Nesta Webster

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Nesta Webster (1927)

Nesta Helen Webster (born August 24, 1876 - May 16, 1960 ) was a British conspiracy theorist , fascist and anti-Semite .

Life

She was born in Trent Park, Cockfosters , the youngest of 14 children of banker Robert Cooper Lee Bevan and his second wife, Emma Francis Shuttleworth . Until 1897 she attended Westfield College in Hampstead , but did not graduate. Economically independent through her wealthy father, she traveled extensively to East Asia, Burma and India , where in 1904 she married the police inspector Arthur Webster, who was born in 1866. The two had two children, Rosalind and Marjorie.

On another trip through Switzerland in the winter of 1910, Webster had a mystical experience: from then on she believed that she was the incarnation of a Comtesse at the time of the French Revolution , whose family had suffered from the terror of the Jacobins . Since then she has clearly represented monarchist and counter-Enlightenment positions, as, in her opinion, the French countess would have done her imagination. On returning to England, she began writing historical novels, the second of which was The Chevalier de Boufflers. A romance of the French Revolution (1916) was positively reviewed and had fifteen editions.

Webster delved into the scientific literature and sources on her favorite subject. The result of these efforts was her first work on conspiracy theory: The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy . Here she spread the thesis that the events from 1789 to 1794 were by no means the result of the economic crisis, the bad government of Louis XVI. and the anger provoked by it, but an intrigue of Prussia , the House of D'Orléans and the "illuminated Freemasonry" . This meant that the German secret society of the Illuminati , which had been banned since 1786, had infiltrated all French Freemasonry - a view that had been widespread since the publications of John Robison and Augustin Barruel in 1798. Webster emphasized that she was the first to uncover these connections.

The journalistic success and the threatening developments in World War I then inspired three further historical revisionist works in quick succession : The anti-communist World Revolution: The Plot against Civilization , Secret Societies and Subversive Movements , which summarized their basic ideas, and finally The Surrender of an Empire .

In 1926 she joined the British Fascists and quickly rose to their executive board. In the 1930s she was involved in the Nazi- friendly organization The Link and in Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists . She repeatedly expressed her sympathy for the Nazi regime in Germany and for Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism . These movements and the like were banned in Great Britain from the beginning of World War II .

Her other books included The Need for Fascism in Great Britain , The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution , Germany and England , where she praised Hitler for stopping the Jewish world conspiracy , and her autobiography Spacious days , published in 1949 .

Conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism

The belief in the existence of subversive forces that would plan to disrupt and overthrow the existing world order took on paranoid traits in Webster . She was prone to seeing agents of world conspiracies everywhere, which is why she always opened her front door with a loaded revolver in hand. Her paranoia was most pronounced in her 1921 work Secret societies and subversive movements , which saw six print editions. In it she tried to prove a huge world conspiracy that had conspired since the beginning of the era and infiltrated the whole world. All movements and currents that have since contradicted the teachings of true (meaning: trinitarian ) Christianity , be they Jews , Gnostics , Druze , free thinkers or socialists , without exception, Webster identifies as Freemasons and thus as parts of a single satanist or anti-Christian conspiracy .

At the center of Webster's conspiracy theories was her outspoken enmity against "the Jews," whom she accused of being the Antichrist and deliberately serving Satan in his efforts to undermine Christianity. In doing so, it relied on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , an anti-Semitic and forgeries- based text published at the beginning of the 20th century , which is supposed to prove the Jewish world conspiracy , as well as the ideologue of supposedly Jewish Bolshevism . The linking of the two main strands of conspiracy-theoretical speculation, the anti-illuminatic and the anti-Semitic branches, which should become influential in the 20th century, goes back essentially to Webster.

Reception by anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist circles

After the war, Webster was disavowed as a fascist , and her works were only received by American conspirators such as the Ku Klux Klan , the John Birch Society and the militia movement . For some years now, her conspiracy theories have been increasingly found on the Internet. The German conspiracy theorist Jan Udo Holey also relies on Webster's theses.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christof Czech: Webster, Nesta H. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , pp. 877 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  2. ↑ James Webb: The Occult Establishment. Open Court, La Salle IL 1976, ISBN 0-912050-56-X . P. 129.
  3. ↑ Christof Czech: Webster, Nesta H. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , pp. 877 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  4. ↑ Markku Ruotsila: Antisemitism. In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara / Denver / London 2003, Volume 1, p. 82 f.
  5. ↑ Christof Czech: Webster, Nesta H. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 878. (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
personal data
SURNAME Webster, Nesta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bevan, Nesta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English conspiracy theorist
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Trent Park, Cockfosters
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1960