Douglas Reed
Douglas Launcelot Reed (11 March 1895 - 26 August 1976) was a British journalist, playwright, novelist and author of a number of books on politics. His book Insanity Fair (1938) was influential in analyzing the state of Europe and the rise of Adolf Hitler before the Second World War. By the time of his death, Reed had fallen victim to an organized campaign of character assassination reserved for those critical of Jewish supremacism; his best known work on the Jewish Question is The Controversy of Zion.
Biography
At the age of 13, Reed began working as an office boy, and at 19 a bank clerk. At the outbreak of the First World War 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 a variety of major European cities including Warsaw, Moscow, Prague, Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest.
According to Reed, he resigned from his job by expostulant letter in protest at the appeasement of Hitler after the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the following outbreak of the Second World War, Reed retired to Durban, South Africa. In his Insanity Fair, Reed recounted that he was informed that he had to leave Germany quickly, and there was concern as to his whereabouts in diplomatic circles.
Richard Thurlow confirms that Reed was one of the first scholarly writers to state that Hitler did not persecute the Jews as per post-war propaganda.
In the 1960's Reed was outspoken in his opposition to the decolonization of Africa, considering the Black Africans to be unable to govern themselves and needing prolonged colonial tutelage. In his "The Battle for Rhodesia" (1966) [1] Reed explicitly compared decolonization to the above-mentioned appeasement of Hitler and outspokenly supported Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence, arguing that Smith's Rhodesia had to be defended as "the last bulwark against the Third World War", like Czechoslovakia had to be defended in 1938.
Works
- The Burning of the Reichstag (1934)
- Insanity Fair: A European Cavalcade (Jonathan Cape, 1938)
- Disgrace Abounding (do., 1939)
- Fire and Bomb: A comparison between the burning of the Reichstag and the bomb explosion at Munich (do., 1940)
- Nemesis? The Story of Otto Strasser (do,1940)
- A Prophet at Home (do., 1941)
- All Our Tomorrows (do., 1942)
- Lest We Regret (do., 1943)
- The Next Horizon;: Or, Yeomans' Progress, novel (do., 1945)
- Downfall, play (do., 1945)
- From Smoke to Smother (1938-1948): A Sequel to Insanity Fair (do., 1948)
- Somewhere South of Suez (do., 1949)
- Far and Wide: A Further Survey of the Grand Design of the Twentieth Century (1951)
- The Battle for Rhodesia (HAUM, 1966)
- The Siege of Southern Africa (Macmillan, Johannesburg, 1974), ISBN 0-86954-014-9
- Behind the Scene (Part 2 of Far and Wide) (Dolphin Press, 1975; Noontide Press, 1976, ISBN 0-911038-41-8)
- The Grand Design of the 20th Century (Dolphin Press, 1977)
- Galanty Show, novel
- Reasons of Health, novel
- Rule of Three, novel
- Prisoner of Ottawa: Otto Strasser
- The Controversy of Zion (1978, 1985)[1]
See also
Quotes
| “ | The little offshoot of 1913, the "Anti-Defamation League", had by 1947 become a secret police of formidable power in America. In Doublespeak "anti-defamation" means "defamation" and this body lived by calumny, using such terms as anti-semite, fascist, rabble-rouser, Jew-baiter, Red-baiter, paranoiac, lunatic, madman, reactionary, diehard, bigot and more of the like. The vocabulary is fixed and the true nature of any writer's or newspaper's allegiance may be detected by keeping count of the number of times these trade-mark words are used. The achievement of this organization (usually known as the A.D.L.) has been by iteration to make fetishes of them, so that party politicians hasten to deny that they are any of these things. Under this regime reasoned debate became outlawed; there is something of sorcery in this subjugation of two generations of Western men to the mumbo-jumbo of Asiatic conspirators. | ” |
| “ | The plan I think is the old one of world dominion in a new form. The money power and the revolutionary power have been set up and given sham but symbolic shapes, (Capitalism or Communism) and sharply defined citadels (America and Russia). Such is the spectacle publicly staged for the masses, but what if similar men with a common aim secretly rule in both camps and propose to achieve their ambition through the clash between those masses? I believe that any diligent student of our times will discover that this is the case. | ” |
References
- ↑ Douglas Reed, 1895-1976 (HTML). Contemporary Authors Online. Thomson Gale, 2007 (2007). Retrieved on 2007-08-28.
External links
- Douglas Reed.co.uk Comprehensive compilation of his works
- Profile of Douglas Reed
