Lobster Reviews Book on Six British Fascists

It’s a new year, and a new issue of the online magazine on parapolitics and genuine conspiracies, Lobster. In issue 83 they have a fascinating review by John Newsinger, professor emeritus of history at Bath University, of Graham Macklin’s Failed Fuhrers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right, published by Routledge at £24.99. The book’s actually a collection of biographies of six infamous British Fascists, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, A.K. Chesterton, Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and Nick Griffin. Newsinger states that it is a book to read and keep for reference for the information it provides. He will never forget that Colin Jordan, of NF infamy, was arrested in the ’70s for stealing women’s underwear from Tesco’s. The Scum mocked him as a panty-thief, which must be one of the few times when the vile rag actually did something anti-racist. Jordan himself, as with all the grotty sawdust Caesars examined in the book, was a massive anti-Semite. He claimed he was innocent and it was all part of a Jewish conspiracy. Right. So he thought that the same people he believes have absolute secret control of media, politics and the economy, would feel the need to frame him for such a squalid petty crime. It shows both how paranoid the real Nazis are, and how ridiculous and absurd their stupid ideas about a secret Jewish global conspiracy get. Newsinger’s review summarises the careers of these real anti-Semites and Nazis.

Arnold Leese

was, the book claims, a pivotal figure in the development of British race nationalism. He was a poisonous anti-Semite who believed the Jews were the enemies of the White race secretly conspiring about Britain. They were to be first segregated and then exterminated. He founded the Imperial Fascist League. He was briefly interned during the War. After which he founded the racist magazine, Gothic Ripples, with its vile column, ‘Nigger Notes’. After a period of disillusionment with Hitler, he returned to praising him as one of the greatest statement produced by Europe. He blamed the war on the Jews. You hardly need to add that he was also a holocaust denier. His statement about it in Gothic Ripples sums up the whole mentality behind Holocaust denial: the people who do deny do so out of embarrassment, but would have absolutely no objection to it at all. Leese claimed that it didn’t happen, but if it had, his only objection would have been that too few Jews were murdered. Provided it was all done humanely. There is no way you can commit mass murder humanely. Leese also Lord Haw-Haw as a hero, and was jailed in 1947 for trying to help two Dutch SS officer escape to Argentina. Leese, unfortunately, wasn’t just influential in Britain, but also Europe and America.

Oswald Mosley

was the notorious leader of the BUF and the subject of an earlier biography by Macklin, which charted his career after the War. Mosley was an anti-Semite, although he constantly denied it despite all the plentiful evidence to the contrary. It’s therefore ironic, then, that Leese hated him because he thought that, as a member of aristocracy, Mosley’s own racial purity had also been compromised through intermixture with the Jews. ‘Cause Britain’s wannabe great dictator had a Jewish uncle on his mother’s side. In 1963 three members of his Union Movement, the post-war successor to the BUF, were jailed for bombing the offices of the Daily Worker. He managed to rehabilitate himself after the War, appearing on TV shows despite having condemned the Nuremberg trials and blaming the Jews for the Second World. War. I didn’t know about the bombing, and it explains why the authorities appear to be more afraid of White right-wing terrorism than Islamist.

A.K. Chesterton

was a relative of novelist and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton. He was a member of Mosley’s BUF and editor of its magazine, The Blackshirt. He later broke away from the BUF, but continued as an extreme right-wing activist. Another grotty anti-Semite, he told the Nordic League that Jews should be hanged from lamp posts. He briefly served as a British officer in Kenya and Somaliland. But he’s also interesting for the way he and his followers also crossed over into the Tory party. He wrote for the Conservative magazine, Truth, which published his anti-Semitic screeds. He was even planning to run an article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He also contributed articles to the magazine of the Royal United Services Institute, as well as the Daily and Sunday Express and the Evening Standard. He also ghost wrote Beaverbrook’s biography, before launching his own rag, Candour and founding the League of Empire Loyalists. He hated the Common Market and regarded those who supported it as traitors. Many grassroots Tories were also member of the LEL. When a Conservative MP accused League members of following a Fascist, it was pointed out to him that the chair of the meeting, the MP Jocelyn Lucas, was a former member of the BUF. The League firmly supported White rule in Africa. He also wrote the anti-Semitic book, The New Unhappy Lords, which claimed that the Jews were conspiring to enslave the west and incorporate it into a one-world superstate. Now we know the origin of that particular conspiracy theory and all those rantings about ‘globalists’. The National Front was former from a merger of the League with the Race Preservation Society, and served as the new organisation’s president until his death.

Colin Jordan

was another Nazi and member or founder of the National Socialist Movement. However, like Mosley he turned to anti-Black racism after the way, loudly supporting the ‘Keep Britain White’ movement. He also exploited the Notting Hill riots to promote racial hatred. He staged a series of tasteless racist stunt to stop the Labour candidate, Gordon Walker, getting elected. These involved his followers appearing in blackface and monkey costumes. After a Jewish cabby refused to accept his wife, Francoise Dior, the poor fellow was forced to flee to Israel after his home was firebombed. The NSM’s magazine hailed it as ‘the Second Expulsion of the Jews’. Two groups of NSM members firebombed ten synagogues and more in London. Jordan denied knowing about it beforehand, but had no qualms about posing with the accused outside the courthouse. He also hoped to get funding from the United Arab Republic and had schemes for a racist, offshore pirate radio station. I doubt it would have been a success. Not against Radio Caroline. He was also obsessed with Rudolf Hess, and wanted him awarded the Nobel Peace. It’s grotesque, but when you consider that they later awarded it to Henry Kissinger it starts to seem all too reasonable. However, the rest of the Far Right thought he was an embarrassment because he was too open about the Nazism they all held.

John Tyndall

was secretary of Jordan’s grotty NSM, praising the SS and the Holocaust in the pages of its magazine and calling for the creation of an SS state. He broke with Jordan to join the NF, taking over as leader. He was another anti-Semite who turned from attacking the Jews to racism against Blacks and immigrants. He also had connections to the American Far Right, helping them to resist the extradition James Earl Ray, suspected of the assassination Martin Luther King, from London. He was also a friend of William Pierce, author of the Turner Diaries, helping to sell his wretched Vanguard newspaper in London. The NF’s membership was boosted by Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, even though Amin was another anti-Semite and fan of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Well, Black and White, unite and fight – against racists and anti-Semites whatever their colour. After the NF’s electoral failure in 1979, Tyndall went back to Nazism before founding the fifth incarnation of the BNP. As leader of the NF, he was in some kind of power struggle with Martin Webster, who called it a gay organisation. I think that’s because Tyndall was gay, and had gay toleration written into its constitution.

Nick Griffin

claimed to have read Mein Kampf when he was just thirteen, and joined the NF when he was 15. The NF viewed some of the Middle Eastern countries as allies in the struggle against the Jews. He welcomed Iran’s reprinting of the Protocols and ardently supported Gaddafi’s Libya. After 9/11 he exploited Islamophobia,, but when debating Abu Hamza he found that his and the terrorist supporter’s views converged, with Abu Hamza telling the audience to support the BNP. And what a surprise, hem-hem, I do not think, as Nigel Molesworth would sa, he was yet another Holocaust denier. He then started playing down the anti-Semitism so that the BNP even had a Jewish councillor elected in Epping. Well, one of left-wing Jewish bloggers I follow – I can’t remember if it was David Rosenberg or Tony Greenstein, noted that the Jewish Conservative MP for somewhere around Islington or Tower Hamlets used to hobnob with the local Nazis at elections, complaining that the division between the BNP/NF and the Conservatives also meant the nationalist vote was divided. And the very respected Jewish historian Geoffrey Alderman got into a bit of hot water with the Board of Deputies of British Jews when his history of the British Jewish community stated that two per cent of British Jews voted for the NF because of anti-Black racism. The BNP’s peak came with the election of over 50 councillors and two MEP, of whom Griffin was one. He also liked Vladimir Putin, hailing him as an enemy of European liberalism and saviour of Christianity. He also supported Assad’s regime in Syria, even appearing on Russia Today to do so.

British Fascism’s Influence on Front National

Newsinger also notes that the book also claims that the NF also influenced the French Front National, now National Reveille. He wonders how this could be so, considering that British Fascism’s history is one of failure. My guess would be that Marine Le Pen looked at what they were doing, and then did the opposite. Her tactics are more like that of the founder of Italy’s post-Fascist party, Fini and his Alleanza Nazionale. Fini wound up the explicitly neo-Fascist MSI, and positioned the new party as centre-right. Le Pen has done something similar with the former Front National. Not that there isn’t a precedent in French Fascist history. The Croix de Feu were a ’30s French Fascist organisation, combing far right politics with their enthusiasm for cars. They also originally had a Fascist uniform, but their greatest electoral victories came when the dumped it and started trying to sound more like ordinary Conservatives.

This book’s important, because apart from the light it sheds on the history of British Fascism, it also shows where the vast majority of anti-Semitism really comes. And no, the real anti-Semites aren’t Corbyn and his supporters, let alone with sincere anti-racist peeps, especially Jewish, whom the British establishment has libelled and smeared. The real, poisonous anti-Semitism nearly always comes from the Far Right. And they are a real terrorist menace. I didn’t know British Nazis had bombed the Daily Worker and ten synagogues in the 60s, though I knew about the street fights between them and anti-Fascists. In the ’80s the NF were successfully prosecuted for holding paramilitary ‘self-defence’ training out on a farm somewhere. Part of the evidence they were planning to commit a terrorist outrage was that a can of weedkiller in a garden shed had the word ‘weed’ crossed out and replaced with Jew. Then there was the lone Nazi in the 90s who nail-bombed three pubs, including a gay bar. And this is quite apart from the assassination of Jo Cox and genuine Nazi outfits like the banned National Action. Simon Webb over at History Debunked has questioned the jailing of White Nazis as terrorists, when they have done nothing but look at Nazi material on YouTube, unlike the Islamists, who have committed real terrorist atrocities. I think the answer is that the authorities fear that they will start committing genuine acts of terrorism like those in the ’60s, as well as exploiting racism and the immigration crisis.

The six men profiled by the book are failures, but they continue to exert a malign influence and there is always a danger that their ideas will inspire real terrorism while persecuting and murdering innocents ’cause they’re the wrong religion or race.

For further information, see: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster83/lob83-failed-fuhrers.pdf

Colonel La Roque and the Croix de Feu: French Fascism’s Jeremy Clarkson?

Jeremy Clarkson: Right-wing loudmouth presenter of Top Gear

Colonel de la Roque: French Fascist Leader, who held Paramilitary Car Rallies. The Petrolhead’s Generalissimo.

Jeremy Clarkson is in the news again this morning for once again making or rather, appearing to make a racist comment. It’s from an out-take of Top Gear in which he seems to be using a derogatory expression for Blacks while quoting a nursery rhyme. He has denied he used the term, and states it is word he despises. I dare say he’s right. Unfortunately, he has form for racist comments. Only a year or so ago, he, the Hamster and James May were in trouble for making racist comments on Top Gear about Mexicans, including describing Mexican food as ‘tasting of sick’. Some of Clarkson’s stunts on Top Gear, apart from the comments for which he has been officially criticised and chastened, also to my mind smack of racism and a need to sneer at despised or low status ethnic groups. For example, on one edition of Top Gear, where the boys went round Romania, Clarkson thought it was amusing to spoof the local’s style of dress. Or rather, he decided to spoof the local Roma people’s dress sense. Noting that the men tended to all wear a particular style of hat, he decided to drive through a Roman village wearing one, while saying something suitably sarcastic about it to camera. Clarkson has little patience with the Left. He describes Guardian readers and people with similar Right-on political views as ‘yoghurt-knitters’. My guess is that he and the producers probably regarded this stunt as an amusingly cheeky bit of ‘political incorrectness’. Offensive, but not actually racist.

The problem with that attitude is that the Roma are a severely persecuted people in many parts of eastern Europe. The Nazis were determined to exterminate them, along with Jews and Slavs. There was a scandal a few years ago in the Czech Republic when an ostensibly democratic Czech MP declared that Gypsies would go either to Canada or to the Death Camps. It was also revealed that the Czech medical service had a deliberate policy of sterilising Roma women to make sure they did not outbreed ethnic Czechs. The Australian journalist, Vitaly Vitaliev, who was born in Russia, describes the extreme poverty and utter destitution of many Gypsy communities in Romania in his travel book on eastern Europe, Borders Up. And you can find the same descriptions of utter poverty and despair in plenty of other travel books about Romania. Faced with the reality of severe state persecution and genocidal hatred against the Roma by the host populations, Clarkson’s drive through a Roman village sneering at their fashion sense seems less like a piece of cheeky fun, and something far darker and sinister. It could reasonably be compared to sneering at the fashion sense of the South African Black poor during Apartheid, or Jews during the pogroms. Unlike Blacks and Jews, the persecution of the Roma isn’t quite as notorious, and so Clarkson and his producers could get away with their tasteless stunt.

One of the French Fascist groups in the 1930s also shared Clarkson and co.’s love of cars. This was the Croix de Feu under Colonel Francois La Roque. the Croix de Feu was originally a veterans’ association for soldiers, who had won the Croix de Guerre for their bravery in combat. It was taken over by La Roque, and turned into a political organisation that denounced parliamentary weakness and corruption, the Communist threat and the need for an authoritarian social order. He also demanded the establishment of a corporative state into which the workers would be incorporated on the model of Fascist Italy. Like the Nazis with the SA and SS, and Mussolini with the Blackshirts and Squadristi, the Croix also had a paramilitary wing. These were the dispos, from the French word for ‘ready’, disponible. These used to go off to remote destinations, following secret order to train in readiness for ‘le jour j’ (‘D Day’), and l’heure H’ (‘H Hour’), when they would begin physically fighting a Communist uprising. With a number of other extreme Right-wing groups, they launched a march on the French Chamber of Deputies on February 6, 1934, in emulation of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’. In 1933 and 1934 they set up a series of militaristic car rallies. Which makes them all sound rather like a Fascist candidate for coverage by Top Gear, rather like Clarkson in jackboots with a stormtrooper’s helmet.

Clarkson would not, however, have got on quite so well in Musso’s Italy. The Duce deliberately did not try to launch an affordable family car, like the Nazis planned to do in Germany with Volkswagen. He thought the comfort of motoring would make Italians soft, and so stop them from achieving their imperial destiny as a feared military power. He also declared that he wasn’t going to improve peasant housing for much the same reason, and that he would have liked to have planted more woodland to make the Italian climate colder and harsher, again to toughen Italians up so they could conquer the world. Or at least, the Balkans and North Africa. Whatever else Musso was, he definitely wasn’t a ‘yoghurt knitter’.

Actually, I really don’t think Clarkson is a racist, although he has made it very clear that he wishes to stop immigration. When he actually stops making tasteless comments about foreigners, he can actually be very, very good. A few years ago, he presented a series in which he went round various European countries, Jeremy Clarkson Meets the Neighbours. This was actually far from the car-crash exhibit of rampant chauvinism and xenophobia you might expect. He actually likes France, despite his various comments about the French. In his last programme he went round Italy, where he made admiring comments about Italian style and cars. He was also impressed by Italian sobriety. After going out with the Italian navy in their patrols looking for illegal immigrants, he remarked on the way that Italian matelots drank coffee along with the rest of the population, rather than getting drunk on booze. An Italian authority he interviewed about this told him that it was part of the Italian desire to make a ‘bella figura’ – a good figure. You don’t cut a suitable dash by getting drunk, and so Italians simply don’t drink as much alcohol as Brits, or don’t do it to get drunk. He concluded the programme by saying that Europe wasn’t like America, and shouldn’t try to be. It was better.

So, he isn’t quite the racist loudmouth he appears to be, though he is indeed a Right-wing loudmouth. He just makes racist comments as a crude form of schoolboy humour to wind people up. It’s all part of his image as the motoring world’s answer to Bernard Manning. Only sometimes it goes much too far, and strays into the genuinely racist. He’s been making offensively Right-wing comments for nearly three decades now. He was taken off Top Gear in the 1990s after making sexist comments about a particular brand of car snapping knicker elastic. His popularity and the allure of the Clarkson persona was too great, however, and he came back. When he wants to be, he can be a good presenter. It’s just that it’s about time he knew and kept to the limits of what is acceptable.