Jorian Jenks and the Fascist Arguments for a Jewish Homeland

On Sunday night, Lobster put up my review for them of Philip M. Coupland’s Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks (Abingdon: Routledge 2017). Jenks was the son of a Liberal lawyer, but from childhood he always wanted to be a farmer. After studying at agricultural college in Britain, he then went to New Zealand to seek his fortune there. He couldn’t acquire a farm, and so worked as an agricultural official for the New Zealand government. He returned to Britain to begin an agricultural career over here, becoming one of the pioneers of the nascent Green and organic movements.

Jenks was convinced that laissez faire economics was creating massive soil erosion and infertility. If this was not checked, mass starvation and famine would result. He believed that Britain should concentrate on developing its own agriculture to the fullest extent possible, and not live ‘parasitically’ from the produce of its colonies. This was disastrous for them, and forced the peoples of those colonies into poverty as they were forced to subsidise the production of the goods they exported to the motherland. Jenks wished to see a return to an organic, agricultural society to replace the passive proletariat into which working people had been depressed. He was bitterly critical of the influence of finance capitalism, which he believed manipulated politics from behind the scenes. Due to its covert influence, democracy was a sham.

Jenks was sincere in his desire to improve conditions for farmers and farm workers, and was part of a series of non-party political organisations which worked to accomplish this, whose members also included socialists. He joined the BUF and wrote several articles for their magazine, and drafted their agricultural policy, because he found that Mosley’s ideas for the regeneration of British agriculture were very much in line with his own. Mosley’s went much further, however, and demanded the establishment of an agricultural corporation which would include representatives of the farmers, farm workers’ union, and consumers, as part of a Fascist corporative state.

Jenks was a founder member of the Soil Association, but because of his Fascist politics, he’s obviously an extremely controversial figure. Coupland’s book notes how Jenks has been used by figures on both the Left and Right to discredit the Green movement, and how he was denounced by the present head of the Soil Association, Jonathan Dimbleby.

Jenks is therefore interesting as the subject of a biography, not just in himself, but also in the wider context of British politics, Fascism and the emergence of the British and global Green movement. He was in contact with the leaders of similar movements around the world, including America and New Zealand, where the heads of these organisations were Jewish, as well as Germany. There much of the early Green movement disgustingly appears to have been founded by Nazis like Walter Darre, the head of Hitler’s agricultural department and ‘Reich Peasant Leader’.

Jenks was also a vicious anti-Semite. He actually didn’t write or say much about the Jews. However, some of the passages where he does talk about them are chilling, as the language used is very close to genocidal, if not actually well into it. Coupland writes

Several times Jenks also paralleled the issue of agricultural vermin to the ‘Jewish problem’. On one occasion, he compared these two issues, writing that: ‘There can be no truce with Brer Rabbit any more than there can be with the undesirable alien. If he is tolerated, he takes possession. He gives no quarter and should be given none. Of the rabbit, Jenks wrote:

[s]o long as you don’t have to foot the bill it’s easy to be sentimental about him as it is to be sentimental about the Jews. But the result in each case is that the poor defenceless creature ultimately takes possession. Any sensible person will agree that the best way to stop cruelty to rabbits is to abolish them, and if modern methods could be systematically applied, abolition is by no means impossible.

A year or so later, Jenks commended Colonel Leonard Ropner, MP for his denunciation in the House of Commons of rabbits as ‘a plague’ and for his statement that ‘If virtual extermination cannot be obtained, the next best thing is to provide effective control.’ In a scarcely veiled reference to the Jews, he continued that [t]he attitude of British Union towards the rabbits is similar to its attitude towards the two-legged plague – Britons First.

Given the shadow cast over history by the German programme to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War, it is difficult to read these lines without imputing to Jenks a desire that Jews and rabbits should share the same fate. However, even in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, this was not the objective of policy, no matter how cruel and unjust the treatment of the Jewish people there, systematic murder only replaced the policy of forced emigration in the particular conjunction of circumstances from 1941 onwards. Jenks was clear about what was required for the Jews:

There is then but one solution; to remove anti-Semitism by removing the Semite, to relieve irritation by removing the irritant,, to end the circumstances which have made the Jew a parasite by bringing about the re-integration of the Jewish nation.

He suggested this might be achieved in one of the ‘sparsely-populated but fertile areas in Africa, in South America, in Asiatic Russia, in which a re-united Jewish race could create anew its nationality and establish a new home.’ This echoed BUF policy, as detailed in Mosley’s Tomorrow We Live, which demanded the compulsory resettlement of Jews in Britain to a territory other than Palestine. Jenks’ prescription for the Jewish future was additionally connected to his central assumption that a healthy national society was one rooted in the soil:

In regaining contact with the soil, it would set the Jewish character on a broader basis; in regaining national dignity, it would triumphantly fulfil its racial destiny. In withdrawing its disturbing influence from other nations, it would obtain peace and goodwill in place of strife and animosity. (Pp. 103-4).

I’m writing about his vile views of the Jews, and recommendations that they be expelled and given a homeland elsewhere, in order to criticise and attack one of the other arguments used to smear Mike and very many other, decent people as anti-Semites because they had the temerity to mention the Ha’avara Agreement. This was the brief pact Hitler made with the Zionists to send Jews to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, before the Nazis decided on their vile ‘Final Solution’ in 1942. But according to the Blairites and the Israel lobby, if you mention this, as Ken Livingstone did, you’re an anti-Semite. Mike did, as part of his defence of Livingstone in his ‘The Livingstone Presumption’, and like Red Ken, he was duly smeared.

It is an historical fact, however, that many of the people, who demanded a separate homeland for the Jews were anti-Semites and Fascists. They wanted them to be given a homeland elsewhere as a way of removing them from their real homelands in Europe. And the last paragraph, in which Jenks describes how the Jewish people would benefit from having a homeland of their own, is actually very close indeed, if not identical, to the aspirations of the Zionists themselves. They too hoped that anti-Semitism would cease if Jews became like other peoples and had a homeland of their own. And Mike, Red Ken and the others, who discussed this, were not anti-Semites for doing so. The smears against them were a vicious attempt by the Israel lobby to suppress and rewrite history in order to deal with their opponents in the Labour party.

It’s time Mike and the other decent people, who’ve been libelled and smeared, had justice and were reinstated. And for those, who libelled them instead to be investigated and brought to account for their libels.

My review is at Lobster 76. Go over to the Lobster site, click on ’76’, and then click on article when it appears on the contents.



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