[HN Gopher] Sex, scandal and high society in Chips Channon's unc... ___________________________________________________________________ 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-05 23:00 UTC)