James Strachey Barnes

James Strachey Barnes (7 September 1890 – 25 August 1955) was a British journalist and political scientist.

Biography

He was born in India, the son of Hugh Shakespear Barnes and his wife Winifred Strachey, daughter of Sir John Strachey. Brought up in Florence by his Strachey grandparents, he was educated at St Aubyns School Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He became a Roman Catholic convert in 1914.

Barnes served in the Guards and Royal Flying Corps during World War I. He then worked in the Foreign Office Intelligence department, to 1919. Subsequently, he lived in Italy, disliking British life as he found it. He was a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, and a friend of Benito Mussolini.

Barnes became the leader of the Centre International des Études Fascistes (CINEF) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Other British founders were Edmund Garratt Gardner and Walter Starkie; George Clarke, 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe and Arnold Leese were members. Strachey's The Universal Aspects of Fascism was published in CINEF's journal, along with articles by Edmondo Rossoni, Augusto Turati and Gioacchino Volpe. Barnes became foreign editor of the periodical Social Justice.

His 1928 book The Universal Aspect of Fascism received some attention both in Italy and in Europe. Mussolini wrote the second edition's preface.

In 1933, he was the successor to Sir Edward John Buck (1862–1948) as Reuters chief correspondent with the Indian government. On October 1935, Barnes was appointed Reuter's war correspondent with the Italian Expeditionary Force during the invasion of Ethiopia.

He worked to publicise Fascist Italy during World War II. His own Fascist views included palingenesis, anti-Semitism, and opposition to liberalism. After the war he lived in Italy. On the idea of Fascism, he described:

Fascism may be defined generally as a political and social movement having as its objective the re-establishment of a political and social order, based upon the main current of traditions that have formed our European civilisation, traditions created by Rome, first by the Empire and subsequently by the Catholic Church.

Barnes attempted to get Ezra Pound released from St. Elizabeths Hospital. He tried to influence Fulton J. Sheen and Clare Boothe Luce in Pound’s favor. At the time of his death he was preparing an appeal to Winston Churchill.

James Strachey Barnes died in Rome.

Works

• The Universal Aspects of Fascism (1928)
• Fascism (1931)
• Half a Life (1934)
• Half a Life Left (1937)
• A British Fascist in the Second World War: The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943-45 (2014; edited by Claudia Baldoli and Brendan Fleming)

References

• Bradshaw, David, and Smith, James (2013). "Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes (“The Italian Lord Haw-Haw”) and Italian Fascism," Review of English Studies, Vol. LXIV, No. 266, pp. 672–93.
• Diggins, John P. (1967). "American Catholics and Italian Fascism," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 51–68.
• Liddell Hart, B. H. (1928). "The Universal Aspects of Fascism," The Living Age, Vol. CCCXXXIV, No. 4327, p. 655.
• Linehan, Thomas (2000). British Fascism, 1918-1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Jackson, Paul (2015). "James Strachey Barnes and the Fascist Revolution: Catholicism, Anti-Semitism and the International New Order." In: Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
• West, W. J. (1987). Truth Betrayed. London: Duckworth.

External links

• Works by James Strachey Barnes at Unz.com
• Works by James Strachey Barnes at Open Library