Douglas Reed
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Part of a series on |
| Far-right politics in the United Kingdom |
|---|
 |
Douglas Lancelot Reed (11 March 1895 – 26 August 1976) was a British novelist and political commentator. His book Insanity Fair (1938) examined the state of Europe and the megalomania of Adolf Hitler before World War II. Subsequently, Reed believed in a long-term Zionist conspiracy to impose a world government on an enslaved humanity.[1] He was also staunchly anti-Communist, and once wrote that Nazism was a "stooge or stalking horse" meant to further the aims of the "Communist Empire."[2] When The Times ran his obituary, it condemned Reed as a "virulent antisemite".[3]
At the age of 13, Reed began working as an office boy, and at 19, a bank clerk. At the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in the British Army. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, gaining a single kill in aerial combat and severely burning his face in a flying accident (Insanity Fair, 1938). Around 1921, he began working as a telephonist and clerk for The Times. At the age of 30, he became a sub-editor. In 1927, he became assistant correspondent in Berlin, later transferring to Vienna as chief central European correspondent. He went on to report from European centres including Warsaw, Moscow, Prague, Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest.[4]
According to Reed, he resigned his job in protest against the appeasement of Hitler after the Munich Agreement of 1938. In Somewhere South of Suez: a further survey of the grand design of the Twentieth Century (1949), Reed wrote that his resignation came in response to press censorship which prevented him from fully reporting "the facts about Hitler and National Socialism." He believed that by becoming a "journalist without a newspaper," he would be free to write as he chose.
His 1938 book Insanity Fair analysing the situation in pre-war Europe brought him worldwide fame. His next few books were also bestsellers.
Reed spent the duration of the Second World War in England; in 1948, he moved to Durban, South Africa. In his 1951 book Far and Wide he wrote: "During the Second World War I noticed that the figures of Jewish losses, in places where war made verification impossible, were being irresponsibly inflated, and said so in a book. The process continued until the war's end when the figure of six millions was produced… No proof can be given". Reed was subsequently banned by established publishers and booksellers, and his previous titles were often removed from library shelves.[5]
His career as a published author effectively over, Reed nevertheless spent several years, including in New York and Montreal, working on his magnum opus The Controversy of Zion. Despite some initial discussions with a publisher, the manuscript was never submitted.[5]
In the 1960s Reed opposed the decolonization of Africa. In his The Battle for Rhodesia (1966) he explicitly compared decolonization to the appeasement of Hitler; he supported Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom, arguing that Smith's Rhodesia had to be defended as "the last bulwark against the Third World War", just as Czechoslovakia should have been defended against Hitler in 1938.
Reed died in Durban in 1976. Two years later The Controversy of Zion was finally brought to print, the manuscript having lain on top of a wardrobe in Reed's home for over two decades.[5]
