Christopher Hitchens was a major journalist and essayist, who wrote on a great variety of subjects but an extraordinary range of magazines, like Vanity Fair and The Nation. Here he’s writing on Diana Mosley, one of a famous set of upper class English sisters, including Jessica the muckraking journalist, the novelist Nancy, and Unity, who fell in love with Hitler. Diana married Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists (satirized by P. G. Wodehouse as Sir Roderick Spode), in 1936. Hitchens' description appears in his essay "What a Lot of Parties: On Diana Mosley," published in The London Review of Books and collected in A Hitch in Time. It has been slightly edited to remove the asides.
Antisemitism is a prejudice that may sometimes be, but usually is not, lightly worn. It has great appeal to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, because it has great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot.
And it can form a bond between upper-crust types and the plebeians, a bond of sturdy race and nation against the clever and the tricky and the “hard to place”: the very “socialism of fools” that August Bebel identified and that the Mosleys tried to carry into practice.
A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject.
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