53 Fall 2021 ick Toczek, a writer, performer, and political researcher, presents a biography of Henry Hamilton Beamish (1873-1948), a deservedly obscure English antisemite who founded in 1919 The Britons, an organization and publishing outlet (Britons Publishing Society) which continued until 1975. Beamish, the son of a Royal Navy admiral, developed an obsessive hatred for Jews while visiting South Africa at the time of the Boer War (1899-1902). Beamish came to believe that Jewish immigrants to South Africa controlled the country’s vast gold and diamond deposits, and that these Jews (he likely had the Oppenheimer family in mind) were using their rapidly accumulating wealth to pursue a scheme for global domination. When The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination) became available to Beamish and other English speakers some years later, he and a small circle of antisemites took it to be the Gospel truth. Some years later, before the outbreak of World War I, Beamish and a small band of equally obsessive antisemites noticed that London had become home to thousands of Jewish refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of them residents of the East End who mostly lived in poverty. For Beamish and others, their arrival represented an invasion in the UK of Yiddish speaking elements, who, in their eyes, were committed to polluting the population with their “tainted” blood and “malevolent” ways. This immigration did not go unnoticed by His Majesty’s Government, some of whose members gave some thought to settling Jews in East Africa. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 found Beamish, an inveterate traveler, in Johannesburg where he helped organize several British patriotic societies, including a vigilante band. These groups not only intended to aid the British war effort but, ironically, in view of subsequent developments, attacked Germans and German influence in southern Africa. By the end of the war in 1918, Beamish had returned to Britain where he pursued a career as a professional Jew-hater. He stood for parliament at a by-election but lost. He wrote various pamphlets and delivered public speeches on the threat of Jewish world domination (where, unsurprisingly, scuffles took place among those in attendance). He was aided not only by“The Protocols,” but by the reality of the Russian Revolution and the role Jews played, or allegedly played, in directing it. Against this background, Beamish and others formed The Britons in 1919. To join the organization, members were required to affirm a set of principles, including belief in God (in the Christian sense); belief that Bolshevism is essentially anti-Christian; that Bolshevism is Judaism; that the Jew menace seeks to destroy civilization; and that the Jews are a race and not a religion (p. 92). These principles constituted what the historian Norman Cohn (1915-2007) later labeled “a warrant for genocide.”Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, The Britons attracted leading antisemites of the era such as Nesta Webster, Arnold Leese, William Joyce (later identifying himself as“Lord Haw-Haw" when making pro-Nazi talks on German radio during World War II), along with various other lesser-known antisemites. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s was a virtual dream come true for Beamish and The Britons. Beamish was quick to don the Swastika and make several trips to Germany to confer with Nazi party officials, heaping praise on National Socialism and the insights its “luminaries” provided on the Jewish Question. Beamish also traveled to the United States to meet likeminded Americans, e.g., William Pelley. Unsurprisingly, he lavished praise on Henry Ford and his literary products. Beamish’s cause and his organization outlasted his death in 1948. During the 1950s and 1960s, the neo-Nazi Colin Jordan became a key figure in the effort to resurrect the antisemitic cause in the UK and, along with American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, he formed the World Union of National Socialists in 1962. As Nick Toczek points out, the population of postwar Britain underwent a significant and highly visible change with significant numbers of Commonwealth citizens, N Reviewed by LeonardWeinberg Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators By Nick Toczek Routledge (2016, 289 pp.)
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