A Few Pictures of the Reality of Fascism

Simon Webb today went full Mosley and put up a video asking, ‘What’s wrong with Fascism?’ He wanted to make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Fascism, he said, had been tarnished through its association with Nazism. But if you wanted to see a benevolent regime that was Fascist in all but name, he directed you to that of the Portuguese dictator Salazar.

But it isn’t just the association with the Third Reich and its attendant horrors that has turned decent people across the world against Fascism. It’s the fact that Mussolini’s fascists were also militant imperialists responsible for brutal atrocities in the nations they conquered, as well as those committed by the various Fascist juntas in Greece, Latin America and Indonesia.

Yesterday or the day before right-wingers like Paul Joseph Watson were also celebrating the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition in Sweden’s elections over their socialist party. This coalition included with the centre right party the Sweden Democrats, a far-right outfit. They’re obviously anti-immigration, but have a very unpleasant neo-Nazi past. According to Hope Not Hate, they used to wear Nazi uniforms as late as the ’90.

I didn’t watch Webb’s video about the Swedish election, whose title said that the Swedes had turned against immigration, the Italians were waking up and when would Britain follow? Mark Pattie did, and wasn’t impressed. He writes ‘Dear God! I did watch his recent video on the Swedish election result where he said “Why can’t we have a similar party here?”- and the anti-immigration party he mentioned? Ukip, 2015? No, he mentioned the bloody National Front getting 5% of the vote in 1974. Makes me think he would vote for Britain First in the next GE.’

I remember the National Front when they goose-stepping about in the 1970s, as well as the various other Fascist and Nazi outfits like the British Movement. And they were overtly Nazi and extremely violent. Michael Collins in his book Hate describes one of the attacks he took part in on an anti-racist meeting in the local library. This had young Asian women leaping out of upstairs windows to get away from them. Monica Ali gives a fictionalised description of the gang fights between White Fascists and Asian self-defence groups in her book, Brick Lane. Just to remind people what British Fascism looked like in the 1960s and 70s, here are a few pictures from British Fascism, 1919-1985. and the W.H. Smith History of the World.

Colin Jordan, Fuhrer of the World Union of National Socialists, with his wife, the daughter of fashion designer Christian Dior.

Skinhead supporter of the NF in the 1970s

And this is what the Nazis did to the Jews, aided by their collaborators in occupied Europe.

The Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp

I don’t know about Portugal, but Franco only kept out of the Second World War because of poverty. Even so, I think he wanted to send a few token Spanish troops with the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Not everyone who wants to cut down on immigration is a racist or Nazi. And despite the rhetoric, the BNP and NF as Fascists have a trouble hanging on to members. Lobster published a piece in the 90s which I think quoted anti-racist researchers of the movement as saying that although they boasted of having 2,000 members or more, they actually had a very high membership turnover. In reality they only had 200 or so core members. The simple reason for this is probably that people aren’t interested or sympathetic to fascist ideology. People joined not because they wanted some kind of new British reich or dictatorship, but probably simply because they wanted an end to non-White immigration. When they were subjected to the Nazi or Fascist ideology, they left. And political scientists have noted that this common in other countries with Fascist parties as well. They do better when they get rid of the jackboots, the right arm salute and the calls for a dictatorship. The Alleanzo Nazionale was formed from the Italian neo-Fascist party, the Movimiento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement. But they jettisoned the Fascist paraphernalia and became instead, so they claimed, a centre-right party. As such they joined Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition with the separatists of the Liga Nord and Berlusconi’s own Forza Italia party.

Whatever people’s feelings about immigration, the majority of normal people despise Fascism and its British parties. There should be absolutely no nostalgia for these brutal thugs.

British Fascism and the Madagascar Plan for Jewish Resettlement

I’ve put up many posts about the Ha’avara Agreement between the German Zionists and the Nazis in which Hitler pledged to help German Jews emigrate to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. This was the reality behind the anti-Semitism charge hurled at ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone because he said, quite correctly, that Hitler initially supported Zionism. Hitler did. This is documented, historical fact, and there is an entry about it on the website of the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem in Israel. Hitler was, however, not a Zionist and the Agreement was short lived. But mentioning it at all is an anti-Semitic crime in the eyes of the fanatical defenders of Israel and Zionism. Mike was accused of anti-Semitism simply for publishing a document in support of Livingstone, pointing out that he was, in that instance, historically correct. And I’ve also said countless times that real anti-Semites and Nazis were in favour of giving the Jews their own homeland, not because they supported them, but because they wanted to clear them out of their own countries. Richard Wagner was one of these, urging that the Jews should be resettled in Palestine. Before the Second World War there was also a plan, supported by some British Fascists, to resettle the Jews in a new homeland in Madagascar.

Charles W. Gore, a vicious anti-Semite who fully believed in the blood libel of the Jewish ritual sacrifice of Christian children and an influence on Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League, was one of these. He sent a copy of his unpublished book, The Island of Madagascar as a National State for the Jewish People And Why to Lord Rothschild, who then forwarded it to the Board of Deputies of British Jews. See Thurlow, British Fascist – A History, 1918-1985, p.73.

Perhaps this is another incident in the vile history of anti-Semitism and Nazism that the Campaign for Anti-Semitism will want censored, even though I don’t think either Rothschild nor the Board were impressed?