Nesta Webster
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Nesta Helen Webster (August 24, 1876 - May 16, 1960) was a controversial historian and author who wrote several books on subjects in which she proposed or supported conspiracy theories as a mode of explanation. At least one work mentioned, among several other things, a perceived Jewish conspiracy. Arguably her most notorious was her authorship with several others, in 1920 Britain, of The Jewish Peril series of articles in the London Morning Post, centered on the Protocols of Zion. These articles were subsequently compiled and published in the same year, in book form under the title of the The Cause of World Unrest.
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[edit] Early years
She was born Nesta Bevan in the stately home Trent Park. She was the youngest daughter of Robert Bevan, a close friend of Cardinal Manning. Her mother was the daughter of Bishop Shuttleworth 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 to India, Burma, Singapore, and Japan. In India she married Captain Arthur Webster, the Superintendent of the English Police.
[edit] Obsession with French Revolution
Returning to England she started writing, and was overcome by a strong literary obsession that she had lived in eighteenth-century France. The more she read about the French Revolution the more she remembered. Her first serious book on this subject was The Chevalier de Boufflers, which Lord Cromer gave a long review in The Spectator. She sank deeper into the literature of the Revolution, spending over three years at the British Museum and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
[edit] Anti-Subversive
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 Revolutions: 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. Winston Churchill was convinced by this theory and in 1920 wrote: "This conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt ... as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution."
In her autobiography, Spacious Days, she argued that there was an "attempt to boycott my books in those quarters where the plan of world revolution was secretly entertained."
Webster also published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Need for Fascism in Great Britain and The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution. In her books she 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.
[edit] Fascist involvement
Webster became involved in several right-wing groups including the British Fascists, The Link, and the British Union of Fascists. She was also the leading writer of the anti-Semitic "The Patriot", where she supported the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany. She later published Germany and England in which she suggested that Adolf Hitler had successfully halted the Jewish attempt to control the world.
[edit] Works
- The Revolution of 1848 ISBN 1425373151
- World revolution; the plot against civilization. London: Constable and company ltd., 1921.
- Secret societies and subversive movements, Kessinger Publishing (January 2003) ISBN 0766130665
- The French terror and Russian bolshevism., Publisher: [London, Boswell Print. and Pub. Co., 1920?] OCLC: 22692582
- The Chevalier De Boufflers a Romance of the French Revolution, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1926.
- Boche and Bolshevik, with Kurt Kerlen. ISBN 1417979496
- Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before the Revolution, G.P. Putnam's sons 1937. 319 pp.
- Marie-Antoinette in time ISBN 2710300613
- The Socialist Network. ISBN 0913022063, Noontide Press, 2000. 152 pages.
