Letters to the Editor
The Establishment Christopher Sykes 'Servant of the County' Margaret Cole 'The Outsider' B. J. Taylor The Dead Sea Scrolls Edmund Wilson Stage Designing Cecil Beaton Nationalised Prodigality Howard Marten What Kind of School? Perplexed
THE ESTABLISHMENT Sul,—The letter in your issue of June 15 from Sir Norman Angell is of great interest. I think he puts into perspective a view not only of,the Establishment Mr. Fairlie has in mind, but Many other establishments which have caused much needless alarm.
When I was young and Hitler was little thought of, I used to be told by the more advanced of my friends that if the world was in a bad state this was largely due to banking Interests. When Hitler was in power I always found it easy to resist the propaganda about the Jews which was loosed by his party be- cause I had already heard and grown sceptical about the similar and similarly tall Story about bankers which I had heard from ,111Y advanced friends. Hitler, it will be remem- bered, went on with his tall story about the Jews for a long time, and when war came I found myself, during an inglorious period, in n propaganda office, charged with contradict- ing the nonsense. Among suggestions for doing so which I received was one which seemed to inc to contain equal nonsense : a proposition, manufactured by my old friends of the advanced Left, that it was upper-class life, tiPPer-class types, country squires and so forth, that kept the world in a bad state, and these things were mysteriously the power behind grub- 111, little Adolf. I was urged to announce that our great war aim was to liquidate squire- arehies. To my lasting regret my friend the late Philip Jordan was deceived by this unsurpassed twaddle, and gave expression to it in his Writing, That an intelligent man, as he was, Could believe such things perplexed me till I came to study anti-Semitism. Five years ago 1 was studying for an essay I subsequently wrote on the origins of the Balfour Declaration. It seemed necessary for my purpose to know something about anti- Semitism, so I undertook a thorough study With the help of Mr. Isaiah. Berlin (sorry to drag his name in as he hates it, but veritas Prevalebii). I came to know the writings of Bernard Lazare and through him I made acquaintance with the Abbe Barruel who lived at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Barruel • is a great name in anti-Semitic history, and he has many Unconscious followers. His Memoires pour v0 NIP' d l'histoire du Jacobinistne may be called a foundation document of modern persecution. Strangely enough the Abbe was not himself an anti-Semite----his life-struggle was against freemasonry—but he provided anti-Semitism with what it needed fifty years after his time, He argued with great plausibility that history was largely the consequence of certain terrible conspiracies of the deepest secrecy. I believe that Mr. Berlin (sorry to drag, etc.) would agree with me that Barruel invented the 'conspiracy-theory' of history. It is an immensely silly theory, more or less total bosh, but curiously tempting to many minds. The kind of Titus-Oatesy arguments that he skilfully used to show the responsihility of the Freemasons for the French Revolution have been used with yet more skill by his anti- Semite, anti-Banking, anti-British Empire, and I suppose anti-Fascist and anti-Communist successors. There is something in us all that responds to the idea of human fate being an affair of cloaks, daggetis and cellars, but the point to seize about Bhrruelism is that it is provably false: human nature is not made that way or else it would have come to a sticky end long ago, Few people today know Barruel's delightfully readable books, and his name has grown dim for the best of reasons. is it too much to hope that Mr. Fairlie may fling his Establishment theory into that big bin which now contains the Abbe's works and should contain the whole of anti-Semite literature among other piffle?—Yours faith- fully,
CHRISTOPHER SYKES
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