Peter Huxley-Blythe

Peter Huxley-Blythe (16 November 1925 – 18 August 2013) was a British author and fascist.

Early life

Huxley-Blythe was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the son of Annie Huxley and Henry Blythe. His father was a self-proclaimed "consultant hypnotist" who often worked as a stage hypnotist in the music halls and once ran as a candidate for the Labour Party under the slogan "Look into my Eyes and Vote for Me". Shortly after his birth, his family moved to London. His parents' marriage broke up when he was young and he was brought up by his mother. He attended Chapel Royal Hampton Court and the St Mary of the Angels school, where he specilised in choir singing. As a teenager, he was strongly attracted to the British Union of Fascists movement led by Sir Oswald Mosley. He attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and in 1939 he was assigned to the training ship HMS ''Arethusa''. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Navy in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific theaters. He went to sea in 1942, and served abroad HMS ''Renown'' for two years. He then served on abroad HMS ''Highflyer'', HMS ''Virago'' and HMS ''Rapid''.

Fascism

An extreme anti-communist with a hankering for authoritarian leadership, after his honourable discharge from the Navy he joined the Union Movement, Oswald Mosley's successor to the British Union of Fascists, and became close to the American thinker Francis Parker Yockey. When Yockey broke with Mosley, Huxley-Blythe followed the former into the European Liberation Front (ELF). Huxley-Blythe shared Yockey's fears about the "cultural-racial decline" of the West, and like him saw the United States as a "mongrelised" society that was a corrupting influence on the rest of the world. The 12-point plan of the ELF, which was partially written by Huxley-Blythe, called for "the immediate expulsion of all Jews and other parasitic aliens from the Soil of Europe" and the "cleansing of the Soul of Europe from the ethical syphilis of Hollywood". In 1950, having remained an officer with the Royal Naval Reserve, he was called up to service during the Korean War and lost touch with Yockey. During his Korean War service, he got to know a Lieutenant Hillary Cotter, a self-proclaimed "Catholic fascist" who was to influence his thinking. It was through Cotter that Huxley-Blythe first learned of the Russian Liberation Army, better known as the Vlasov Army, which became a subject that was to greatly interest him for the rest of his life. His interest in the Russian Liberation Army was to "change radically his views about Russia".

After his return from Korea, Huxley-Blythe resumed his far-right associations. He claimed he broke with Yockey over what he claimed were Yockey's pro-Soviet views, writing in a letter to the FBI in 1961 that he ceased associating with Yockey when the latter "praised Soviet policy in Germany" and urged his followers "to help him organise secret partisan bands of neo-Nazis in West Germany, bands which would collaborate with the Soviet Military Authorities against the Western occupation powers". On 2 February 1952, Huxley-Blythe wrote to the Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand, asking for permission to publish in German his anti-Semitic pamphlet ''La Clé du mystère'', writing: "I'm anxious to obtain two hundred (200) copies of your excellent work, ''The Key to the Mystery'' as soon as possible to fulfill an order I have received from Germany". Permission was granted, and on 27 February 1952 he wrote to Arcand for permission to print up to 300 more copies of ''La Clé du mystère'' for sale in Great Britain. During this time, he served as a mentor to Colin Jordan. He served as editor of the ELF's journal ''Frontfighter'' and of the Anglo-German Natinform (Nationalist Information Bureau). The Natinform was a joint venture between A. F. X. Baron and Huxley-Blythe, and fell apart when the two quarreled in 1958.

At some point in the 1950s, Huxley-Blythe became friends with a George Knupffer, the self-proclaimed tutor and adviser to the Grand Duke Vladimir, the son of Grand Duke Kirill, the pretender to the Russian throne. Huxley-Blythe became involved in quixotic plans to restore the House of Romanov to the Russian throne. Taking up the quarrels of the Russian emigres as his own, Huxley-Blythe was relentless in attacking the NTS (''Nacional'no Trudovoj Sojuz'' - the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists) as a pro-Soviet group, using the fact that the CIA sometimes financed the NTS as proof that the group was really working for the Soviet Union.

A major interest for Huxley-Blythe was the repatriation of the Cossacks, a subject that he started to research in the 1950s. Huxley-Blythe first came to widespread notice with his 1955 book ''Betrayal: The Story of Russian Anti-Communism'' where he argued that the West was losing the Cold War and claimed that CIA was actually supporting communist groups. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, Huxley-Blythe's journalism, as expressed in his newsletter ''World Survey'', started to take an aggressively anti-American tone as he became an obsessive critic of President Dwight Eisenhower, whom he attacked as being "pro-Communist". Huxley-Blythe attracted a following among the elements of American right disenchanted with Eisenhower, who had been elected president in 1952 on a platform calling for the "rollback" of communism, but in office pursued the same "containment" policy as Harry Truman. Knupffer also served as the London correspondent of ''Task Force'', the journal of an American ultra-conservative force, Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC). Through Knupffer, Huxley-Blythe got in touch with the DAC, one of whose leaders, Pedro del Valle, called ''Betrayal'' an "excellent work" in a book review, being deeply impressed with Huxley-Blythe's thesis that the CIA was supporting communist groups instead of anti-communist ones. ''Task Force'' combined its August and September editions of 1956 in order to reprint ''Betrayal'', calling it "one of the most important articles it has ever been a privilege to publish". Likewise, the American journal ''Right'' was impressed with Huxley-Blythe's pamphlet ''Insecure Security'', which claimed that the West was losing the Cold War, and an editorial in 1958 stated that Huxley-Blythe was "no stranger to well informed American patriots." Huxley-Blythe's belief in white supremacy, his attacks on nationalists demanding independence in Britain's African colonies, his opposition to non-white immigration, and his equally vehement opposition to the American civil rights movement, helped to make him a well-known figure to the American far right. In the 1950s, there was a tendency for Anglo-American white supremacists to see themselves as threatened by a common foe, and to link support for segregation in the United States with the struggle to maintain the British Empire in Africa.

In his articles, Huxley-Blythe claimed to be in contact with vast underground armies behind the Iron Curtain, which were ready to rise up the moment that the West started a policy of "rollback". Huxley-Blythe compared the nuclear deterrence policies of the Eisenhower administration to the Maginot Line, demanding that the West undertake an offensive foreign policy to liquidate the Soviet Union once and for all. In 1958, he merged his journal ''World Survey'' with Pearson's journal ''Northlander'' to better promote "scientific and forward looking nationalism." Together with Roger Pearson he co-founded the Northern League in 1958, whose stated purpose was to protect the "Nordic race" from the "annihilation of our kind" and to struggle "against forces which would mongrelise our race and civilisation." In 1967, the American historian Kurt Tauber described Huxley-Blythe as very active in a number of neo-Nazi groups in both West Germany and the United Kingdom from the late 1940s onward, and as a leading anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Within far-right circles in Britain, Huxley-Blythe had the reputation of "a reckless adventurer."

In 1958, he demanded in a public letter to the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that Britain pay reparations to the survivors of the Cossack repatriation, a request that was refused. Afterwards, Huxley-Blythe drew up a petition which he submitted to Queen Elizabeth II, criticising Macmillan and demanding that Britain pay compensation to the Cossacks. A major theme of Huxley-Blythe's writings was a tendency to equate "Western civilization" with being whiteness and Christianity, together with a deep fear of "cosmopolitism" and racial "degeneracy". Huxley-Blythe was obsessed with the theme of maintaining racial purity for the "Nordic race" (defined as white, Christian people originating form north-west Europe) and believed that various phenomena such as non-white immigration to Britain and the civil rights movement in the United States were all part of the same "Communist plot" to destroy the "Nordic race" via miscegenation. Another major theme of the writings of Huxley-Blythe and other writers associated with the Northern League was the basic inequality of humanity, supported by pseudo-scientific studies purporting to prove that non-white people had lower IQs than white people.

In April–May 1961, he covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann