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Julius himself never goes that far, but his own faulty reasoning certainly invites such conjecture. He attempts to use The Criterion, the quarterly review which Eliot edited from 1922-1939, in order to prove that Eliot's enmity to ward the Jews bordered on complicity with the Nazis. He cites a harsh review that appeared in The Criterion in 1936, demeaning the account, in the book The Yellow Spot, of atrocities against Jews in German concentration camps. Julius now admits to having been mistaken in assuming Eliot's authorship of the review (Eliot's widow came forward recently to identify the author as Montgomery Belgion). However, he still claims a deep culpability for the editor:

Drawn elsewhere to examples of martyrdom—Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Celia in The Cocktail Party—Eliot's willingness to publish this ugly review suggests that he was blind to the martyrdom of German Jewry. Certainly, in the whole period from the Nazi seizure of power to the closure of the Criterion, he did not publish a single article or review correcting the false impression given by Belgion of life (and death) for Jews under Nazism.

In his sweeping indictment, and the further implication of complicity in the Nazi mistreatment of Jews, Julius goes awry. The actual testament of The Criterion in the thirties is decidedly anti-Nazi. Probably Eliot's most direct criticism of Nazism was in regard to its dangerous assault on the place of the Christian Church in the social order (an issue increasingly central to his thought), and one finds an unexpected hero in The Criterion reviews of the mid-thirties in the figure of the great Protestant dissident Karl Barth. Through Julius's obsession with the crassness of the review of The Yellow Spot, he misses the whole direction of Eliot's practical socio-political concerns.

Kenneth Asher comes closer to pinning down these socio-political concerns in his book T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Asher sees Eliot's early attraction to the proto-Fascist ideas of Charles Maurras and his organization L'Action Francaise, as the enduring and dominant feature in Eliot's development, spiritual and otherwise. Indeed, it is no accident that Eliot's famous pronouncement in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes is an echo of an early manifesto from the newspaper of L'Action Francaise, published around the turn of the century (a formula that included the necessity of anti-Semitism in the mix). Eliot had also made a very public defense of Maurras, in the pages of The Criterion, when the Frenchman was condemned by the Vatican in 1926 for espousing and promulgating a form of Catholicism which valued the Church's political function while denying Christ. Eliot's odd rejoinder to the Catholic apologist Leo Ward was to proclaim:

I may say also that I felt a reluctance to meddle with a matter that concerns another nation than mine. What decided me was Mr. Ward's suggestion that the influence of Maurras, indeed the intention of Maurras, is to pervert his disciples and students away from Christianity. I have been a reader of the work of Maurras for eighteen years; upon me he has had exactly the opposite effect. This is only the evidence of one; but if one can speak, is it not his duty to testify?

Asher makes a very shrewd observation regarding Eliot's resolution of these difficulties:

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