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Nesta Helen Webster

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Nesta Helen Webster
Webster in later life, aged 53.
Webster in later life, aged 53.
BornNesta Helen Bevan
(1876-08-24)24 August 1876
Trent Park, London
Died16 May 1960(1960-05-16) (aged 83)
Occupationwriter, historian, theorist
NationalityEnglish
CitizenshipBritish
SubjectInternational Revolutionary conspiracy
Notable worksWorld Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements

Nesta Helen Webster (Mrs. Arthur Webster), (24 August 1876 – 16 May 1960) was a controversial author who revived conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.[1][2][3][4] She argued that the secret society's members were occultists, plotting communist world domination,[3] using the idea of a Jewish cabal,[5] the Masons and Jesuits[6] as a smokescreen.[3] According to her, their international subversion included the French Revolution, 1848 Revolution, the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.[7]

In 1920, Webster was one of the contributing authors who wrote The Jewish Peril, a series of articles in the London Morning Post, centered on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These articles were subsequently compiled and published in the same year, in book form under the title of The Cause of World Unrest.[8]

Webster claimed that the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an "open question". Her position on that, in 1924, "Contrary to the assertions of certain writers, I never affirmed my belief in the authenticity of the Protocols, but have always treated it as an entirely open question." (See Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924), p. 408). At one time she was a member of the British Union of Fascists.[2]

Early years

She was born Nesta Bevan in the stately home Trent Park. She was the youngest daughter of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, a close friend of Cardinal Manning. Her mother was the daughter of Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, Anglican bishop of Chichester. She was educated at Westfield College (now part of Queen Mary, University of London). On coming of age, she travelled around the world, visiting India, Burma, Singapore, and Japan. In India, in 1914, she married Captain Arthur Webster, the Superintendent of the English Police.[9]

Fascination with the French Revolution

Returning to England she began her historical studies and literary career with a critical re-assessment of the French Revolution, especially exploring the theory of the monarchy's subversion by a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. For more than three years she immersed herself in historical research, primarily in the archives of the British Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Her first serious book on this subject was The Chevalier de Boufflers. While doing research for the book, she experienced deja vu which led her to believe she might have been reincarnated.[10]

Political views

Following the First World War she gave a lecture on the Origin and Progress of World Revolution to the officers of the Royal Artillery at Woolwich. By special request she repeated the lecture to the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Brigade of Guards in Whitehall, and then she was asked to repeat it a third time to the officers of the Secret Service. It was at their special request that she wrote the World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilisation, based on these lectures. Her charisma helped her to captivate some the leading literary, political and military minds of her day. Lord Kitchener in India described her as the "foremost opponent of subversion".

In 1919 Webster published The French Revolution: a Study in Democracy where she claimed that a secret conspiracy had prepared and carried out the French Revolution. As she said in her book, "The lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati were thus the source whence emanated all those anarchic schemes which culminated in the Terror,[11] and it was at a great meeting of the Freemasons in Frankfurt-am-Main, three years before the French Revolution began, that the deaths of Louis XVI and Gustavus III of Sweden were first planned."

She had a wide readership. Winston Churchill praised her in a 1920 article entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,”[12][13] in which he asserted, “This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution.”[14]

Webster also published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Need for Fascism in Great Britain,[15] the Menace of Communism (with Mrs. Katherine Atkinson) and The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution. In the latter book, published in 1921, she wrote: "What mysteries of iniquity would be revealed if the Jew, like the mole, did not make a point of working in the dark! Jews have never been more Jews than when we tried to make them men and citizens."[16] In her books, Webster argued that Bolshevism was part of a much older and more secret, self-perpetuating conspiracy. She described three possible sources for this conspiracy: Zionism, Pan-Germanism, or "the occult power." She stated that she leaned towards Zionism as the most likely culprit of the three. She also claimed that even if the Protocols were fake, they still describe how Jews behave.[17]"

Webster became involved in several right-wing groups including the British Fascists,[5] the Anti-Socialist Union, The Link, and the British Union of Fascists.[18] She was also the leading writer of "The Patriot", an anti-Semitic paper,[19] Webster dismissed much of the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany as exaggeration and propaganda.[20]

Feminism

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

Criticism

In February 1924, Hilaire Belloc wrote to an American Jewish friend regarding one of Webster's publications which purported to expose evidence of Jewish conspiracy. Though Belloc's record of writing about Jews has attracted accusations of antisemitism itself, his contempt for Webster's own efforts was evident:

In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits, with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that.[22]

Umberto Eco, whose novel The Prague Cemetery recounts the development of the Protocols, has characterised Webster's propagation of the document as evidence of a delusional tendency:

In 1921... the Times of London discovered the old pamphlet by Joly and realized that it was the source for the Protocols. But evidence is not enough for those who want to live in a horror novel... [Webster's] syllogism is impeccable: since the Protocols resemble the story I have told, they confirm it. Or: the Protocols confirm the story I have concocted from them; therefore they are true.[23]

Works

  • The Chevalier De Boufflers. A Romance of the French Revolution, E.P. Dutton and Company, 1927. [1st Pub. London, John Murray, 1910. Reprints: 1916; 1920; 1924; 1925; E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1926].
  • Britain's Call to Arms: An Appeal to Our Women, London, Hugh Rees, 1914.
  • The Sheep Track. An aspect of London society, London, John Murray, 1914.
  • The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, London, Constable & Co., 1919.[24][25][26]
  • The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., 1920 [?]. OCLC: 22692582.
  • World Revolution. The Plot Against Civilization, Small, Maynard & Company, 1921 [1st Pub. London, Constable & Co., 1921. Reprints: Constable, 1922; Chawleigh, The Britons Publishing Co., 1971; Sudbury, Bloomfield Books, 1990?].
  • The Past History of the World Revolution. A Lecture, Woolwich, Royal Artillery Institution, 1921.
  • “Conservatism – A Living Creed,” The Patriot, N°. 1, Vol. I, February 9, 1922.
  • "Danton," The Patriot 2, Nº. 16, May 22, 1922.
  • "Saint Just," The Patriot 2, Nº. 18, June 8, 1922.
  • "A Few Terrorists," The Patriot 2, Nº. 19, June 15, 1922.
  • "The Marquis De Sade," The Patriot 2, Nº. 20, June 22, 1922.
  • “'Beppo' and Bakunin," The Patriot 2, Nº. 22, July 6, 1922.
  • with Kurt Kerlen, Boche and Bolshevik, being a series of articles from the Morning Post of London, reprinted for distribution in the United States, New York, Beckwith, 1923. Reprint: Sudbury, Bloomfield Books [1990?]. ISBN 1-4179-7949-6.
  • Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. London, 1924. Reprints: Boswell, 1928 and 1936; London, The Britons Publishing Co., London, 1955 and 1964; Palmdale, Christian Book Club of America and Sudbury and Sudbury, Bloomfield Books, 198 [?]; Kessinger Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-7661-3066-5. Project Gutenberg e-text[27][28]
  • The Socialist Network, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., 1926. Reprint: Boswell, 1933; Sudbury, Bloomfield (1989?); Noontide Press, 2000. ISBN 0-913022-06-3.
  • The Need for Fascism in Britain, London, British Fascists, Pamphlet No. 17, 1926.
  • The Surrender of an Empire, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., 1931. Reprint: Sudbury, Bloomfield Books (1990?).
  • The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co. (1932).
  • (with the pseudonym of Julian Sterne), The Secret of the Zodiac, London, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., 1933.
  • Germany and England (reprinted from The Patriot and revised), London, Boswell Publishing Co. (1938).
  • Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before the Revolution, G.P. Putnam's sons, 1938. [1st. Pub. London, Constable & Co., 1936. Reprint: Constable, 1937].
  • Spacious Days: An Autobiography, London, Hutchinson, 1949 and 1950.
  • Crowded Hours: Part Two of her Autobiography; manuscript "disappeared from her publisher's office". It remains unpublished.
  • Marie-Antoinette Intime, Paris, La Table ronde, 1981 (French translation). ISBN 2-7103-0061-3.
  • The Revolution of 1848 (ed. and date unknown). ISBN 1-4253-7315-1.

Bibliography

  • Gilman, Richard M., Behind "World Revolution": The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster, Ann Arbor, Insights Books, 1982.
  • Lee, Martha F., Nesta Webster: The Voice of Conspiracy, in Journal of Women's History, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 81 ff. Fall, 2005. Biography.

References

  1. ^ Bruno Duarte, Miguel, "Illuminati," The Inter-American Institute, December 11, 2012.
  2. ^ a b Who Are The Illuminati?; We Reveal The Truth Behind This Secret Sect The Express October 27, 2005.[page needed][unreliable source?]
  3. ^ a b c Who are the Illuminati? Independent on Sunday (London) November 6, 2005.
  4. ^ Stauffer, Vernon, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, New York, 1918.
  5. ^ a b http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/105650.html
  6. ^ Not without Honor, Harvard University Nieman Reports, March 22, 1997.
  7. ^ New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism, The Christian Century September 13, 1995.
  8. ^ The Cause of World Unrest, G. P. Putnam's Son, 1920.
  9. ^ N. Webster, Spacious Days, London and Bombay: Hutchinson & Co., 1950, pp. 103 and 172–175.
  10. ^ Thurlow, Richard C. (2006). Fascism in Britain: from Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to the National Front. London: I.B. Taurus. p. 38. ISBN 1-86064-337-X. citing Webster, Nesta (1949). Spacious Days. London. p. 173.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  11. ^ Johnston, R. M., "Mirabeau's Secret Mission to Berlin," American Historical Review 6, Nº. 2, 1901.
  12. ^ Churchill, Winston S., "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, pg. 5, 1920.
  13. ^ Quoted in Anthony Julius, Trials of The Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 719, footnote 387.
  14. ^ Pyle, Joseph Gilpin, "1919 and 1793," The Unpartizan Review 13, Nº. 25,, 1920.
  15. ^ The Need for Fascism in Britain, London, British Fascists, Pamphlet No. 17, 1926, 12pp., (Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, A. V. Alexander Papers AVAR 12/281).
  16. ^ Radner, Ephraim, "New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism", The Christian Century Vol. 112, N°. 26, September 13, 1995
  17. ^ "The Professor's Pendulum", Los Angeles Times; November 9, 1989
  18. ^ Barberis, Peter (2005-07-26). Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations: Parties, Groups and Movements of the 20th Century. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-5814-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help), page 176
  19. ^ Macklin, Graham (2007-04-15). Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley And the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84511-284-4., page 30
  20. ^ Julius, Anthony (2010-05-03). Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929705-4., page 408.
  21. ^ Lee, Martha F., "Nesta Webster: The Voice of Conspiracy," Journal of Women's History 17 (3), Fall 2005.
  22. ^ The Life Of Hilaire Belloc, by Robert Speaight, 1957, pp. 456–8.
  23. ^ Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, by Umberto Eco, 1994, pp. 137-9.
  24. ^ Egan, Maurice Francis, "Democracy and the French Revolution," The New York Times, June 27, 1920.
  25. ^ Boynton, H. W., "A New History of the French Revolution," The Weekly Review 2, Part. II, 1920.
  26. ^ Pratt, Julius W., "The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy," The South Atlantic Quarterly 19, Nº 4 , 1920.
  27. ^ "Nesta H. Webster’s Secret Societies," Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon A.F. & A.M. Updated: July 27, 2001.
  28. ^ Heckethorn, Charles William, The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, Vol. 2, George Redway. London, 1897.
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