The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this author is (with a few notable exceptions) horribly flawed — littered with misconstruction, omissions of fact and interpretive errors designed to present him as ‘an innocent, uncomplicated man, blessed with almost permanent happiness and having no experience of suffering — hence an ideal candidate for canonisation’. That flourish, appearing in Ingrams’s third to last paragraph, was a bombshell to me, though I understand there exists a sizeable constituency pressing for Chesterton’s beatification, rebuffed in 2019 when Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton condemned his anti-Semitism.
Ingrams’s predecessors are guilty of trying either to ignore or to cleanse what-ever might blemish the appearance of saintly virtue. Ingrams instead provides a detailed explanation of how misplaced loyalty to his younger brother Cecil led Chesterton to adopt the anti-Semitic views of Hilaire Belloc, to whom Jews were un-British parasites, consisting largely of bankers and businessmen determined to take over the world.
Chesterton’s fidelity to ‘the Bellocian manifesto’ led him in turn to support fascism. He met Mussolini in Rome, and when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 wrote that Britain had no right to ‘issue a moral rebuke’, condemning those who disagreed for deferring to the same ‘Jewish conspiracy’ that vindicated Dreyfus. In the year Oswald Mosley married Diana Guinness at the home of Joseph Goebbels, Chesterton could write: ‘Fascism is worth looking at, whereas parliamentarianism is not worth looking at.’
Such pronouncements are nothing if not preposterous, yet are mere splinters compared with the industrial quantities of pine planking that comprise Chesterton’s disquisitions on the ‘Jewish problem’ which, he said, could only be solved by establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to which British Jews should be shipped.
