Frederick Augustus Voigt - Politics

Politics

Voigt was described by his former tutor in 1919 as “a first-rate and rather old-fashioned liberal”, and, as befitted the German Correspondent of a left-leaning liberal, if non-partisan, newspaper, Voigt was a champion of individual liberty and democracy. He worked closely with many on the left of German and Eastern European politics in the 1920s and 1930s, was a supporter of the Weimar Republic and broadly opposed to the post-war peace settlement, which he regarded as unfair and too harsh. He was a staunch and implacable opponent of injustice and the use of coercion and state terrorism, a crusading journalist determined to expose the cruelty and injustice meted out to the oppressed peoples and minorities of Central and Eastern Europe. He was also sceptical about the ability of the League of Nations to solve international disputes.

However, after the Nazi seizure of power, Voigt became disillusioned with the German left, which he believed had ignominiously given up in the face of Nazi pressure. He came to regard the two dominant totalitarian ideologies as being the abiding evils and threats to European civilization of the day and moved away from his former scientific materialism and returned to the Anglicanism of his youth. He came to regard both Fascism/Nazism and Communism as pseudo-religious ideologies that seriously threatened the essentially Christian civilization of Europe, and could only be opposed if the Western democracies committed to defend that civilization.

After World War II he became a leading exponent of what George Orwell termed “neo-toryism”, regarding the maintenance of British imperial power as an invaluable bulwark against Communism and as being indispensable to the creation and continuation of international peace and political stability.