Г.К. Честертонның апталық журналы: Тарихы мен маңызы

G. K.'s Weekly was a British publication founded in 1925 (with its pilot edition surfacing in late 1924) by writer G. K. Chesterton, continuing until his death in 1936. Its articles typically discussed topical cultural, political, and socio economic issues yet the publication also ran poems, cartoons, and other such material that piqued Chesterton's interest. It contained much of his journalistic work done in the latter part of his life, and extracts from it were published as the book The Outline of Sanity. Precursor publications existed by the names of The Eye Witness and The New Witness, the former being a weekly newspaper started by Hilaire Belloc in 1911, the latter Belloc took over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother, who died in World War I: and a revamped version of G. K.'s Weekly continued some years after Chesterton's death by the name of The Weekly Review. As an alternative publication outside of the mainstream press of the time, G. K.'s Weekly never attained a particularly large readership, with its highest circulation being some eight thousand. However, it attracted significant support from several benefactors, which included notables such as the internationally famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Individuals whose work appeared in G. K.'s Weekly include public figures such as E. C. Bentley, Alfred Noyes, Ezra Pound, and George Bernard Shaw as well as (at the very beginning of his career) George Orwell. In total, the series of publications featured hundreds of articles, including well over a hundred poems. Some essays from G. K.'s Weekly have appeared in the books The Outline of Sanity, The Well and the Shallows, The End of the Armistice, The Common Man, and The Coloured Lands. Some originals of the weekly have been collected by educational institutions such as Christendom College. In fact, in founding The Eye Witness, Belloc took a title of a book of essays of his own from a couple of years before, and drew initially on a group of writers more associated with The Speaker. The papers under discussion in this article became, in practical terms, the organs of the distributist group. This came together as the Distributist League in 1926, as G. K.'s Weekly appeared as a revamped publication. The main business of the League, organisationally, fell to Titterton. The League had its own newsletter from 1931.

G. K.'s Weekly never picked up a particularly large readership, being viewed as outside of the mainstream press of the time. Its highest circulation worked out to only about eight thousand. Yet the weekly attracted significant support from several benefactors, including figures such as the internationally famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. As well, many well known writers ran material in G. K.'s Weekly such as E. C. Bentley, Alfred Noyes, Ezra Pound, and George Bernard Shaw. G. K.'s Weekly provided little financially for Chesterton; it was not a lucrative venture by any means in his mind, but he kept it going as a gesture of respect for Cecil's memory. The financial state of the publication meant that contributors could expect little or no reward. One later famous name who first broke into journalism this way was George Orwell (then going by 'E. A. Blair'). Editorial policy in the latter days of G. K.'s Weekly in terms of foreign policy and also electoral politics involved nuanced positions, with Gilbert Chesterton providing a generally moderating influence. Chesterton, for example, held ambiguous and conflicted views about Italy under fascism. Until 1929, the Distributist League broadly supported the Labour Party and the British trade union movement. Sir Henry Slesser, a notable Labour Member of Parliament, served as one of the League's biggest supporters. Attitudes to Benito Mussolini specifically (whom GKC interviewed, see the Maisie Ward biography) in the 1930s has attracted attention. Chesterton made somewhat favourable remarks about contemporary Italy in his Autobiography (1935). However, the invasion of Abyssinia proved a dicey matter for Chesterton and his League.

Gilbert Chesterton's death on 14 June 1936 brought changes to the publication. Belloc resumed as editor, with him thus having been brought back to the same position as he was in 1911. After Chesterton died in 1936 the League was near collapse but continued in a new form, until being closed down in 1940. Arthur Penty's Distributist Manifesto was published in 1937; Belloc had taken over as president, and the vice presidents included Eric Gill and T. S. Eliot.

Points often made about Chesterton's attitude to Jews relate to well known writings, both 'in the small' or casual, and in the large when he seriously addressed the question. Bernard Levin, a leading British columnist who frequently quoted Chesterton, in The Case for Chesterton brought up some of his light verse, and said "The best one can say of Chesterton's anti semitism is that it was less vile than Belloc's; let us leave it at that." Joseph Pearce wrote that It is clear that such verses may cause offence, but it is equally clear they were not intended to. Against Chesterton are also his remarks in The New Jerusalem (1920). Chesterton was, in a real sense, a Zionist. He was not, however, a Zionist without conditions. The following is from the introductory remarks in that book:

"I have felt disposed to say: let all liberal legislation stand, let all literal and legal civic equality stand; let a Jew occupy any political or social position which he can gain in open competition; let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary restrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice, if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked him out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury, if our national religion has attained to that receptive breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable and even unconscious. But let there be one single clause bill; one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other. Be it enacted, by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in Parliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab. Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab. Let him preach in St. Paul's Cathedral, but let him preach there dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him. The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land." This is seen by some as an unacceptable statement. The point is still contested. It was Chesterton's stated view, having a fondness for the dramatic, that all nations should maintain and return to traditional dress, and enjoyed wearing a classical form of dress himself in the manner of capes and swordsticks. He gave this idea free rein in his first novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill. In the chapter 'On Zionism', one also finds Chesterton's dim appraisal of the patriotism of Benjamin Disraeli (who had been baptised Anglican at age 13). He argues in effect that the former Prime Minister, due to his Jewish birth, would naturally have abandoned England (a Christian nation) in extremis:

"Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation. It is dying with the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merely as a real resting place like an inn, but as a final resting place, like a house or even a grave Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived for England, we cannot think that he would have died with her. If England had sunk in the Atlantic he would not have sunk with her, but easily floated over to America to stand for the Presidency When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it more truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeed he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case. I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance of England, [as did Dernburg Germany], and it is still true that though it was a romance, they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would have seen that the story had a happy ending, especially for themselves. These Jews would not have died with any Christian nation." Further discussion comes from comments about Jews being responsible for both the USSR's communism and the US's unbridled capitalism (1929). John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) commented:

"Chesterton's hatred of capitalism and his dread of the monolithic state were the generous responses of a man who saw the sickness of his society far more clearly than the ordinary Liberal and felt it far more deeply than the self confident Fabian social engineers. Unfortunately, though, a sense of outrage often proved as bad a counsellor in his case as it had done in Carlyle's. His diatribes against usury and corruption were those of a man on the edge of hysteria; his anti semitism was an illness. Despite this, his fundamental decency is never obscured for long. He hated oppression; he belonged to the world before totalitarianism. But the positive side of his politics – Distributism, peasant smallholdings, Merrie Englandism – led him into a hopeless cul de sac." Chesterton, however, opposed all forms of persecution of Jews and all violent anti semitism. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that: