by K. R. Bolton
As we shall see, whatever Potocki’s suspicions regarding fascism and Hitlerism before the war, it was after the war that Potocki (in contrast to many others, such as Wyndham Lewis, who had supported fascism before the war) became an avid supporter of National Socialism and fascism. Perhaps he felt obliged to make a commitment as both a diehard rebel against the democratic status quo, and in realization that the post-war world was one of global democratization and Sovietization. At any rate, his sympathies after the war became more radical, rather than moderate.
The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was the occasion for what Potocki calls his “first political manifesto,”440 The Unconstitutional Crisis. Accompanied by the writer Nigel Heseltine, who assisted with editing The Right Review, and the artist George Hann, who provided the woodblock illustrations for Potocki’s publications, they distributed large quantities of the pamphlet supporting the King in Whitehall, “at the very moment the arch-traitor Baldwin was announcing the abdication.”441 He and Heseltine were later arrested for obstruction and briefly held at Buckingham Palace. At court, Whitehall tried to intervene and have Potocki charged on the text of the pamphlet, but the judge refused, and minor fines were imposed for obstruction.442
In 1939 Potocki set up The Right Review Bookshop in his flat, barred to “communists and racial enemies.”443 During the late 1930s he also elaborated on his pagan religious views, stating in Whited Sepulchers that he opposed Puritanism, Calvinism, Democracy, Christianity, and appealed to fellow pagan avengers of “the great Apostle of Paganism, Divine Julian.”444 Potocki’s primary deity was Apollo and remained so throughout his life. He was by now also in the habit of greeting friends with the “Roman”—fascist—salute, a gesture that was surely part of his rebellious nature.
KING OF POLAND
In 1939, Potocki crowned himself “Wladilsaw 5th, King of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Silesia and the Ukraine, Hospodar of Moldavia, etc., etc., etc., High Priest of the Sun” in a Rite of the Sun.445
In 1940, he and his wife Odile were jailed for two months and one month, respectively, for resisting arrest, having barricaded their flat against the police, on a “black-out offence.”446 Their occupations were entered in the register as King and Queen of Poland.
Potocki’s effort to register as a conscientious objector was unsuccessful, but he did succeed in evading military service. He founded the Polish Royalist Association and exchanged his robes for a military style uniform adorned with the Polish eagle and Potocki coat of arms. In the midst of war, a photograph of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley adorned Potocki’s cottage in Surrey, which belonged to a member of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.
KATYN
Apart from his escapades connected to the controversy surrounding Here Lies John Penis, Potocki was most proud of being the first person in England to expose the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the USSR. The Soviets insisted (until quite recently) that Katyn was a German war crime, and the British authorities tried to suppress knowledge to the contrary during the war lest it reflect badly on the British-Soviet alliance.
As claimant to the throne of Poland, Potocki was of course interested in Poland’s future after the war. He regarded the USSR as the greatest threat to Poland’s nationhood, and foresaw the likelihood of a Soviet Poland emerging from the war.447 He put his printing skills to work for Polish exiles, which included reports that were censored in the British press. He believed that occupation by Germany was preferable to that of the USSR, despite his liking for Russians as individuals.448 Potocki’s contempt for Britain was increased by its failure to come to Poland’s aid when the USSR invaded, and his support for fascism and Hitlerism in this context became more pronounced, particularly when the USSR and Britain became allies in 1941.449
In 1943, hearing rumors of Soviet atrocities among the Polish community, Potocki sought the help of the Duke of Bedford, an opponent of the war and an avid proponent of banking reform, which the Duke—like Potocki450—saw as a major aspect of the Hitler regime, and incidentally as a cause of war. The Duke in correspondence with Potocki also alluded to the rumors he had heard about the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet Union.451
In May 1943 Potocki was asked by Poles in London to expose the atrocity to the British public, and so he wrote the Katyn Manifesto. This was distributed by the thousands with the help of the Polish-government-in-exile. It was a “Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews [sic],”452 from the King of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, etc. Potocki spelled out the basic facts behind Katyn and called for a negotiated peace with the hope that Germany would recognize a united Poland and Hungary, that the “jews” would be helped “if they will even at this late hour repent and behave themselves,” the Tsar to be restored to Russia, and the King to France.453
Potocki was placed under surveillance, questions were asked in Parliament, and Potocki was attacked by the press, including the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, which described the manifesto as “poisonous filth,”454 calling Potocki a “crazy Fascist Count.” It was at this time that Potocki was jailed for “insufficient black-out,” his wife Odile having left him for fear of his anti-government views during the war.455 After release he was ordered by the Ministry of Labour to serve six months in an agricultural camp in Northumberland, which he attended in preference to conscription, adorned with his royal attire. After a month, he bade a “Heil Hitler” to the camp manager and left.
POST-WAR ENGLAND & PROVENCE
During another four years in England, Potocki maintained himself by printing and translations for the Polish-government-in-exile.456 After seeking help from the Duke of Bedford for the renewal of his passport, Potocki left for France. Seeking employment at an Indian University, Potocki wrote that he had had problems with the English because of his “violently pro-Axis” outlook during the war, an attitude that would not have been necessarily offensive to an Indian given that India continues to maintain esteem (probably about equal to that held for Gandhi) for the pro-Axis Subhas Chandra Bose. He also wrote to the American Ambassador offering his services to the USA against the USSR, his naiveté concerning the USA presumably being the result of judgment clouded by his hatred of the Soviet Union.457
In 1949, Potocki settled in Provence, which would be his home for much of the remainder of his life, apart from sojourns in New Zealand in later years, now thoroughly “hating” the “english” (sic),458 a word that he never seems to have capitalized. Before he was able to leave, however, the British legal system had one last go at him, charging him with assault on a female admirer after he pushed her out of his flat when she attempted to prevent his departure.
Before being fined £2, he had been assessed for several weeks at a psychiatric ward, but was found to be “perfectly healthy in every respect, both in body and mind.” The authorities had expected to find a New Zealand-born claimant to the throne of Poland to be mentally unsound, but the psychiatrist was instead treated to a lucid exposition of the possibility, albeit unlikely, of Potocki becoming King on the basis that in the event of confrontation between the USA and USSR the Americans would be looking for someone who could be trusted by both Germans and Poles.459
Potocki settled into an old cottage in the Draguignan countryside, bought for him for £100 by the Countess de Bioncourt. Chris Martin, who knew Potocki, writes of this period:
The Count spent his later years living in a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by olive trees in Provence. He was accompanied by a variety of lady friends and continued to work on his press. Driving around in a Citroën 2CV, flying the Polish Royal Standard he was a well-liked local figure. He also produced a translation of Adam Mickiewicz’ Dziady, or Forefathers, which is the Polish national epic and the translation of which is now a standard text in a large number of American universities. The irony, if one should look for one, is that this same standard text, beautifully produced, comes with an introduction by a Jewish professor.460 The work was—c
haracteristically—the subject of a prolonged legal tussle between the Count and the Polish Cultural Foundation, at whose instigation the work had been translated. (It is, in passing, worth mentioning that parts of the work were recited by the translator at a concert at Leighton House, West London, together with a recital by the Count’s compatriot, the pianist Richard Bielicki.)461
Stephanie de Montalk states that by 1958 there was a renewed interest in Potocki as part of a general interest in the literati of the 1930s and 1940s, and there was again media reportage, and his publications—mostly limited, small-run, hand-bound editions—became collectors’ items, as they still are, fetching high prices.462
POST-WAR FASCISM
Directly after the war Potocki was not only defiantly pro-fascist but also expressed overtly pro-Nazi sympathies. His 1945 Christmas card To Men of Goodwill had the “X” of “Xmas” printed as a swastika, and included a six-verse poem including the words “to save his life, our William Joyce.” This was at the time when Joyce, the infamous “Lord Haw Haw,” was hanged for treason for his wartime broadcasts to England from Germany. It clearly shows the nature of Potocki’s contempt for the era of democracy. Equally as rebellious is his 1946 four-page leaflet, The Nuremberg Trials, including the words “Hitler und Goering Sieg Heil.”
Not surprisingly, then, it was Potocki who printed Savitri Devi’s 11,000 swastika-emblazoned leaflets and posters that she distributed throughout war-ravaged Germany, throwing them from the back of a train and surreptitiously posting them on walls, an action that not surprisingly resulted in her detention by the Occupation Authorities. Savitri had met Potocki in England in 1946463 and also spent time with Potocki when she returned to London in the early 1960s.464
In 1959, Potocki obtained a hundred-year-old platen press and started The Mélissa Press. He now resumed his special editions, and had maintained friendships with a number of prominent literary figures, in particular Richard Aldington, who admired his efforts. Aldington wrote to Potocki that his creative work is “the only answer to the lavatory-seat wipers of literature who naturally don’t recognize a poet and a gentleman when by chance they meet him.”465
Despite his disgust at England he nonetheless commuted between Provence and Dorset, set up a press there, and issued a pamphlet advising residents of A New Dorset Worthy, who was “opposed to virtually every movement or line of thought triumphant at present,” but that was to be expected of a “genius.”466 Among his publications was Two Blacks Don’t Make a White: Remarks about Apartheid, published in 1964. He also printed The National Socialist, the journal of Colin Jordan’s British National Socialist Movement.467
Remarks about Apartheid begins with lines from fellow Right-wing (but Catholic) poet Roy Campbell, expressing a cynicism in regard to humanitarianism as a façade for ignoble purposes: “The old grey wolf of brother love / Slinks in our track with slimy fangs.” Secondly, from William Blake: “One law for the lion and for the ox is oppression.”
Potocki’s outlook on South African Apartheid was based decidedly on the general inferiority of the blacks to whites, insofar as they had not, and could not, make a civilization. However, Potocki did not extend this white supremacy to other races, for he considered the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus equals. In the case of white New Zealanders, he considered the Maori to be a superior race, deserving cultural and language accommodation as well as land compensation—the illiberal Potocki being far ahead of the liberals in his pro-Maori outlook.468
Attacks on Apartheid, Potocki claimed, were the result of the post war era of “universal humbug,” the product of a coalition of Christians, communists, and democrats. He pointed to the selective hypocrisy of the liberal conscience, which was silent about communist dictatorships, and to the record of the British Empire in their treatment of colored colonials. He drew heavily on South African Government publications citing the services that had been rendered to the blacks under Apartheid, pointing out that the Afrikaners did not dispossess indigenous blacks, but had met the Xhosa while both were migrating from opposite directions. He believed that whites should react against “racial hatred” from fellow whites “whether in South Africa, Rhodesia, Smethwick or in the Deep South.”469 According to Stephanie de Montalk, the authorities in England placed an injunction against the sale of the pamphlet.470
In 1966, Potocki took up the cause of Rhodesia. His solution to the crisis was for “Sir Ian Smith” (sic) and the Rhodesian people to proclaim Rhodesia a Kingdom and to “offer the Crown to His Grace the Duke of Montrose.”
In this way the Rhodesians will set the whole world a good example, take the wind out of the sails of the minority of piratical hypocrites in England, & provide a turning-point for the Good in the history of the world, at a time when it never needed it more. This would also be a piece of poetic justice, whereby the Grahams would be rewarded for their courage and loyalty during the disgraceful wars which England waged under the criminal Cromwell against Scotland and against the true interests of humanity.471
Potocki then outlined the genealogy of the Duke to legitimize claims to royal blood, suggesting that Rhodesia adopt the Montrose Arms as its own, which would make the country “the first of the (ex) British colonies to acquire a blazon which is a decent piece of heraldry and not an offence against good taste as e.g. the so-called coat of arms of New Zealand. . . .”
In regard to Queen Elizabeth II, Potocki declared himself to be “a pious Legitimist” and that the only lawful King of England and territories is Albrecht, “de jure King of Bavaria,” and suggested that the Duke of Montrose might even be ahead of Elizabeth in royal succession, through Baden. Nonetheless, Potocki considered Elizabeth “an intelligent and honest girl” who should be “liberated from her servitude to her humbugging inferiors & allowed to use Her Own words as She sees fit.”472 Hence, Potocki remained as ever foremost a Royalist.
In 1977 Potocki returned to Southern African themes, namely:
Let The Rhodesians Not
Be surprised that England should try and sell them down the river to a gang of bolsheviks and other terrorists.
For after having plotted the most gigantic blood-bath and world-wide flood of misery that the world has ever seen, and carried it through by fiendish means (Dresden etc.) backed up by Hellish lies (six millions etc.) on the pretext of safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of Poland, England shamelessly sold that great country (once the largest kingdom in Europe) to the wickedest terrorist of known history, calling himself Stalin. England has Holy Joes enough, proclaiming that “your sins will find you”—but even more surely the crimes of your country, connived at by you, will find you out. Nemesis is completely impartial.473
In 1987, the Count addressed New Zealand race relations, pre-empting much of what the liberals and Maori activists have subsequently sought and obtained. Potocki’s plan was to restore authority to the traditional chieftains, and with the setting up of land tribunals to address grievances, to place compensated resources under the trusteeship of the Maori Sovereign. Potocki was concerned about outside interference and subversion utilizing the Maori radicals, and the likelihood of United Nations meddling in such matters or supranational law courts, which would mean that New Zealand would be “muzzled and hamstring by all the odious humbug she herself has gone in for about South Africa.” Once again, he was prescient.
He regarded the Maori as having genuine grievances, which he did not accord to the Blacks in South Africa, as they had not settled that region prior to the Afrikaners, and furthermore he had an altogether higher regard for the racial qualities of the Maori than for either the Africans or for the pakeha.474 He believed that a racial clash was coming, and that in the long run the pakeha might get the worst of things. He advocated Maori language programs and held that “they should become an integral part of the social and political organization of Aotearoa.” He also sought to remind New Zealanders that he was the most high-born individual who had ever been conceived in New Zealand.475
In the arts, he predictably saw little to praise and considered that a cultural renaissance could still be launched from New Zealand, with his assistance.476 This optimism is surprising, since he had left New Zealand at what now transpires to have been the country’s Golden Age of culture, dominated by his friends such as Rex Fairburn and R. A. K. Mason. Certainly, it reflects a degree of optimism and idealism that also accounts for it “not being impossible,” given the circumstances of the post-war world, that he could have been named king of Poland.
Unsurprisingly, as part of the New Zealand literati, his cousin and biographer Stephanie de Montalk agonizes over Geoffrey’s “bigotry.” Yet she recalls his avid support for Maori, the genuinely warm manner with which he mingled with students of all races at Victoria University, and his enthusiastic interest in their cultures. Students for their part were impressed by his learning and his personality, Indian students by his knowledge of Sanskrit.477
NEW EUROPEAN ORDER
In 1969 Potocki received an “amiable invitation from the Secretary General of the New European Order to attend the biennial Assembly of the Order at Easter in Barcelona, as Polish delegate.”478 Potocki was skeptical, having had bad experiences with “English Fascist, semi-Fascist & pseudo-Fascist organizations,” which he considered, at least among the leadership, to have been police agents and agents provocateurs. He was particularly scathing of Colin Jordan’s’ British National Socialist Movement, but regarded as genuine William Joyce’s National Socialist League.
The New European Order had emerged as a radical faction from out of the European Social Movement, or Malmo International, founded in 1951 at the suggestion of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl, and including support from the British Mosleyites, the Italian Social Movement, Germany’s Socialist Reich Party, etc. The leaders of the New European Order were the Frenchman Ren Binet, and the Swiss Guy Amaudruz,479 who continues to publish a bulletin of that name.