Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords

Abstract

The internationalization of political antisemitism in the postwar period has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Studies of organized political antisemtism and far right extremism in postwar Britain has similarly suffered from a lack of focus on the increasingly transatlantic nature of the phenomenon. American scholars meanwhile have determined that the impetus for the ideological transmission of repackaged antisemitic tropes shifted from the Old World to the New after 1945. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting a detailed case study of the Anglo–American activities of Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, the doyen of conspiratorial antisemitism in postwar Britain. Chesterton was the author of The New Unhappy Lords, which provided the far right on both sides of the Atlantic with a cogent and coherent antisemitic critique of the forces perceived to be driving globalization and which he believed threatened white racial and cultural identity. This article explores the importance of The New Unhappy Lords on a national and international level, assessing its impact on the far right in the United States before moving to locate its importance in terms of the contemporary debate within the transatlantic far right as to who or what constitutes the greatest threat to white racial survival, Islam or Judaism.