| Abstract: | Abstract Ruotsila's article is the first in-depth examination of the development of the racialist and antisemitic thinking of one of the main expositors of British radical-right doctrine in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Viscount Sydenham of Combe. An active participant in all the major debates of the radical right, a popularizer of conspiracy theories to explain Bolshevism, Zionism and modern internationalism, Sydenham had unusually close connections with a wide variety of conservative (and later fascist) organizations and opinion-formers on both sides of the Atlantic. These gave him notable, and notably well-seized, opportunities to influence debate and help shape the categories that have, ever since, guided radical-right thinking. Ruotsila charts Sydenham's commentary on socialism and perceived German subversion in the pre-First World War period, and explores the linkages that he, and the wider movement of which he was a representative, forged between German power politics, Bolshevik revolutionaries and a supposed Jewish conspiracy. Ruotsila's particular contribution lies in the link made between these fairly commonplace radical-right notions and anti-Zionism, and opposition to the League of Nations and to the international projects of liberalism more generally. These points of the anti-modernist and anti-internationalist argument are shown to have been derivatives of a racialist, eventually antisemitic, conception of a world Jewish conspiracy. Ruotsila shows the development of Sydenham's thought to have proceeded from general, at the time almost consensual, racialist assumptions through anti-socialism to a full-blown antisemitic conspiracy theory. |
