Nesta H Webster Popular Books

Nesta H Webster Biography & Facts

Nesta Helen Webster (née Bevan, 24 August 1876 – 16 May 1960) was an English author who revived conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. She claimed that the secret society's members were occultists, plotting communist world domination, through a Jewish cabal, the Masons and Jesuits. She blamed the group for events including the French Revolution, 1848 Revolution, the First World War, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Her writing influenced later conspiracy theories and ideologies, including American anti-communism (particularly the John Birch Society) and the militia movement. In 1920, Webster became a contributor to The Jewish Peril, a series of articles in the London Morning Post centred on the forged document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These articles were compiled and published in the same year in book form under the title of The Cause of World Unrest. Webster claimed that the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an "open question". Before World War II, Webster was involved in British Fascist groups. Early years Born in 1876, in the North London stately home Trent Park, Webster was the youngest daughter of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan and Emma Frances Shuttleworth. She was educated at Westfield College, now part of Queen Mary, University of London. When she became an adult, she travelled around the world, visiting India, Burma, Singapore, and Japan. In 1904, she married Arthur Templer Webster, Superintendent of the British Police in India. Writing Reading the letters of the Countess of Sabran, Webster believed herself to be a reincarnation of someone from the time of the French Revolution. Her first book on the subject of the French Revolution was The Chevalier de Boufflers, followed by The French Revolution: A study in democracy, in which she credited a conspiracy based around Freemasonry as responsible for the French Revolution. She wrote that "the lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati were thus the source whence emanated all those anarchic schemes which culminated in the Terror, 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." Webster differentiated between "Continental Freemasonry" and "British Freemasonry"; while the former was a subversive force in her mind, she considered the latter "an honourable association" and a "supporter of law, order and religion". Masons of the United Grand Lodge of England supported her writings. Political views The publication of the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion led Webster to believe that Jews were the driving force behind an international conspiracy, which in World Revolution: the Plot Against Civilization she developed into a "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy behind international finance and responsible for the Bolshevik revolution. Following this, she became the leading writer of The Patriot, an antisemitic paper financed by Alan Percy. Winston Churchill praised her in a 1920 article entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People," in which he wrote "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." Webster became involved in several far-right groups including the British Fascists, the Anti-Socialist Union, The Link, and the British Union of Fascists. 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 claimed that even if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fake, they still described how Jews behave. Webster dismissed much of the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany as exaggeration and propaganda, having abandoned her anti-German views due to her initial admiration of Adolf Hitler. She came to oppose Hitler after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Webster favoured "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. She favoured women being allowed to vote and favoured 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 conspiracy writing. Much of her conspiracy theories and theorizing was Anti-German in nature, often combining this with her Anti-Communism, claiming that Germans were allied with the Soviet Union. Within her obsession with secret societies the German Vereinigung Vergewältiser Völker and Druidenorden were among her obsessions. According to her, both of these organisation held a pro-Soviet bent. With regards to the VVV, she alleged that it derived from the League for Small and Subject Nationalities and was secretly funded by a mysterious American financier John de Kay. The point here is that because the founder of the League for Small and Small Subject Nationalities Dudley Field Malone was rumored to have been an attorney for the first Soviet Embassy in America. Similarly, the Druidenorden according to Webster was secretly led-by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who had served both as Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic and as the ambassador to the Soviet Union. The activities she blamed the Druidenorden for included the nascent Zionist movement in Mandatory Palesti.... Discover the Nesta H Webster popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Nesta H Webster books.