[HN Gopher] Sex, scandal and high society in Chips Channon's unc...
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Sex, scandal and high society in Chips Channon's uncensored diaries
Author : Petiver
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-03-05 05:46 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| It's funny and strange but these kind of personal-as-political
| theories have a strange currency among those who are
| simultaneously so powerful and so ill-prepared.
|
| _Later still, this self-analysis by the man whose friends called
| him "wicked boy" leads Channon to the most extraordinary
| political theory. He is analysing the division in London between
| pro-democracy politicians and the pro-Nazis. And on 29 May 1936
| he decides he finally understands what is going on: "It is
| curious the division of racial mentality, and it reduces itself
| to a question of sex; all people, whether male or female, who are
| attracted by men and force are pro-German. The 'softies' like
| Hubert Duggan, who make a cult of female-worship, are pro-French.
| Duff Cooper, who adores women to an almost insane pitch, and is
| always trying to rape them in taxis etc, is immeasurably pro-
| French. Sometimes I wonder whether he is not also a bit pro-
| war?"_
|
| _Nobody who was worried about their future reputation would
| leave a pair of sentences like that lying around._
|
| _We don't read diarists because we admire them, but because they
| were there, and they note down what they saw and heard. "Chips"
| Channon was wrong about almost everything. But do we read
| Boswell, Casanova, Pepys, Alan Clark or even Sasha Swire for
| their judgement? We do not. We read them to be taken aback, and
| to question ourselves. Exhausting, massive, genuinely shocking,
| and still revelatory, this new edition of the Channon diaries is
| a work of irrigation and genuine scholarship. Few people may read
| them from cover to cover, but the stories they contain will
| rattle noisily around our culture for decades ahead._
| pjc50 wrote:
| A pretty much ubiquitous observation there, that fascim appeals
| to machismo and vice versa. The "female worship" sentence is
| surprising by the standard of today but I imagine that being
| "normal" until the 60s, perhaps.
|
| Interesting that even in 1936 the distinction is French vs
| German; Czechoslovakia and Poland were just trophies to be
| acquired in the dispute between the great powers.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/UOoz3
| tpmx wrote:
| The UK also had a very large amount of communist spies/traitors:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:British_spies_for_the...
| airhead969 wrote:
| Conservatives (Tories) revering Hitler. Is that a politically-
| touchy issue, a Godwin's law-ism, or an exception to each?
|
| Btw, I don't know the workings of 1930's and 1940's British
| society, but were these the type of people who condoned turning
| away the Jews of the SS Exodus?
|
| Edit: To be fair, the US turned away the MS St. Louis, of which
| 1/3 of the passengers were subsequently killed.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's one of those things which becomes clear if you look at the
| sourced history, but people who believe in the version of
| Britishness taught at school refuse to contemplate.
|
| Overt Nazism was certainly present; not just Rothermere and the
| Mail, but people like
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Mitford and Oswald
| Moseley.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-03-05 23:00 UTC)