Reading Major-General Richard Hilton's 'Imperial Obituary'

I have long been a collector - partly out of intellectual interest and partly out of personal interest - of the publications of the old Britons publishing society. (1) One of the more obscure publications put out by the Britons in their approximately sixty year history was a book by a British Major-General (of Artillery) called Richard Hilton. It was named somewhat oddly considering ‘Imperial Obituary: The Mysterious Death of the British Empire’ (2) considering what he actually wrote.

It is certainly one of the more unusual books that the Britons publishing society put out given that it cannot really decide what it is: short history of Britain, trenchant defence of nationalism and traditional values or a summarized expose of the (then) enemies of the British Empire.

It is on the latter element on which I wish to briefly focus as Hilton is one of the few authors who I have seen refer to one of the best - but yet least known (let alone read) - of Nesta Webster’s books: ‘The Surrender of an Empire’. (3)

In it Webster prophetically catalogues many of the social, political and economic trends that were to tear apart the British Empire and passionately argues that the handling of subversive organisations within the Empire - such as the Zionists and the Indian as well as the Egyptian Nationalists - was symptomatic of the work of a group of left-wing - often jewish, -conspirators and their stooges/flunkies (such as the generally execrable Winston Churchill) who were almost psychotically war-mongering against Germany (hence her positive comments about Hitler [which Hilton obviously doesn't mention]) but yet who were a mixture of peacenik and beatnik (who you didn't want be downwind of whatever else happened) in relation to dealing with those who did things they didn't like and who didn't happen to speak German as their first language.

Webster points out that it was jews - specifically Rufus Isaacs [aka Lord Reading] - in the ‘British’ establishment who deliberately paved the way for the destruction of the Empire by forcing onto the (perhaps surprisingly for modern ears) unwilling natives who were having much too much of a good time of it under the British to want to give it up.

As Hilton himself points out: the destruction of the British Empire (which ultimately led to the isolation and destruction of Rhodesia and then South Africa [that Hilton sagely predicts]) was not a case of assuaging ‘popular discontent’ among the fuzzy-wuzzies, but rather a dictum from the ‘British’ elite (who might have been circumcised but by god they had been Eton too) that the British were going to stop being stalwart stewards and become snivelling socialists instead (with supposedly ‘popular’ movements for ‘national liberation’ being merely an excuse).

This Hilton demonstrates rather adroitly by pointing out that the Conservative party meetings and topics for discussion before the First World War and those after the Second World War were quite literally poles apart. Before the First World War it was about duty and doing the right thing for Britain and after it was all about ‘equal rights’ and the ‘wave of the future’. Hilton’s term for this de-fanged right-wing sentiment (whatever its other faults) is also rather apt: those of a pale pink hue.

I am sure Hilton would not have been too surprised (given his vituperative comments about the idea of legalizing homosexuality [which he refuses to call anything but sodomy] at one point in his book) that the several recent heads of the British Conservative Party (and two recent British Prime Ministers no less) have been of part-jewish origin and have had as their two prime pieces of legislative interest: the ‘plight’ of homosexuals in Russia (ahh poor things: they aren't allowed to seduce kids too. Boo hoo) and forcing churches to accept ‘gay marriage’ (religious freedom doesn't matter: since you aren't a ‘minority’).

Hilton never once suggests it is the jews who destroyed the British Empire, but rather he avoids the issue of identification altogether (following a then common trend among right-wing European writers) and is content merely to ascribe the collapse of the British Empire to unnamed forces.

However the fact that he mentions Nesta Webster, the League of Empire Loyalists (led by Arthur Keith Chesterton who was an anti-jewish literary luminary par extraordinaire) and jewish individuals (such as Rufus Isaacs) whenever he talks about the mysterious/unnamed forces: it becomes clear that Hilton is simply not being honest with his readers.

The problem was the jews and he knew it.

References

(1) A summarized if slightly jaundiced history of the Britons publishing house can be found in Gisela Lebzelter, 1978, ‘Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918-1939’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: London

(2) Richard Hilton, 1968, ‘Imperial Obituary: The Mysterious Death of the British Empire’, 1st Edition, Britons: Chulmleigh

(3) Nesta Webster, 1931, ‘The Surrender of an Empire’, 3rd Edition, Boswell: London