A Martyr to the Anti-Semitic Cause: Captain Archibald Ramsay M.P. and his ‘The Nameless War’

Captain Archibald Ramsay is a figure who in many ways deserves to be far better known than he is in British political history. He can perhaps be referred to as a true idealist and a man who sacrificed greatly for what he believed in. Fortunately, a decent quasi-biography of Ramsay has been written and his importance recognised by those scholars concerned with the so-called ‘Nazi fifth column’ (that never actually existed) and early to mid-twentieth century anti-Semitism in Britain. (1) Ramsay was even the indirect subject of a documentary, which unfortunately simply pilloried him without trying to explain his views. Ramsay was also the probable source of inspiration for the ‘Friday Club’ and its leader Guy Spencer portrayed as an active National Socialist and a supporter of the British Union of Fascists, in the first series of the popular British period murder mystery drama: ‘Foyle’s War’. (2)

After Ramsay’s internment due to the - shall we say - unconstitutional regulation 18b (despite being a sitting member of parliament at the time), which was aimed at the non-existent ‘fifth column’ and was discontinued towards the end of the war. Ramsay began writing a small book cataloguing his experiences and putting forward his ideas. This project in time became the quite well-known book called ‘The Nameless War’. (3)

The book itself is not very innovative as it is largely confined to a combination of putting forth Ramsay’s comments on the origins of the Second World War and commenting on his internment under regulation 18b. However, Ramsay does spend quite a bit of time in the work restating his beliefs in a simple and matter of fact way, which both indicate that the author is well-read and educated as well as quite an able writer of propaganda.

The fact that ‘The Nameless War’ went through four editions that I know of in ten years from its first publication in 1952 to the fourth edition (1962) - that I acquired with many other interesting volumes from Professor Revilo Oliver’s estate - speaks for itself. The book itself has to my knowledge retained its popularity in anti-jewish circles and is still read by British nationalists today even if Ramsay is not popular among philo-Semitic groups like Britain First.

According to Griffiths - and to which surmise I agree on the basis of my own research - Ramsay was really a Christian anti-communist who came to anti-Semitism rather late in life as the result of his research into the origins, causes and consequences of the Bolshevik revolution. Ramsay was led to anti-Semitism by reading such authors as the learned Fr. Denis Fahey who - also arguing from a Christian anti-communist point of view - pointed out the evidence which was then widely circulating that the origins of the Bolshevik revolution lay among the jews. We cannot reasonably or rationally condemn Ramsay for believing and arguing this to be true as it was credible information from numerous eyewitnesses that confirmed the ‘jewish Bolshevik’ thesis. (4) In essence Ramsay concluded that because the Bolshevik revolution, the Comintern and the individual Bolshevik parties outside the Soviet Union were heavily influenced - or even largely controlled - by jews that therefore the problem went beyond Marx and Lenin et al, but rather to the jewish people as a whole.

While it is true that Ramsay’s conclusion was largely correct: his logic does leave something to be desired in so far as Ramsay does not seem to have taken into account in his writings (or elsewhere) that there were numerous jews who were strong anti-Communists as well as those jews who were strong Communists. In essence Ramsay needed a theme to unify this disparate reality (which although he doesn’t consider it he does seemed to have realised was to some degree the case) which he found - perhaps predictably at this time in history - in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purport to be a jewish revolutionary document of grand strategy, which allowed Ramsay to argue that this dual aspect of the jews (i.e., strong anti-Communism or strong Communism) was part of the plot in the same way it had been during the French revolution with the Illuminati (per Nesta Webster’s theory concerning the French Revolution, which was then very popular).

This unifying theme that Ramsay found in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was something that would stay with Ramsay’s writing from the Spanish Civil War - when he first read the Protocols - and his death some years after the Second World War. It tends to permeate his writing and that is true of his last book: ‘The Nameless War’. While we can criticise Ramsay’s approach and use of facts what we cannot do is deny that at the time when he wrote ‘The Nameless War’: it was a cogent work based on decent references and information. It has not aged well, but then not many anti-Semitic works have because the information that they provide is representative only of what was then current academic and intellectual opinion as opposed to the information that has since become available, which unfortunately does discredit much of what Ramsay has to say in ‘The Nameless War’ as well as many other anti-Semitic works.

However what Ramsay does give us in ‘The Nameless War’ is a poignant account of and his experiences during his imprisonment under Regulation 18b similar to those given by two other prominent Regulation 18b detainees; Arnold Leese in his autobiography ‘Out of Step’ (5) and Admiral Sir Barry Domville in his autobiography of his experiences after the first World War, in the inter-war period and during the Second World War ‘From Admiral to Cabin Boy’. (6) For similar reminisces about the disgusting conduct of other Allied governments during and after the war towards their own citizens who were so vile as to want to halt the spread of Communist barbarism, Masonic influence and/or jewish power, then please see for example Franklin Knudsen’s ‘I was Quisling’s Secretary’. (7)

I do not feel it would be of value to go through Ramsay’s ‘The Nameless War’ in any detail as it is - as I have said - largely a rehash of common pro-German, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic ideas at the period that Ramsay wrote that can be read about in more detail than Ramsay gives in numerous anti-Semitic, anti-Communist or revisionist standard works regarding the Bolshevik revolution and the lead up to and Allied/Soviet conduct of the Second World War. However, whatever we may think of Ramsay’s ideas with the benefit of hindsight: we cannot but admire the bravery and fortitude of a man who stood up for what he believed in and kept his priorities straight even when faced with a completely hostile situation as he found in Britain after the Second World War when it would have far easier to simply lay low and pretend to have been ‘reformed’.

So thus, while we must accord Ramsay much respect: we must not let our respect for his person colour our critical judgement of ‘The Nameless War’, which while a pleasant read for any convinced anti-Semite such as myself is unfortunately not a cogent work of anti-Semitism, but rather its only real present value lies in the account Ramsay gives in its pages of his illegal detention under Regulation 18b.

References

(1) Richard Griffiths, 1998, ‘Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-Semitism 1939-1940’, 1^st Edition, Constable: London

(2) ‘Foyle’s War: The White Feather’, Season 1, Episode 2. Wikipedia claims that the inspiration was British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, but I rather doubt this precisely because Ramsay was the founder of the ‘Right Club’ and was thought of as an excellent speaker, while Mosley didn’t maintain clubs in London and nor did he work with the largely aristocratic milieu that the ‘Friday Club’ is portrayed as having, which the ‘Right Club’ of Ramsay had.

(3) Archibald Ramsay, 1962, ‘The Nameless War’, 4^th Edition, Britons: London

(4) I have been reproducing these numerous eye-witness testimonies and other contemporary/modern accounts of the relationship between jews and communism in my ‘Sources on Jews and Communism’ series on this blog.

(5) Arnold Leese, n.d. (probably 1951-1952), ‘Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel-Doctor’, 1^st Edition, Self-Published: Guildford

(6) Barry Domville, 2008, [1948], ‘From Admiral to Cabin Boy’, 1^st Edition, Historical Review Press: Uckfield

(7) Franklin Knudsen, 1967, ‘I was Quisling’s Secretary’, 1^st Edition, Britons: London