying condition behind his weight issues. In any case, while personally unconcerned about his health and not fond of exercising beyond walking rapidly around his house and garden, he was under the regular care of a doctor from the time of his marriage.

Nor was he an alcoholic, despite his political attacks on Temperance and Prohibition and his poems and songs in praise of wine. This both of his doctors strongly affirmed, pointing out that whenever (for broader health reasons) they recommended that he stop drinking alcohol, he always observed these prohibitions scrupulously, an obvious impossibility for an addict. In fact, for much of his adult life Chesterton was an intermittent teetotaler at the orders of his doctor, with the longest period of total abstinence lasting nearly a decade. As he confided to a friend during this time, while many people were secret drinkers, he was a secret teetotaler. When not abstaining, he was a regular drinker of French wine, but did not drink liquor, and there are only a few accounts (all from the stressful period before his major illness during WW1) of him ever being noticeably inebriated. Most people who knew him found that it made little difference to his demeanor whether he drank wine or water. Besides that, he was a regular smoker of high-quality cigars (never pipes, as the common association has it), but did not smoke cigarettes.

Nevertheless, the most common criticism of Chesterton since his death, of course, has been that he was anti-Semitic: and for many years I thought about writing a long essay on this charge and the truth and falsehood found in its popular expressions. I have since given up the idea, both because I am a half-Jew who is much too personally involved in the subject, and because anyway the entire framework within which people in the West evaluated and understood "anti-Semitism" has in the last two to three years almost entirely vanished. At the present writing, discourse on "the Jews" is in what Chesterton called the deplorable state of becoming, divided between increasingly desperate attempts to classify every moral or political or cultural criticism of the actions of any Jewish people and/or the State of Israel as an absolute evil, and the increasingly extreme expressions by people on both Left and Right of an inchoate but unsubtle belief that The Jews Are Bad. Neither standard is really a reasonable one by which to evaluate anyone or anything, for the simple reason that both are not really aimed at moral or intellectual evaluation at all, but at political and social inclusion and exclusion or, in other words, whether you are allowed to speak at TPUSA events and/or the Democratic National Convention or not.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this essay, I should say that my own evaluation, such as it is, is that Chesterton's personal attitude towards individual Jews was not noticeably prejudiced, as he counted Jews among his very closest and lifelong personal friends: that his basic belief that Jews were best dealt with not as a religious belief or race but as a "nationality" distinct as such from Englishmen, Frenchmen, etc is arguable, but certainly very common in his day among both Jews and Gentiles, and obviously the fundamental basis for modern Zionism (of which Chesterton was a supporter in theory, though a critic in practice in regards to the Zionists' relationship with the British government and treatment of non-Jewish Palestinians): that on the political level, Chesterton, like many Catholics and Leftists with whom he was in regular contact, regarded "the Jews" collectively, at least as (mis)represented by the leading secular Jewish politicians and business figures in England, France, and Germany, as a power bloc hostile to his economic, religious, and political goals, which centered on the revival of Catholic Christianity, opposition to capitalism, strong support for the labor movement and the Great Strikes, and a democratic revolution from below that would cleanse the liberal Parliamentary system of corruption. 

In the process of dealing with all of these points, Chesterton certainly said a number of things about Jews or "the Jews" as a group that are literally indefensible in the sense spoken of above: namely that they are rhetorical or functional or personal rather than abstractly truthful, and even on those terms are sometimes simplistic and distorting relative even to the things that Chesterton himself knew and elsewhere conceded. To the extent that anti-Semitism in our society has been measured in purely verbal and social terms, Chesterton would at times have fallen under its censures. In an American society, though, where different ethnic and religious groups are increasingly dealt with primarily by most people most of the time as political blocs against which it is licit to say and do almost anything, and where the special status of the Jews as the one ethnic-religious group you cannot deal with in that way is fading, though, Chesterton appears mild-mannered at best, giving at worst only what his friend Bernard Shaw called a "wouldn't hurt a fly affectation" of genuine prejudice. 

Here, such as they are, are the Faults of G.K. Chesterton: may God have mercy on his soul. Ora pro nobis!

Criticizing Long-Dead People You Are Too Ignorant and Illiterate to Actually Read As a Way of Establishing Social Boundaries in the Present on the Internet is Problematic

Please see the above sub-title, and memorize it, I beg you!

I have nothing else to say on this subject except that I think that Dawn Eden Goldstein is a good and intelligent person with whom I share a lot in common (including Jewish ancestry) and whose work on sexual healing has personally benefited me. Like a lot of very nice people speaking and writing on topics they are very invested in for entirely personal reasons, however, she is prone to Making Important Statements that do not make any sense. 

Hence, her attempt a few years ago to Make a Very Important Statement to American Catholics That (as we Millennials would say) Chesterton is Problematic and Was Maybe Soft on Nazis was so absurd and ludicrous and ignorant and mendacious and illiterate and frankly calumniatory to the point of personal sin although likely excused by personal investment in the real issue of growing anti-Semitism among American Catholics that at the time I basically ignored it for the sake of being charitable towards an otherwise lovely person. 

Nevertheless, it is in fact not a good idea to criticize long-dead people you are too ignorant and illiterate to actually read as a way of establishing social boundaries on the Internet in the present. I recognize that various Church councils and Popes and the Emperor Justinian have at times required people to anathematize long-dead people, not in order to claim some kind of jurisdiction over the souls of the dead or make an infallible statement over whether these dead people were or were not good people, but largely in order to undercut the use of these people by present-day people pushing heretical or problematic beliefs on their name and authority. 

Nevertheless, in my humble judgement this move has usually caused more trouble and confusion than advantages even for the Popes and/or the Emperor Justinian: and has not in fact prevented even devout Catholics from continuing to invoke Origen as a theological authority and argue that Nestorius was not a Nestorian. In any case, 90% of the authorities invoked by people throughout Catholic history and in the present day to justify extremely bad and heretical beliefs and prejudices have in fact been actual Church Fathers and Saints and the Bible itself: and the anathematizations of Augustine or King David or the anonymous author of Hebrews have not yet been successfully carried out, even by German Professors in the 19th century, and so I doubt that anyone will succeed today.

I must also point out that Dawn Eden Goldstein's method for declaring Chesterton Problematic and Maybe Soft on Naziism was and is literally and absolutely indefensible and functionally illiterate, despite the fact that it has become a rather common method on the Internet. This method, which is so charmingly simple it is a wonder that it isn't done more often, is to read a document aimed at attacking a certain person or group or idea, and then take all the concessional clauses and cut out all the main arguments and points. 

This is also what a number of right-wing nationalist Catholics of my acquaintance have done with the anti-Nazi encyclical Mitt Brennender Sorge, pointing out that in it Pius XI (in concessional clauses) acknowledges "the race, or the people, or the State" as "fundamental values of the human community," that he says that the Church accepts as legitimate "the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts" of different nations, that he even says that "no one would think of preventing young Germans from establishing a true folk community (Volksgemeinschaft)"! In this way, people have contrived to suggest that a document called "With Burning Concern" in which all the basic principles of Naziism are directly condemned is in fact an affirmation of some kind of radical right-wing ethnic nationalism: merely by taking all the rhetorical concessions and ignoring the actual argument.

This is a method practically infinite in its scope and appeal. Can we make Donald Trump an anti-racist activist and advocate for mass immigration? Can we make Barack Obama a supporter of radical right-wing nationalism? Can we make Josef Stalin a supporter of capitalism and private property? Can we make the blogger Captain Peabody into a supporter of Donald Trump, or Star Trek Voyager, or Artificial Intelligence, or anything else I actively dislike? As Obama said, yes we can! 

This is for the simple reason, known to every person in the history of the human race who was not entirely illiterate, that if you want to persuade anyone who disagrees with you on any point whatsoever, you must first find some common ground with them. This is because any and all communication, including the communication of disagreement, can take place only on the basis of commonality. Two people who share no principle or concept or even language cannot disagree meaningfully, however much they may hit each other--an action that even so relies on the essential commonality of having bodies and limbs. 

Hence, if you wish to actually refute a contrary position, you must first understand it: and the only way to understand it is in fact to find the ways in which that position is like the position that you yourself hold, the commonalities between your two beliefs with reference to which the disagreements emerge. That is to say, as Chesterton himself said, the only way to disagree with someone is to first agree with them.

Likewise, anyone trying to actually persuade someone who disagrees with them must try (as the Latin term indicates) to be to at least to some minimal degree pleasant (suavis) to them, if only pleasant enough to get them to listen to what they are saying and not simply plug their ears and hit them: and this attempt at pleasantness usually takes the form of at least some minimal and rhetorical concessions to their opponents.

Of course, this all makes sense only on the assumption that you are in fact trying to understand contrary positions and/or meaningfully refute them and/or write something that you assume will at some point be read by anyone who to any extent disagrees with you, and which might in some conceivable universe possibly even persuade anyone who does not already fully share your beliefs and feelings in their totality! And I fully acknowledge that in the present day, almost no one does this anymore. 

Rather, the purpose of public speech or writing on controversial topics is generally (1) To clearly identify oneself as a particular kind of person in conflict with  other kinds by saying precisely the same things that all other members of the group are saying, and in the process (2) deliberately annoy or aggravate or as it were "own" any members of contrary groups that may be listening in and in so doing (3) affirm one's group in the rightness of their chosen mantras and their contempt for other groups. It is quite true that in this kind of social (and therefore moral) environment, there is no graver sin than to concede any ground to the opposition, to say anything positive about them, or even rhetorically concede anything to them. Doing this marks one as, at the least, insufficiently fervent, if not something approaching a traitor. 

The principal reason why G.K. Chesterton, in his rabidly propagandistic anti-Nazi columns and writings between 1933 (when Hitler came to power) and 1936 (when Chesterton died), said, say, that he could approve a hundred things Hitler did if only he could approve the spirit in which he did them, or found some of his economic expedients admirable in spirit if not in practice, or was thankful to him for burning All Quiet on the Western Front but not for his suppression of Socialists and Catholics, or agreed with him that German Jews had at one time had too much power, but nevertheless maintained that they were now being quite unjustly persecuted, was because he assumed--quite correctly--that a very large proportion of his audience in fact very much liked Hitler and Naziism. And as anyone even vaguely familiar with England of the 1930s would know, Hitler upon his rise to power was in fact wildly popular with both the English ruling class and the English people. 

Indeed, so popular was Hitler in the years immediately after his rise to power that he was praised in almost equal degrees by both the Right and Left of the English political spectrum, with the formerly rabid anti-German right-winger Winston Churchhill complimenting him publicly and the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald openly rejoicing in the scrapping of the Treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of the French. Following from their leaders, right-wing British generally praised Hitler as a patriotic hero who had saved Germany from anarchy and as a stalwart vanguard against the much-panicked threat of Bolshevism, while left-wing British praised Hitler for his quasi-Socialist economic centralization and nationalization and for avenging Germany's humiliation at the hands of the hated French. In so doing, they followed a very old tradition in England of profound sympathy and kinship with Germany and Prussia in contradistinction to the liberal and "immoral" French Republic. They also followed a growing tide of hatred for England's own powerful and wealthy Jewish minority emerging likewise from both the nationalist Right and the anti-financial Left. 

G.K. Chesterton, though, as proprietor of his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly, was absolutely clear from 1933 onwards that the German acceptance of Naziism was "the stupidest thing done in the last several centuries," that Hitler and the Nazis were "barbarians" committed to a fundamentally pagan and un-Christian worship of Pride who were unjustly persecuting the Jews, "rabbling and ruining and driving them from their homes," using them absurdly as a "scapegoat" for Germany's defeat in WW1, and who if not sufficiently checked would inevitably begin a World War by invading Poland, very likely in alliance with the Soviet Union. All of these claims can be found repeatedly in Chesterton's columns from 1933 to 1936, and the basic position they embodied was trumpeted as a matter of policy by his newspaper as a whole--and more or less nowhere else in the British press during those years. 

It is for this reason that there has never been, is not now, and never will be any debate among informed scholars or readers of Chesterton about him being in any way remotely sympathetic to or "soft on" Naziism: because he was without a doubt the most anti-Nazi public figure to write in England from 1933 to 1936. This latter claim is at least disputable; but the fact that Chesterton was in his own context extraordinarily and radically and rabidly anti-Nazi is not. There are legitimate debates to be had on Chesterton's economics, politics, approach to gender, relationship with the Jews, and so on: there is no legitimate debate to be had on his anti-Nazi bona fides. I forbear to pretend otherwise.

Chesterton as Propagandist

I do not, however, want to devote a whole post on my blog to refuting an absurd position that no one with the slightest modicum of knowledge would ever accept: nor do I want to devote a whole blog post merely to defending Chesterton from criticism. As I said above, I myself have many criticisms, in both sense, of Chesterton: and I invite similar informed criticisms from others.

Hence, I am now going to write about a topic that is much more complex and ambiguous, much more disputable, and much more interesting than the absurd non-question of whether or not Chesterton was soft on Naziism. For the truth is, Chesterton's extraordinary anti-Nazi output can only be understood in the context of his broader anti-Germanism and anti-Prussianism, his career as a war propagandist in WW1, his efforts at propaganda for Distributism and Catholicism in the interwar years, and the origins of his journalistic career as an anti-war propagandist for the Liberal Party and against the Second Boer War and British Imperialism broadly.

There are many entirely valid lights to view Chesterton, from that of personal holiness to that of economic radicalism to that of literary criticism to that of poetry to that of detective fiction. One of the most overlooked, however, is his lifelong status as a practitioner of political propaganda--by which I do not mean someone who attempts to deceive or distort the truth in service to ideology, but someone whose writings are self-consciously aimed at instigating directly political belief, action, and institutional affiliation in his readers. 

Chesterton's political career was marked above all else by a series of conflicts with the larger, institutional parties and movements of his day, resulting in him being finally confined to publishing political writings in his own newspaper. Nevertheless, for a single person, his track record in garnering support and institutional affiliation for his chosen cause(s) was quite remarkable, beginning with his anti-war advocacy and climaxing in the 1930s in his founding and Presidency of the Distributist League.

Certainly for a single man to run simultaneously both a newspaper and a political advocacy group was hardly the norm in 1930s England: and is even more remarkable for someone who devoted so much of his time and public status to purely literary and theological work. That Chesterton failed to found a lasting Distributist mass movement in England is certainly true: that he tried is not in dispute. In the process, though, he had much more impact on the general English public life and political discourse than is usually acknowledged. There were self-described Distributist MPs in all major parties (Tories, Labour, and Liberals) from the mid-1920s onward, some of whom occasionally wrote for G.K.'s Weekly, and many members of both parties referenced Distributist ideas directly or indirectly during the 1920s and 1930s. Distributism was an even greater influence on the British colonies of Australia and Sri Lanka during this time, as well as being a direct and leading influence on the formation of the American Catholic Worker organization. Also during this period, Distributism became explicitly and officially the economics advocated by the upper clergy of the Irish and British Catholic Churches, as well as being often cited by Catholic clergy in continental Europe and the Americas; Fulton Sheen in America was explicitly and openly a Distributist throughout his career. 

Nor, of course, was Chesterton's political advocacy remotely confined to the economic sphere. During his career as a political journalist, he and/or his newspapers commented continuously on every event or significant news story and every political issue, in each sphere directly advocating for policy changes and for popular pressure to bring them about. In this sense, to read Chesterton without seeing him as a political figure is to not even begin to understand him.

Here, though, it will be helpful to briefly sketch Chesterton's career as a political journalist and writer through its various phases, which depended less upon Chesterton himself than on the shifting conflicts of the political world around him. On every major political and moral issue of his times, Chesterton showed remarkable consistency, certainly more consistency than any other comparable figure of his day. Nevertheless, his priorities and affiliations changed rather drastically, and can be divided between a few clear phases.

Chesterton's career as a writer, journalist, and public figure began in and as a direct result of the Second Boer War. This colonial war, directly instigated by Cecil Rhodes and the (predominantly German-Jewish) mining magnates of British South Africa, was aimed at the conquest and incorporation of the Dutch Boer colonists into the British Empire; and as contemporary sources attest, it was wildly popular with both the British public and by all major political parties and factions. Indeed, Chesterton attested that in his experience it was much more popular than World War 1: being accompanied by popular displays of partying in celebration of war events that became known as "mafficking." 

Chesterton came to prominence as a bitter and absolute opponent of the Second Boer War, a "pro-Boer" who embraced the monicker and declared that the Boers had every right to defend themselves against the British Empire. Ultimately, the disenfranchised anti-war Liberals that he joined, which were funded by the Quaker millionaire Cadbury of Cadbury Chocolates, were successful in gaining control of several newspapers and ultimately the Liberal Party: though not in time to make any appreciable difference to the outcome or course of the war. From roughly 1899 to 1913, then, Chesterton was a Left-wing (anti-war and pro-Labor) writer for the Liberal Party.

Due to the labor conflicts and strikes of the Great Unrest of 1911-1914, which Chesterton fervently supported but which the governing Liberal party worked to limit and repress, and due also to the Marconi Scandal, which raised the specter of corruption and insider trading among the Liberal MPs, Chesterton grew increasingly disenchanted with both the Liberal Party and its press representatives. In 1913, he resigned from the Liberal, Cadbury-owned Daily News and began writing primarily for the radical Socialist paper The Daily Herald. At the same time, he contributed to his brother's radical anti-corruption newspaper The New Witness, as well as to the eclectic The New Age, which acted as a kind of clearing house for alternative forms of Left-Wing politics including Social Credit Theory, Guild Socialism, and (to an increasing extent) Chesterton's developing Distributism.

However, with the outbreak of WW1, Chesterton's support for the war effort brought him to break with the Daily Herald over the newspaper's pacifist position. Instead, he gradually shifted his political journalism to the The New Witness, which supported World War 1 but continued to crusade against war profiteering and corruption under his brother's editorship. When his brother left for the Western Front in 1916, Chesterton took over editing the paper, which under his tenure became less of an anti-corruption paper and more of a political journal pushing Chesterton's own economic goals and policies.

In 1922, Chesterton converted to Catholicism, and in 1925 he officially shut down The New Witness and relaunched it as G.K.'s Weekly, now an explicitly personal platform for his distinctive political views but for that reason attracting a much larger group of writers and readers alike. In 1926, the Distributist League was founded. In 1933, Hitler came to power; and in 1936, Chesterton died.

Chesterton as Cosmopolitan Liberal Francophile

To understand Chesterton's anti-Nazi advocacy, one needs to understand something of Chesterton's background and fundamental political and ideological commitments, which are still to this day profoundly occluded and misunderstood among most people who read him (though not among scholars).

If I had to summarize the consistent orientation of Chesterton's politics throughout his lifetime, stretching from his childhood to his death, I might come up with a list that looked something like this: (1) democracy, (2) individual liberty, (3) family property, (4) majoritarianism, (5) social egalitarianism, (6) economic worker control, and (7) absolute opposition to aristocracy, oligarchy, and plutocracy. When laid out in this way, though, one sees rather quickly that they could be summarized much more simply under the headings Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

To properly understand Chesterton as an anti-Nazi propagandist, then, one must take in his much longer career as an anti-German propagandist--itself an emanation from his lifelong status as a Francophile and a supporter of the French Revolution.

One of the constant fallacies of writing on Chesterton, dating back to his lifetime, is the tendency for people to blame anything they dislike about Chesterton's views or politics on the influence of his friend Hilaire Belloc. In this case, it is certainly true that Belloc was half-French, Catholic, and in youth a fervent supporter of the French Revolution who by the time he met Chesterton had served in the French army. Nevertheless, it is absolutely false that Chesterton absorbed his regard for France or the French Revolution from Belloc. Rather, his devotion to France and the French Revolution is best understood at the outset as a matter of personal proclivities and family tradition.

Chesterton's father, though entirely English in descent, came from a line of political and religious Liberals stretching back at least to a grandfather who was a prison reformer and close friend of Charles Dickens; his mother, meanwhile, was not of Scottish and French ancestry. Chesterton was consequently raised on a historical mythology centered on the Puritan struggle against Charles I, but on a politics and culture that emanated almost entirely, not from English religious Puritanism, but from English Francophilia.

Chesterton's parents were Unitarians, not members of the established, patriotic Anglican Church: and he was raised in and around his father's passionate devotion to French art, culture, language, and literature; so that while many scions of England's noble houses and middle classes alike were studying in Germany and learning to embrace pan-Teutonism, Chesterton was being taught about French painters and Gothic Cathedrals and taken on tours of Paris by his father, and being educated in the Greek and Roman Classics at St. Paul's Preparatory School.

Likewise, the politics that Chesterton absorbed from his father--a cosmopolitan English Liberal Republicanism, friendly to the French Republic but hostile to both the English Established Church and the aristocracy--originated in the French Revolution: or, perhaps more accurately, in the Napoleonic Wars, which the English oligarchy took up as a kind of moral crusade, sacrificing immeasurable wealth and innumerable poorer Englishmen in an at times one-nation effort to prevent Napoleon from dominating Europe. Chesterton, though, throughout his life saw himself as emerging in a direct line from those few pro-French, anti-aristocratic Radicals, Liberals, and Labour agitators who even in the heart of Britain's struggles dared to say that Napoleon was (at least) not the monster he was painted, that England's cause was unjust, that her alliance with the Germanies was support for tyranny, and that, perhaps most fundamentally of all, the sacrifices asked of the British poor were simply not worth it.

While Chesterton in his autobiography mildly chides his parents' for their lack of concern for the working classes, there is no question that he grew up in a profoundly political and (for its milieu) Left-wing household. This Chesterton's friends at preparatory school all attested, friends who from the very beginning regarded Chesterton's family as both culturally Bohemian and politically Radical for their lack of discipline, their devotion to art, their love for the French Republic, their Unitarian religion, and their Liberal politics. When Chesterton in his school debating society passionately defended Liberalism, Radicalism, and the French Revolution to the scandalized ears of his middle-class English friends, he was continuing a family tradition.

Now, to be devoted to France in this way, particularly the France of the Revolution, was at least relatively to be hostile to Germany: since the duel between Prussia and Austria on the one hand, and France on the other, had begun with the French Revolution and climaxed with the the Franco-Prussian War and the birth of the German Empire in 1870, four years before Chesterton himself was born. One could hardly travel in France as much as Chesterton did and not be aware of the profound resentment occasioned by this war and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in the French populace, the popular stories of German arrogance and atrocities, and the hopes and fears in France of a coming war with Germany where they would either get revenge, or be humiliated further. When as an adult Chesterton travelled in and ultimately developed a passionate attachment to Italy as well as France, he could also not miss the passionate hatred of contemporary Italians for Germany and Germans, rooted in the Italian War of Independence against Austria whose hero Garibaldi he as a romantic Republican naturally hero-worshipped from a young age, as well as in feelings of insulted honor at the barbaric 'Teutons' despising of Europe's Roman legacy.

Far more important, though, I believe, than these conflicts among foreigners were the conflicts that Chesterton's cosmopolitan revolutionary background created with his fellow Englishmen: conflicts that bothered the intensely social and gregarious young Chesterton as few things could. Though Chesterton saw himself as a patriotic Englishman, from a young age he found himself pitted in direct opposition to what most people around him saw as English. 

To understand Chesterton, one must understand that he was born not merely an Englishman, but a very particular kind of Englishman: an upper-middle-class, educated, Liberal, Unitarian, Republican, cosmopolitan Londoner. Though he would through much of his life publicly defend "patriotism" or "nationalism" against "cosmopolitanism," his own "nationalism" was of a decidedly cosmopolitan nature: emanating from abstract, universalist principles, centered in French Revolutionary Liberalism, grounded in close cultural, religious, and political bonds with other European nations, and conceived in primary opposition to contemporary British Imperialism. By his own confession, Chesterton throughout his life confused and confounded nearly everyone he met by his insistence that patriotism and Imperialism were opposites. 

Perhaps more confoundingly, Chesterton is more or less the only English writer I have ever read who entirely lacks either an interest in or an awareness of class. Though historically and ideologically opposed to the English aristocracy, on a personal level Chesterton dealt with aristocrats exactly as he dealt with everyone else--often, on the accounts of his friends, committing the unforgivable faux pas of failing to even notice the aristocratic birth of those he spoke with and befriended. Indeed, it is impossible to understand Chesterton's crusade against the British aristocracy if one does not appreciate that for Chesterton, their greatest sin by far was creating an entire society obsessed (either in positive or negative terms) with them to the exclusion of everyone else, a society of snobs entirely lacking the (indelibly French and Revolutionary) sense of equal humanity and citizenship and classless camaraderie Chesterton most valued. 

On the other hand, Chesterton's conclusion that the French Revolution had been, on the whole, successful was a conclusion drawn not primarily from ideology or history, but from his personal enjoyment and appreciation for the contemporary French society of the Third Republic in contrast to Victorian and Edwardian England. 

As Chesterton again and again pointed out to his readers on the Daily News and , the French Revolution, whatever else it had done in the ways of sins and crimes, had brought an absolute end to aristocracy and classism in France, had result in an economy with widely-distributed property and a powerful and prosperous land-holding peasant class, had produced a society where people related socially one to another on the basis of equal humanity and equal citizenship, had birthed a culture where people openly pitted sexual immorality against sexual morality, openly argued about monarchy versus democracy, openly embraced Catholicism or secularism, instead of shamefacedly avoiding conversations on politics and religion and vaguely converging on an inoffensive, inactive quasi-Anglican agnosticism. Put simply, Chesterton from his earliest upbringing simply found that there were a long list of things he liked better about France than England: and being personally honest, recognized the role that the French Revolution had played in creating these things, and being personally patriotic, naturally wanted to see them brought to England also.

G.K. Chesterton and JRR Tolkien were both profoundly English people--but few experiences could be farther apart than Tolkien's childhood in the British countryside and South Africa on the one hand, and Chesterton's politicized and artistic upbringing in London. Regardless of his own liking for the rural English, Chesterton had little substantively in common with the insular patriotism--closely associated with the Anglican Church, and well described by Tolkien in his treatment of the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings--of most of the English lower and middle classes, their passionate romantic fixation on the idealized figure of the gentleman or lady, and their concomitant suspicion and hatred of (proverbially Catholic) "foreigners."

Chesterton's ultimate conclusion, already cemented by the end of his time at school, was that the English society he saw had in fact been corrupted by both a brutal and inhuman industrial capitalism and by a sham culture that, in strong contradistinction to Chesterton's Francophilia and Romance, saw the Teutonic race shared by the British and Germans as inherently superior to the "Latin" or "Mediterranean race" represented by Chesterton's beloved French, Italians, and ancient Romans. 

Chesterton's hostility to this gospel of Teutonic superiority, rooted ultimately in the work of thinkers like Gobineau, Haeckel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, certainly dates to before his contact with Belloc or any even remote attachment with Catholicism: and it remained one of his overriding political passions to his dying day. Its ultimate roots, though, were not so much in a particular theory of biology and human nature as in his upbringing.

Still, for all his passionate attachment to Latin culture, there is no indication that Chesterton was personally raised with any particular cultural hostility to Germany as such; nor was he ever a participant in the popular fears of a "German Invasion" of England that filled the newspapers from the 1890s until WW1, which in fact he publicly downplayed. Whatever else he was, Chesterton was never at any time a Jingo. Still, in the basic narrative of European history that Chesterton absorbed from the French Revolution, Prussia and Germany were undoubtedly the antagonists. This was further increased by his childhood rejection of capitalism and adhesion to more romantic and anti-industrial forms of Socialism, pitted against the industrial capitalism embraced in both England and Germany: and increased still further by his personal attachment to Roman, French, and Italian culture in contradistinction to popular Teutonism.

Chesterton as Anti-War Propagandist

All of the above development precedes anything that could properly be called a political career on Chesterton's effect. The beginning of that career came with the Second Boer War, whose effect on Chesterton's politics literally cannot be overestimated. 

Here, though, there are some ironies. Chesterton's hostility to the war protected him from the specifically Imperialist hatred of Germany occasioned by the war, and in particular by the Boers' appeals to Kaiser Wilhelm for support and his own weak attempts to interfere. Indeed, so passionate was Chesterton in his pro-Boer advocacy, and so hostile to British Imperialism was he, that it is even conceivable that Chesterton would have welcomed German intervention against the British. 

Still, the war reinforced Chesterton's political instincts in several important ways. First, the fact that the war was provoked by Cecil Rhodes and his predominantly German-Jewish faction of capitalist 'randlords' in service of their own financial interests was seared into Chesterton's brain to his dying day, and firmly cemented his opposition to capitalism in general and international finance in particular.

Characteristically, though Chesterton was not above pointing out the un-British character of the Randlords, Chesterton's primary animosity was reserved for the thoroughly English Protestant Cecil Rhodes, a brutal (reportedly homosexual) ideologue who advocated the inherent superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon race" and the need to spread that race throughout the world via domination of other races. Here, Chesterton's hatred was practically boundless: it is hardly too much to say that Rhodes became a kind of symbolic devil figure for Chesterton, an emblem of everything Chesterton opposed. So intense was his contempt that he even attacked Rhodes bitterly and publicly upon his death, denouncing both him and the feared spread of his further influence via his will (which created the famous Rhodes Scholarships). It was from the Boer Wars that Chesterton took his lifelong hatred for the art of Rudyard Kipling, also an English Protestant and an enthusiastic supporter of British Imperialism and the 'White Man's Burden.'

Secondly, the war paradoxically reinforced Chesterton's commitment to the romantic and revolutionary traditions of the Revolution and 19th century Radical Republicanism. What was so contemptible about the Boer War, Chesterton argued again and again, was not simply that it was a war: it was that it was a war fought by a professional military for distant Imperial and financial interests and supported by a public who assumed that the war would never seriously affect them and that victory was simply inevitable. 

"What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. [...] The blows struck by the Boer nation at bay, the dash and dazzling evasions of De Wet, the capture of a British general at the very end of the campaign, sounded again and again the opposite note of defiance; of those who, as I wrote later in one of my first articles, 'disregard the omens and disdain the stars.' And all this swelled up within me into vague images of a modem resurrection of Marathon or Thermopylae; and I saw again my recurring dream of the unscalable tower and the besieging citizens."

And this is something very important to understand about Chesterton's later advocacy for the Allied cause in WW1 and the cause of France and Poland against Nazi Germany: that Chesterton was never a pacifist, but rather a romantic radical who saw the goodness of a war as dependent on the moral rightness of its cause and on the moral commitment of its populace. This concept of a just war was shaped and redefined to a large degree by Christianity: but it was shaped in its infancy from the Classical traditions filtered through romantic Liberalism and the French Revolution. 

That the period of the Second Boer War also saw Chesterton's marriage to the French-descended Anglo-Catholic Frances Blogg, his own conversion from Unitarianism to a Catholic-inflected confessional Christianity, and the beginnings of a close personal friendship with the half-French, passionately Catholic and pro-Revolution Hilaire Belloc only accelerated Chesterton's existing trajectory. As over the next ten years Chesterton worked and wrote as a leading light of the new anti-Imperial Liberal Party, he continued to passionately defend the French Revolution, French and Italian culture, and (increasingly) the Catholic Church at the root of these good things. 

While continuing to deprecate fears of German invasion, Chesterton visited Germany for an academic conference and came away with a rather negative impression, recorded at the time in a column for the Daily News and later in his autobiography. Over the course of a series of talks and discussions on political topics, Chesterton was frustrated by the German scholars' unsmiling insistence that patriotism and Imperialism were the same thing, annoyed by their humorlessness in the face of his jokes at the expense of the English government, and deeply angered by their implication that as an opponent of English Imperialism he might perhaps support German Imperialism on racial grounds at the expense of his own nation. In his column for the Daily News written at the time, he wondered openly if some of the negative trends seen in contemporary British life--above all the humorless idealism of contemporary British political and social trends--might in fact be the result of German influence.

As stated above, Chesterton's break with the Liberal Party came predominantly as the result of the Great Unrest, the series of large strikes in England from 1911 to 1914, and in particular from the ruling Liberal Party's lack of sympathy with these strikes and attempts to suppress them. Chesterton's support for organized Labour had only grown more radical since his youth, until it had issued in an absolute support for the right to strike as a basic consequence of individual liberty. Any laws that prevented workers from forming unions, collectively bargaining, or striking, or which imposed compulsory arbitration on them, Chesterton insisted in his columns at the time, were tantamount to slavery--an argument buttressed by Belloc's controversial book The Servile State, which argued for a contemporary trend not towards Socialism, but rather towards a quasi-slave society where the poor would be compelled by law to labor in the interests of the rich. 

The faction of the Liberal Party opposed to Chesterton, however, led by the quasi-Socialist Welsh demagogue Lloyd George, was bent on establishing both the beginnings of a government Welfare State and laws that would regulate unions and impose compulsory government arbitration to prevent strikes--and was willing to use force to implement these policies. These policies Chesterton regarded as an absolute betrayal, not just of the workers, but of the basic tenets of liberalism itself--a betrayal visible also in the Liberal government's passing of the first of the Eugenics Laws imposing compulsory internment in asylums on the 'feeble-minded,' in their progressive health policy's coercive control of the poor, in their lack of concern for the abuse of power by police officers and prison warders, in licensing laws that forbade the drinking of alcohol before noon, and in the first compulsory Health Insurance Law that Chesterton saw as drawing away control of their own money from the poor and depriving the Unions of much-needed strike funds.

In all these things, though, Chesterton quickly became aware that the Liberalism of Lloyd George was taking its cue, not from the kind of revolutionary Labour politics that he himself favored (derived in large part from the French Syndicalists), but rather from the progressive, regulated Welfare Statism pioneered by Otto von Bismarck in the German Empire. In short, Germany was being held up as a model for England in actions and policies that Chesterton regarded as simple tyranny: and this certainly led to some explicit anti-German sentiment and writings as he left the Liberal Party and commenced a flood of anti-capitalist polemic for the Socialist Daily Herald.

And then, of course, World War 1 broke out: and everything changed.

Chesterton as War Propagandist: The First Phase

Chesterton, like the overwhelming majority of people in England from 1914 to 1919, supported the Allied cause in WW1. This is, in itself, not particularly remarkable. Nor is the mere fact that, in a time when British subjects of all ages and stripes were being conscripted into various kinds of direct or indirect war labor, he joined the large majority of active popular writers at the time in being paid to write war propaganda for the British government.

What is remarkable is the actual propaganda that Chesterton wrote; how much it differs from standard Allied propaganda at the time; and how much the arguments and conclusions found in his propaganda were not only sincerely held by Chesterton at the time, but continued to shape his actions and views for the remainder of his life.

The fact of Chesterton, formerly one of the most prominent voices against the Second Boer War, now embracing the cause of the British Government in an even larger and more destructive war, is certainly not without its basic ironies--ironies that Chesterton himself was well aware of. By the time WW1 broke out, Chesterton had not just left the Liberal Party in support of Syndicalist strikes, but was frequently and explicitly in his columns calling for a "revolution," on the model of the French Revolution, that would end capitalism and purify the English government. 

Likewise, as his writings for the New Witness during these years attest, Chesterton was opposed in principle to mass conscription and wartime restrictions on free speech, loathed nearly all of the British government's wartime regulations on everyday life, denounced the British violations of the Geneva Conventions as a moral surrender to the "German Gospel of frightfulness," and both believed and publicly stated (correctly) that the war was being used to make huge profits for capitalists on the backs of soldiers, to crush organized labour, and to suppress independent newspapers and any speech opposed to the government. Even more galling, it was not just Chesterton's former Liberal leader of H. Asquith who started the war, but by 1916 Chesterton's nemesis (and Marconi scandal subject) Lloyd George had actually taken over the role of Prime Minister and war leader of England. Chesterton's personal and political hatred for Lloyd George was nearly as intense as his loathing for Cecil Rhodes--and, given George's long public career, a great deal more enduring.  

Nevertheless, Chesterton's transition to anti-Germanist ideology and anti-German propaganda writing was made easier by a number of factors.

First, there was the straightforward fact that WW1 was the first major war in centuries in which Britain and Republican France fought as close allies: and this basic fact was immensely gratifying not only to Chesterton's cultural Francophilia, but more fundamentally to his cosmopolitan advocacy for European unity and concord. As Chesterton's beloved Italy and other smaller nations joined the war effort, Chesterton hoped out loud that the Alliance would in fact create lasting bonds between England, France, and Italy, would become the means by which the unity of European Christendom, lost in the Reformation, might be at least partially restored. 

Secondly, Chesterton's transition to propagandist was helped by the degree to which the British interpretation of the war, especially in its early stages, was simply derived wholesale from that produced by writers and thinkers in the French Republic. Britain and Germany had been culturally and politically allied for centuries: and though they had for a few decades been rivals, this rivalry was almost entirely based around entirely shared goals and values. Britain had the largest navy in the world: and Germany wanted to have an even bigger navy, which could conceivably (in the panic-stricken minds of English popular writers) be used to invade the island nation. This was hardly the materials for a moral crusade however, particularly since as it turned out the British Navy in WW1 possessed a dominance so absolute that the vaunted German Navy never once attempted an engagement save by submarine raiding. When the time came to define the war morally, then, Britain had no narrative ready to go. But the French did.

Since before 1870, Frenchmen had been framing their conflict with Germany as essentially a struggle between civilization and barbarism: a narrative derived in part from the intense devotion of the French Revolutionaries for Ancient Rome, and in part from disdain for the anti-aesthetic culture, pervasive militarism, ubiquitous breaking of treaties, and military atrocities committed by the small Northern German state Prussia that, in 1870, became the ruling power of the new German Empire. 

The English took up this narrative to a degree by necessity, but to a larger degree also due to the exponential growth in practical contacts between England and France. The narrative, though, was greatly aided by the genuine moral shock and revulsion produced by Germany's violation of treaty to invade Belgium and the well-documented (and quite real) atrocities committed by the German military against civilians there. The popular, ubiquitous substitution of the name "Hun" for the name "German" was only the most obvious result. When Italy itself joined the war effort, it was greeted in France in particular as a ringing affirmation of their Romans-vs-the-Barbarians narrative: which, at least on the part of the Italian people and government, it certainly was.

This was a narrative, though, that appealed to Chesterton on a much deeper level than to most Englishmen. Indeed, it appealed to Chesterton so deeply in part because it ran directly contrary to the previous "Teutonist" narratives popular in Britain before the war. During the Victorian Era, a new strain of scholarship and education had made ubiquitous in England the belief that the Germanic peoples who had migrated into and ultimately taken over the Western Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries had been in fact racially and culturally superior to the degraded 'Mediterranean' Romans and the source of more or less all the good things about later Western European society, including the Reformation, and especially the source of the continuing superiority of Northern European, Protestant nations like England and Germany to the degraded remnants of Latin culture found in France and Italy. 

Chesterton was hostile to this narrative, not merely accidentally and politically, but via his entire upbringing, education, and career, which had always been grounded predominantly in Greek, Latin, and French literature and culture. 

The outbreak of WW1 gave Chesterton an excellent chance to strike back at Teutonism in print, in public, with the active support of the British government and the British public.

In his The Barbarism of Berlin and accompanying newspaper columns, Chesterton again and again poured scorn on any idea that Teutonic culture had improved Roman civilization any more than plagues or natural disasters. European civilization, he insisted, was formed in its essence by the Roman Empire and the Christian Church, both of which were multi-racial, multi-cultural conglomerates depending on universal human natural equality, and neither of which had learned anything of value from the chaotic bands of cultureless mercenaries that plundered them.

Chesterton's general commitment to universal human equality on the basis of nature and reason was certainly derived from his Liberal upbringing, including inherited traditions of rejecting African slavery and valorizing Abraham Lincoln. His hostility to racial theories tout court, however, had more to do with his hatred for Cecil Rhodes and the 'Anglo-Saxonist' justifications put forward for British Imperialism. It was during WW1, though, that Chesterton began incorporating into his writing polemic not only against Anglo-Saxonism or Teutonism, but against any belief in inherent racial superiority whatsoever. It was both absurd and essentially corrupting, he argued at this time, to think not of nations or peoples but of races: and it had been used by the arrogant Germans to not only claim all the advantages of other nations as their own (by inventing spurious "Teutonic" ancestry for them), but even more unforgivably to make of themselves their own moral and aesthetic and cultural standard and look down on older and superior civilizations.

The irony of Chesterton's "anti-barbarian" propaganda, it should be said, is that it ultimately resulted in a definition of barbarian that has little or nothing to do with what most people, including most Romans and Frenchmen, meant by the term. Rather, Chesterton self-consciously set out to create a universal and moral definition of barbarian applicable in principle (and this is important) not only to the Germans, but to varying degrees to all contemporary countries including England, and even to individual people.

The essence of barbarism, Chesterton argued, is the refusal of reciprocity: or, put slightly differently, the refusal to accept that universal, binding standards equally applicable to everyone exist, and that these standards apply not only to others but oneself. 

This definition of barbarism is, really, extremely interesting and effective in precisely targeting a rampant issue in Chesterton's day as well as in our own. Chesterton was quite correct to see that this idea of a 'specialness' defined in ultimately solipsistic terms, a superiority grounded in no universal standard except an appeal to brute egoism, lay at the heart both of Teutonist racism and of the contemporary German High Command's policy of creating German dominance of Europe via aggressive wars enabled by an alleged charismatic German military superiority and justified by a 'law of force' that licensed breaking any and all treaties. A great deal of reading on WW1 has only confirmed me in this belief. In addition, Chesterton's concept has been helpful to me in percieiving the degree to which a similar vision of a kind of 'specialness' or 'charisma' consisting principally in not being bound by universal standards and basic moral responsibility lies at the heart of contemporary American life.

I cannot refrain from noting, however, that this definition of barbarism, while brilliant and incisive, is to a degree hampered by its association with a word invented by the Greeks to mean "people who don't speak Greek, eventually expanded by the Romans to mean "mercenary bands of soldiers who come from across the Rhine even if they speak Latin," and mostly used by contemporary Englishmen to refer to subjects of colonial states. 

Still, Chesterton's theorizing was aimed at providing justification for both the Roman Empire's resistance to the Germanic mercenary bands in the 5th century, and the French Republic's resistance to Germans in the 20th century: namely, that agreements cannot be reliably made with parties that see themselves as special in being able to break to agreements at will while also appealing to them. It is for this reason, Chesterton argued, that barbarians usually have to be met with some degree of force: not because they are intrinsically stupid or violent, but because they lack the virtues of consistency and honesty and respect on which any peaceful contact ultimately depends. The openly hysterical emotionalism and theoretical and racialized pride and rampant breaking of treaties and conventions and rules of civilized warfare by the WW1 German military government was certainly one case in point: but so too, I would argue, is the symbolic chaos found in much of American politics and public life today.

In any case, Chesterton was well aware that many of his criticisms of Germany were also applicable to England; and indeed one could argue that that was in fact the whole point. This he made clear in his most impressive work of war propaganda, and indeed probably the most remarkable piece of war propaganda ever written by anyone: namely, The Crimes of England.

When I first heard of this volume, mentioned by Chesterton prominently in his Autobiography, my initial reaction was something approaching shame. Chesterton's introduction of the volume in his recounting of his activities in WW1 was to say, somewhat briefly, that he considered it extremely important not to merely "play the Pharisee" in relation to Germany during WW1, but to openly acknowledge England's own past participation in the evils of militarism, racism, and "Prussianism"--in the process, however, pointing out both that Germany had in fact for a long time been the true European center of these things, worse than the more mixed and hypocritical English, and that England had at least in WW1 at long lost come to a sort of belated repentance in finally siding with France and Italy against Germany. 

When I read these words, I took it for granted that no volume of war propaganda (commissioned and published and distributed by the English government) could possibly correspond to what Chesterton was describing--and that in fact, The Crimes of England must be an even worse act of hypocrisy precisely in pretending to attack English crimes merely as a pretext to attack Germany. 

I was wrong. Whatever else The Crimes of England is, it is not a book that merely lightly touches on English wrongdoing in order to condemn Germany. It is, to a very large extent, precisely the opposite: a book that takes the unique opportunity of a war with Germany to deliver a moralistic sermon and tirade against the English government and its foreign and domestic policies of the last few centuries. 

It is also perhaps the most complete and detailed historical narrative that Chesterton ever gave of the era of English and European politics extending from the French Revolution to WW1. And as such, it is also perhaps the most complete defense Chesterton ever gave of the essential goodness of the French Revolution and its role in European history.

For the first and greatest "Crime of England" that Chesterton chronicles is simply the fact that the English joined, at the outset, the alliance of states that invaded and opposed the French Revolution--an invasion that, in his view, was directly responsible for turning the liberal principles of the Revolution towards militarism and mass conscription. The alliances against the French Republic, Chesterton points out, were instigated and led by Prussia and Austria: in joining them, though, the English aristocracy were not just supporting tyranny against liberty and corruption against reform, but in so doing betraying the Liberal English tradition as a whole. As Chesterton pointed out, the French Revolutionaries were to a man admirers of England and readers of English and Scottish Liberal writers: the oligarchy of England, though, chose to reject this profound consonance between England and France in favor of the brute militarism of Prussia and the more sympathetic, but nonetheless decaying absolutist state of Austria. What ought to have happened, rather, was an alliance between England and France that would help to temper the excesses of the Revolution, bring peace to the Continent, and follow the path of democratic reform to its logical conclusion in anti-Imperialism and economic justice. 

In Chesterton's (somewhat exaggerated) portrayal, England at this profound turning point in history had been the essential arbiter capable of turning the course of Europe as a whole towards either renewal and liberty, or tyranny and violence: and England had chosen wrong.

This is, essentially, the repeating thesis of The Crimes of England. The Prussian state born from Frederick the Great's atheistic irresponsibility and worship of brutal violence (which Chesterton, in a rather brilliant rhetorical passage, ascribes to childhood abuse) had for the past century been a straightforward and largely unmixed worker for tyranny and violence--while England had been the morally complex arbiter again and again thrust into the position of deciding between right and wrong, and again and again choosing evil in the form of German economics, politics, and kultur. 

In this balance, it should be pointed out that while Prussia and Germany are again and again asserted to be worse than England in being more unmixed and less conflicted in their devotion to evil, England is directly and repeatedly made out to be more morally responsible, and therefore guilty, in its moral choices.

One could hardly accuse Chesterton's summary of English history of whitewashing, particularly when one comes to the chapters in which Chesterton chronicles and denounces England's repression of Ireland. These are the harshest pages Chesterton ever wrote: portraying England's atrocities in 1798 as a "war of devils against angels" in which "rape become a mode of government" and "the violation of virgins a standing order of the police": "as if England could produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs." After such crimes, continued in less extreme form to the present day, Chesterton strongly asserted that the relations of England and Ireland could never be anything but those between two men, one of whom had quite recently, within living memory, tried to torture the other to death. After such events, there might possibly be reconciliation: but not without the most abject repentance.

The idea that this book was put out by the British Government as official war propaganda is an utterly confounding concept. I have no idea how this could have happened--except, of course, that I do. WW1 was a desperate time in which England and France were now close allies and the previously close ally Germany a bitter enemy: and, more importantly, the head of one of the major propaganda offices was a personal friend of Chesterton's. Also, reading between the lines, Chesterton's somewhat cynical friend Charles Masterman primarily targeted Chesterton's propaganda at neutral countries with strong traditions of anti-English feeling: places like Italy, Ireland, and America.

Still, if there is something to be charged against Chesterton's war propaganda, it is certainly not that he overlooks the flaws of England in order to cheaply score on foreigners. Indeed, the idea was anathema to Chesterton from his first Francophile essays for his student newspaper to his last radio broadcasts for the BBC. Rather, Chesterton is always and everywhere much more interested in attacking England than attacking foreign societies and governments. 

Indeed, this was a principle that Chesterton frequently defended quite openly and in print from his early career: arguing that it was the foremost duty of every patriot to morally criticize and reform his own nation before those of others, and that one should always be more morally charitable to inhabitants of other countries with temptations and struggles one knew nothing about, about crimes and wrongs that one usually had only imperfect information at best. This idea greatly frustrated the readers of the Daily News who wrote angry letters to the paper criticizing Chesterton's columns on atrocities in Russian prisons (in which he deliberately focused much more on atrocities in British prisons); and it continued to be a frequent cause of criticism to the very end of his life.

In the case of The Crimes of England, Chesterton's goal and hope had less to do with Germany than with England and Europe, or rather with England in Europe. By allying with France and Italy in a grand crusade against a barbaric enemy, England could, perhaps, begin to see beyond its insular ignorance and parochialism and pride, and learn to see itself as merely one part of a larger European (which is to say, Roman and Christian) civilization again. In the process, England could, perhaps, recognize where she herself had embraced barbarism and militarism and racialism and Imperialism, where she herself had been like Germany: and, recognizing this, repent.

It is extremely doubtful that very many people in England during WW1 shared Chesterton's hopes for the war--though it is also true that a great deal of people in England were at least open to it, willing to listen to it and entertain it, in a way they had never before been in Chesterton's lifetime. The shock to the English, both popular and elite, in fighting Germany after centuries of kinship cannot be underestimated: or the equally profound shock of allying with France and Italy. 

Still, Chesterton's practical conclusion on WW1 was everything the most Jingoistic English Imperialist could have hoped for: that England must, at whatever cost, prosecute the war to its conclusion. 

The fundamental reason for this conclusion, though--an argument he repeated again and again in his columns during WW1 and continued to repeat for the next few decades--was rather original: namely, that what the Allies were fighting in WW1 was not Germany (which, Chesterton acknowledged, included the many millions of Southern German Catholics), was not even Prussia, but was, rather, a belief. As Chesterton saw it, a certain stunted military class had come to believe that it possessed a charisma, a unique proclivity for victory as such: and had gotten this belief accepted more or less by the rest of the Germanies and much of the world beyond, to such an extent that the citizens of this large and prosperous and seemingly civilized country were willing to let this military exist beyond any political controls and do whatever it wanted, including provoking massive wars, without taking any responsibility for the results.

(I should pause to add that, having just finished Absolute Destruction, an extended monograph on the internal culture of the German military just before and during WW1, all the evidence points to the fact that Chesterton was absolutely correct about at least this. The new German Imperial state had been founded thanks to the victory of the Prussian military over France in 1870, and as a result had granted that military a unique and central constitutional position exempt from any civilian control or oversight and a unique cultural status as the primary carrier of unifying values for the new state. Likewise, in both micro and macro terms, official German military structure, training, strategy, and tactics were explicitly premised on the belief in a charismatic superiority of German soldiers to any possible adversary, expressed in a unique ability to go beyond orders and invent new tactical realities and sacrifice to extreme degrees and so achieve total victory even absent logistical support or strategic direction.)

Of course, what was true for Germany was true to a lesser degree, as Chesterton was well aware, not so much of the British publics' trust in their military, as in their unfailing faith in their ruling class, the aristocratic oligarchy that had dominated England and Scotland since the 18th century. As Chesterton carefully pointed out, the British ruling class was by no means and to no degree a military class comparable to the Junkers dominating Germany--they were, however, "insolent" and corrupt and possessed "a class arrogance that cries out to heaven for vengeance." And the answer in both cases was the same: the dispossession of the ruling class, aristocratic or military, by a democratic, organized public eager and willing to take up moral responsibility. Chesterton's hope was in fact that the popular support for the war, the popular organization produced by mass military mobilization, the popular revulsion for Germany's arrogance and crimes, and the popular contact of ordinary Englishmen with French and Italian culture and civilization, might lead to such a revival being born out of the very heart of the war.

I am writing this, today, as the United States of America has just begun a massive war of choice against Iran that is likely to kill tens of thousands and destabilize the Middle East for decades: a war that, so far as I can tell, Americans as a whole neither oppose or support, but merely accept. Whatever was true of Germany and England, Chesterton's diagnosis of Germany's madness is now without question true of the United States of America. The reason why Americans by and large do not care about foreign policy, do not care how many wars America starts or how many foreigners she kills, is that they, like the German public in the early 20th century, are possessed of an absolute security and indifference born ultimately of a belief. Americans believe that the American military will always win: and hence are willing to let their leadership start as many wars as they want, secure in the bedrock, psychologically unbreakable certainty that no war will ever harm or affect them. Of course, if America were to lose a war...  

The conclusion Chesterton drew from this reality in the 1910s, though, was that WW1 was in essence a war of belief, a religious war, aiming not at the destruction or humiliation of Germany, but at its persuasion and even repentance. And the only way, Chesterton believed, to convince the Germans as a whole--including above all the Southern German Catholics and Austrians--that the German kultur and race was not superior to all others, that the German military was not infallibly destined for inevitable victory, was to actually and undeniably defeat it. 

As in all such cases of religious fanaticism and charisma, anything short of that undeniable defeat, Chesterton argued, would have the paradoxical effect of strengthening belief. A German military hobbled and harried but not undeniably defeated would inevitably return, in one year or ten or twenty, to try again to prove its superiority to the world. Thus, any "premature peace" with Germany would inevitably lead, in one year or ten or twenty, to another war.

Chesterton as Propagandist of the Future War

As it turned out, Germany was defeated: but in Chesterton's view, not nearly enough. 

Chesterton was profoundly unhappy with the Treaty of Versailles: about as unhappy as the French government and people, and for the same reasons. As the French Prime Minister Clemenceau (a Mason and anti-Catholic) argued at the Paris Peace Conference, the only reasonable conclusion to the war was to create a situation where Germany would never again be a threat to France or the rest of Europe ever again. The obvious solution was to undo the great wrong of 1870 not just by giving Alsace-Lorraine back to France, but by breaking the Prussia-dominated, militarist German Empire created in 1870 back into its component states. That this would mean along the way freeing the Southern German Catholic states that were the last and most reluctant to join the Empire was something that the increasingly Catholic Chesterton was well aware of. 

As it happened, this did not happen--largely because the English government of Chesterton's nemesis Lloyd George insisted that a strong, prosperous, and united Germany was necessary as an economic trading partner for an impoverished Britain dependent on industry and trade for its food supply, and also as a military bulwark against the new threat of Bolshevist Russia. 

Chesterton was utterly outraged and shamed by Lloyd George's and England's role in the Paris Peace Conference: and driven to something approaching depression by the ultimate Treaty of Versailles, which allowed Germany to remain united and merely partially disarmed her and obliged her to pay reparations in money to help rebuild a France deliberately ravaged by the German military--reparations that, as the New Witness and G.K.'s Weekly were to point out again and again over the next decades, were never actually paid, with the total payments even after the occupation of the Ruhr ultimately totaling only around 15% of what had been promised in the Treaty, and that largely paid for with loans from American financiers.

Even more outrageous, Chesterton's newspapers charged, was the fact that the post-war England still led absurdly by a wartime Coalition government was in fact embracing all those things against which (in Chesterton's view) the war had been fought: beginning with a brutally militaristic repression of Ireland that drove Chesterton to write anguished propaganda against the the British government, much of it printed and distributed in the form of tracts, in which he declared that what Britain was doing in Ireland was morally and practically equivalent to what Germany had done in Belgium, would result just as inevitably in English defeat, "the hatred of humanity, and the wrath of God." At the same time, the British government was failing to live up to its promises to veterans, failing to take the necessary economic steps to fight post-war inflation and unemployment, continuing and in fact vastly intensifying repression of the Labour movement on the absurd pretext of anti-Bolshevism, and continuing to push and legally implement Eugenics. In all this, Chesterton pointed out with anguish, they were once again imitating the Germany that so many Englishmen, including his own brother, had died to defeat. And if the War was not about this, what was it about?

As Chesterton admits in his polemical tract Eugenics and Other Evils, he had initially written the book before the war, and then set it aside as obsolete given the coming defeat of Germany--but had discovered to his horror and outrage that England was still, in his view, just as eager to imitate Germany as ever.

More than this, English public opinion after WW1 quickly returned to a decidedly anti-French mindset--with many English writers and politicians again and again blaming alleged French "vengefulness" against Germany for the troubles of the post-war world. Had the English people forgotten the atrocities they themselves had seen on the Western Front? Had they forgotten the profound bonds that had united them to Continental Europe during the Alliance? And did they really desire to return to a childish Victorian pride and insularity even in an England whose Imperial prosperity had been manifestly and totally destroyed in a sudden judgment from God, as he himself had from the beginning of his career predicted it inevitably would be?

Still, if England was inexcusably acting as though she had never allied with France and never fought a war against Germany, the Germans were acting as though they had not in fact been defeated: taking every opportunity to renege on their Treaty obligations, to build back up their armaments, forging military alliances with the Bolshevists in Russia and borrowing money from Wall Street in America, all with the obvious goal of restoring themselves to the status of global Imperial power. Could his fellow Englishmen not see that this trajectory would lead inevitably to another war: that regardless of whether the Kaiser or the Socialists of the Weimar Republic were in charge, the German military and elites continued to believe in German superiority, continued to refuse to accept any binding reciprocity or obligation to abide by agreements, disclaimed all responsibility for German's initiation of the War and atrocities during it, and were obviously eager to seize Poland and France once again?

Almost immediately after the conclusion of WW1, then, Chesterton began to quite directly predict another World War: a war that would start when Germany invaded Poland.

Here it is perhaps worth adding that it was during the inter-war period in particular that Chesterton began to discover a deep love for yet another predominantly Catholic Continental country: namely, Poland. This, too, was not precisely new, since 19th century Romantic Liberals of the sort that Chesterton drew from had long disclaimed Frederick the Great's destruction and partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and hope for a restoration of Polish nationhood. During the closing days of WW1, Chesterton's New Witness waged a ceaseless campaign for the full restoration of Polish nationhood within its "historical borders" including all of what was then called East Prussia. During the Paris Peace Conference, Chesterton insisted that to yield any ground on this point in particular would be to "lose the war that we have won": not just because this was necessary as a restitution for the wrongs of Prussia, but because (as Clemenceau also argued) a strong Poland with a port and access to the West was absolutely needed as a bulwark and ally for France against both Germany and Bolshevist Russia.

As it turned out, Poland was restored--but not strengthened nearly enough for Chesterton's liking. As a result, concern for a coming German invasion of Poland occupied Chesterton's thoughts continuously from the Treaty of Versailles to his death, buttressed by his awareness of the popular hatred for the Poles in Germany and of the particular humiliation felt by the German military for the taking of German territory by the new state. Meanwhile, Chesterton became acquainted with many members of the Polish government, actively participated in pro-Polish cultural and political and religious activities in Britain, and travelled more than once to Poland, where he was publicly acclaimed as a national hero. In Chesterton's ultimate conclusion, the Polish combined with their profound Catholicism a national character natively much closer to the English than any other Continental country, and certainly much closer than the French. Chesterton's desire for a true Polish-English friendship became, then, if anything even more immediate than his desire for English-French amity.

Of course, another thing that took place shortly after the War was Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism: an event long in coming (he had already a full ten years before declared his rejection of the Anglican Church and belief in Catholicism) that brought him into much fuller contact than ever before with Continental culture and politics. Indeed, it brought him for the first time into contact with cultures and civilizations beyond Europe altogether--as Chesterton himself breathlessly discussed in his books from this period. This was in profound keeping with his initial cosmopolitanism and belief in human equality, but was also far more immediate and personal in its impact: forcing Chesterton, as he recounted in his The Resurrection of Rome, even to confront for the first time his own personal (not at all theoretical) prejudice against Africans.

A full discussion of the ways in which Chesterton's adherence to Catholicism complicated and deepened his existing political and ideological positions would take several more posts (or perhaps books). Nevertheless, what should be said here is that it did not for all that transform the basic orientations discussed above. In What I Saw in America, Chesterton acknowledged with profound sadness that the Liberal tradition of the French Revolution had in fact in the final balance failed: that for all its practical successes, its individual liberty had finally degenerated into plutocracy, its economic liberty into capitalism, and its freedom of conscience into secularism. Still, as he wrote to his mother upon his conversion, he perceived no essential break with the ideals of liberty and conscience on which he had been raised, "only a new and necessary way of fighting for them." To the end of his life, Chesterton remained equally committed to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Still, as the initial panics of the post-war shocks stabilized into the more decrepit world of the 1920s, Chesterton's alarms grew gradually less immediate. While he still continued his crusades against the English and German governments, and while he continued to predict another World War in public, the prospects for such things grew somehow less immediate--and he even began to hope that perhaps they would not happen at all. 

And then, of course, a man named Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Chesterton and Hitler

At the end of the year 1933, Chesterton declared to his newspaper's readers that he had no interest in recapping any of the events that had taken place that year save one: an event that, he roundly declared, represented the stupidest thing done, not merely that year, but for the last several centuries. That thing was Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

To put Chesterton's relationship with Adolf Hitler and Naziism, one must understand two very important things. First, the rise of Naziism was to Chesterton not a shock or surprise, but rather a profound confirmation of what he had already believed or at least feared about Germany society and its likely future actions. Second, it was the public reaction to the rise of Naziism in England that was to Chesterton a matter of shock and disgust, precisely because, at least in the beginning, that reaction was so uniformly positive. 

It was the combination of these two factors that led Chesterton embark, in the last three years of his life, of a remarkable campaign of what can only be called war propaganda: propaganda aimed not primarily at analyzing and morally condemning Naziism, but at persuading the English public and government to end up on the right side of an imminent second World War. And it is only in the light of those two factors that one can understand and put in their proper light his writings during this period.

Another way to put it, as those who knew Chesterton could attest, is that much of his propaganda was in fact driven by fear: by a fear that when war inevitably broke out between Nazi Germany on the one hand and France and Poland on the other, England would not hold to its alliances and treaty obligations, but would declare neutrality or even side with Germany. 

Hence, during these years, even his columns in the Illustrated London News--which were mandated to be non-political and non-partisan--were filled with what anti-Nazi propaganda. Chesterton's propaganda 

It is quite true that in writing against the Nazis in this early period, Chesterton did not choose to focus on the Nazi persecution of Jews. It is also true that anti-Jewish sentiment was on the rise in both England and America and that the early anti-Jewish actions of the Nazis 1933-1936 (long before Kristallnacht in 1938) were largely popular with or at least excused by elites and populations in America and England alike.

Indeed, for the period in which he was writing, it is remarkable that Chesterton brought up Nazi persecution of Jews more or less in every article and column he wrote on the regime, that he directly and universally called it persecution and violence, and that he was completely clear that in his opinion it was wrong and unjustified. Indeed--rather remarkably given Chesterton's past writings--he went so far as to attack even the anti-Semitic cultural policies of the government, wondering openly if the Germans were willing to carry out an "anti-Semitic amputation" of their culture to remove the works of German-Jewish composers and artists: "They will find it difficult to persuade any German, let alone any European who is fond of Germany, that Schiller is a poet and Heine is not; that Goethe is a critic and Lessing is not; that Beethoven is a composer and Mendelssohn is not; or that Bach is a musician and Brahms is not." And Chesterton recognized just as clearly where Nazi policies were heading: and when he in a famous quote stated that he would "probably die defending the last Jew in Europe," there is little question he was being both literal and sincere.

Still, the primary reason why Chesterton focused so much on the Jews when writing about the Nazis had less to do with his interest in the Jewish Problem or his personal friendships with Jews than with his appreciation of the absolutely central role the Jews were now playing in German justifications for starting another European war. Chesterton saw and stated clearly that the Jews were being used a "scapegoat" in the creation of a genuinely popular, but only very recently invented myth that Germany had not really lost World War 1.

From 1914 onwards, Chesterton had been insistent that another war with Germany was inevitable unless the German military and public were clearly convinced that they had been defeated: and he now saw that the German public were being convinced that they had not been defeated, but merely betrayed by the Jews. 

The necessity of the moment, then, was to convince the British public, and, as much as possible, the German public as well, that this myth was false. To do this, though, simple moral denunciations of persecution of the Jews were not enough. 

After all, Chesterton pleaded, the "Stabbed in the Back" narrative was simply absurd: regardless of how evil one thought the Jews, regardless of how powerful one thought the Jews had been in Germany before the Nazis, the one thing a wealthy intellectual minority could absolutely never conceivably have done was to trick the powerful and proud and overwhelmingly Gentile German military into sinking its own fleet and laying down its own arms and surrendering its own armies and giving up the German government to Socialists. Chesterton was willing to admit that the Jews had been too powerful in Germany; that they had caused problems in their chosen spheres of culture and education and intellectual life and democratic politics, problems that had led indirectly in fact (as Chesterton taunted) to the Nazi myth of the "Chosen Race," a concept obviously stolen from the Jews. But this they had not done--they had not forced the German military to surrender without being defeated. The German military had been defeated by England and France and Italy; they were not invincible. If this was not clearly understood, then another war was inevitable.

Still, even if the Germans could not be convinced of this, at least the British public could be convinced that Hitler meant what he said: that he did in fact intend to invade Poland and plunge all of Europe into another World War. In writing to an English public that largely regarded this claim as fantastical and Hitler as an inspirational figure, Chesterton was willing to say that he could "applaud a hundred things Hitler is doing," but he was equally clear that he could in no degree applaud "the spirit in which they are done": the spirit, once again, of racism and barbarism. 

Chesterton again pointed out in his columns that "the Nazi literature" was "opposed to common sense and common historical information and is in conflict with the Catholic conscience and the principal religious authority of Europe." The Nazis were absurdly trying to remove the Old Testament from the Bible; they were "contradict[ing] not only every Christian virtue but every common human generosity, as in saying that 'the conception of Christian charity causes national degeneration inasmuch as it involves caring for the physically weak and infirm.'" They were seeking to "unbaptize" Germany, and return Europe to paganism and barbarism. "Of course a number of other words were actually used; that the Germanic spirit was free from Judaic and Papist influences; that the German blood guaranteed an emancipation from Latin and Semitic superstitions; and so on. But what it meant was that Teutons like to be barbaric and are going to be as barbaric as they like." 

The core of this Nazi barbarism, Chesterton argued, was once again racism: and the core of racism was simply pride. Catholicism proclaimed equality in "the old idea of human fellowship in a Faith open to all": the racist, in contrast, worshipped himself. "The curse of race religion is that it makes each separate man the sacred image which he worships. His own bones are the sacred relics; his own blood is the blood of St. Januarius." The Germans were once again absurdly asserting the superiority of "Teutonic" blood over Latin and Semitic civilization; and were once again rejecting any reciprocity, any obligation to abide by treaties, any common morality binding both them and their opponents. 

Chesterton had criticized the Soviet Union since its inception; but had also consistently denounced the "Red Scares" that filled England during the inter-war years, particularly in their use to suppress organized Labour. To an anti-Bolshevist public, though, he pointed out that "the Nazi is ready to dally with Communists." An alliance between the Nazis and Soviets, Chesterton pointed out, was on its face absurd given Hitler's public anti-Bolshevism, which had won him many supporters in Germany and the West. Yet it was in fact happening: the Germans and Russians would unite to invade Poland.

"The Nazi may be Nationalist and the Bolshie may be Internationalist, but these are words; for Prussia is hardly a full nation and Russia is much less in contact with other nations than anything else. But they both feel they are of the same stuff; a stuff which they would call the new forces and I should call the old barbarism. The Prussian patriot may plaster himself all over with eagles and iron crosses, but he will be found in practice side by side with the Red Flag. The Prussian and the Russian will agree about everything; especially about Poland. They may differ in many things, but in hatred of the Christian civilisation they are truly international."

If the British public could not see this, they could be convinced that the new world they were entering was divided, not between Teutons and Latins or Jews and Gentiles or Nationalists and Internationalists, but between on the one hand the old Christian and Catholic civilization of Europe and on the other hand pagan barbarism. In this war, the Nazis and Soviets would be joined by the equally barbarous civilization of Japan--which, Chesterton correctly pointed out, he had written against consistently since 1900, and which was currently engaged like the German barbarians of the 5th century in invading and plundering the ancient and venerable and Rome-like civilization of China (which Chesterton had written in support of also since before 1900).

In the face of this racist paganism, in the face of this unchecked aggression, for England to think that it could simply stand aside and stay out of the war to come was absurd. It was worse than absurd: it was evil, however much it might be consonant with the contemporary policy of the United States of America. "It is hard not to suspect some journalists of the generous dream of making a European war and keeping out of it. Thus we should grow as rich as America was; and then be ruined as America is. That is their bright idea of saving Capitalism." 

It was to prevent this state of affairs--an England withdrawn from the Continent, allied with isolationist America against Europe, allowing the Nazis and Soviets to plunder Poland, France, and Italy--that Chesterton devoted a great proportion of his remaining energies. When the confrontation between Dolfuss' Austria and Hitler's Germany emerged, Chesterton wrote enthusiastic propaganda defending the high ancient civilization of Austria, sufficient in itself to refute the "slander on a European race" that all Germans were barbarians: when Dolfuss was murdered by the Nazis, Chesterton lauded him as a martyr and denounced the "swine who trod over him" and "forbad him even a priest." And with each passing event, the doom he predicted drew nearer. And then, in 1936, a little over three years after Hitler's rise to power, G.K. Chesterton was dead.

Mercifully, Chesterton did not live to see what for him would have been a heart-breaking betrayal: the alliance of his beloved Italy with Germany. On Italian Fascism, Chesterton had been a moderate voice since 1922: pointing out the Capitalist plutocracy that had spurred the Fascists' rise to power, refusing to either justify or denounce foreign atrocities that might or might not be accurate, applauding Mussolini for managing at least to produce "a government that was not merely a governing class" and was not only at the beck and call of capitalists, but criticizing the Fascists' "breathless progressivism," recourse to violence and force, rejection of individual liberty and democracy, and fundamentally absurd belief in minority rule. English Fascists were ubiquitously mocked in Chesterton's newspapers as a pathetic front for the British plutocracy.

Still, when World War II finally broke out, there is little doubt that Chesterton would have felt immense relief that England had, in fact, stuck to her alliance with France and Poland and committed herself to the destruction of the Nazi regime. 

What he would have made of the devastated, post-war Europe dominated by American global hegemony is another question: as Chesterton, while personally friendly to Americans, had consistently denounced . As Chesterton said, he had always rejected British Imperialism, and so had every right to reject American Imperialism also: and had in any case "much more respect for the Empire that is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance." To the end of his life, he never abandoned his rejection of capitalism, his insistence on worker control, his hope for a popular revolution, and his overriding belief in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Conclusion: Humanity in History

I have deliberately chosen the topic of Chesterton as war propagandist, and wanted to write about it for some time, precisely because it is the aspect of Chesterton's thought that I have always found least sympathetic and easy to understand. Chesterton was and is a voluminous figure; and every phase of his political career discussed above was also marked by entirely un-political writings and activities on religion, poetry, art, literature, economics, and morality that could just as easily be focused on.

I am not only of a generally anti-war cast of mind, am not only far more dubious on the French Revolution than Chesterton, but as a historian regard the World Wars taken collectively as perhaps the greatest calamity to ever strike the human race--and the continuing weakening of Europe and global hegemonic American Empire that resulted from them as a tragic and deplorable outcome. I have deep sympathy for the position of such committed Catholic pacifists as Dorothy Day who saw in the World Wars a new phase of human evil to be rejected by all people of conscience; and have profound intellectual respect and at least partial agreement with the Catholic moral theologians, including Cardinal Ottaviani and most mid-century Popes, who argued that modern methods of war rendered large-scale modern wars like this immoral in means by definition. For all my agreement with Chesterton rejecting racialism, militarism, and what he himself called barbarism, I am simply incapable of writing in retrospect the kind of propaganda for WW1 and WW2 that he wrote looking ahead.

Nevertheless, the benefits of attempting to engage charitably and in depth with other people, even or especially where one's instincts are opposed to theirs, is that one always learns a great deal, at the least, and usually finds unexpected points of agreement. Chesterton's war propaganda writings, taken as a whole, are both brilliant and insightful, and have shaped my thinking on many contemporary matters deeply--mostly on matters that have little to do directly with Germany and the World Wars. As I pointed out above, the moral evaluations Chesterton garnered from the Wars ultimately led to moral and universal conclusions capable of being applied to many different societies and even individual people. 

Perhaps most importantly, they lead to conclusions that are extremely applicable to the American Empire of the 21st century: and emphatically not in a way that would lead to war propaganda in favor of any American military conflict of the last fifty years.

If there is a society today that pervasively sees itself as superior to all others, sees its soldiers and workers and leaders alike as constitutionally stronger and smarter and bolder and harder-working than those of other nations; if there is a society whose citizens worship themselves as incarnations of an essentially superior type, regard their pictures as sacred images and their bones as sacred relics; if there is a society today that absolutely and essentially rejects any reciprocity whatsoever with other countries and peoples, regards the idea of universal moral standards applicable equally to themselves and others as absurd, constantly changes its standards to suit itself and constantly applies standards to others it refuses to apply to itself, refuses to abide by treaties and pacts it has itself agreed to, claims the right to use international institutions for its own purposes but act apart from them whenever it wants, and scorns any suggestion of accountability to anyone; if there is a society today absolutely committed to its military, that regards its soldiers as essentially righteous, its military leadership as rightfully beyond democratic accountability and control, and its military-industrial complex as a whole as possessed of a unique charisma always and inevitably leading to victory; if there is a society today whose populace possesses an absolute sense if its own security, rejects any popular responsibility or participation in decisions for and against war, almost to a man does not care how many foreigners are killed or how many foreign nations are brought down in ruins so long as their life goes on as usual, and moreover assumes that their life always will go on as normal regardless of how many wars its leadership pursues; well, if there is a society like this in the world today, it is certainly not Germany.

When I began this essay, I was inspired by anger at the ignorant, mendacius, calumniating anti-Chestertonians spoken of above; but I was also filled with fear and dread about the rapid approach of a war of aggression of my own country against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a war that no one I spoke to seemed at all concerned about. As I finish this essay, I am filled with fear and anger at the actual enacting of this war, a war that once again no one in America seems to be remotely concerned about. In either case, ignorant anti-Chestertonians on the Internet are the least of my worries.

To close this essay, then, I will say again what I said at the beginning: that Chesterton was a good man, a brilliant man, and a saint: and it is for this reason above all else that, even where I disagree with him, even where I find him lacking, I find him nonetheless a source of light and truth not just for his own time, but for mine.

And certainly, if Chesterton was right about the Germany of his own day--right at least about the basic evils and sins of that Germany, and the inevitably of war and destruction and judgment they would lead to--then we, the citizens of the United States of America in 2026, need all the saints we can get.

G.K. Chesterton, pray for us!
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on us!