The making of a British Fascist : The case of A.K. Chesterton.

The thesis is based upon a belief that it is possible to obtain a
clearer understanding of the causes, consequences and complexities
of British Fascism through studying the process of politicization,
from childhood to full Fascist political consciousness, of Mosley's
Director of Publicity and Propaganda in the British Union of
Fascists - Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, M.C. (1899-1973).
In order to trace through the exact nature of Chesterton's road to
Fascism, those events and ideas which can be seen as crucial to
his ideological evolution are highlighted. These include his childhood, spent amidst the jingoistic patriotism, overt racism and
covert anti-Semitism of fin de siecle South Africa; his cloistered
private education in England (1911-1914); his dreadful and yet
uplifting experiences of war, while still intellectually and
emotionally a child; the bleak disillusionment of peace - his
return to South Africa in 1919, where he was faced with the
realities of Afrikaner nationalism and white trade unionism, in
opposition to Chesterton's beloved British Empire, which drew
Chesterton into armed conflict under most unhappy circumstances;
his return to England in 1924 and immersion in the small-minded
world of provincial journalism; his development of a romantic
literary intellectualism which led him to the transfer of
essentially metaphysical values into the realm of political
analysis; and finally the impact of Fascist ideology itself, with
its extreme xenophobia, cultural nationalism, mystical historicism
and rabid anti-Semitism.
The result is a portrait of Chesterton which explains his
motivation in terms of a complex mix of personal, intellectual,
and contextual forces,and thus demythologises the man, removing
the easy-to-manage hate figure and replacing him with a
complicated figure of tragic contradictions. A comparison of
Chesterton's Fascist beliefs with those of Mosley and William
Joyce reveals that each was motivated by different obsessions,
suggesting that inter-war Fascism was a coalition of many strands
of opinion, held loosely together by certain common assumptions.