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.

The Zionist Persecution of the Indigenous Arabs in Palestine under the British Mandate

I found this description of the apartheid and maltreatment inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs by the Zionist settlers in History of the World: The Last Five Hundred Years, general editor Esmond Wright (Feltham: Hamlyn/W.H. Smith 1984), page 629.

The most serious long-term problem bequeathed by Britain’s devious wartime diplomacy in the Middle East arose from its promise to the Jews. The terms of Britain’s mandate in Palestine made it responsible for putting this promise into effect by the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home from the Jewish people.’ The Arabs, who made up more than ninety percent of the Palestinian population, were at once assured by Britain that the Jewish national home would not become a Jewish national state and that their ‘civil and religious rights’ would be respected. A national state, however, was precisely what the Zionist movement (which was responsible for the idea of a ‘national home’ in Palestine) intended to achieve – a state which, in the words of Dr. Weizmann, its leader, would be ‘as Jewish and England is English’.

As a first step towards this goal, Zionists insisted on the strict separation of Arab and Jewish communities. Jewish parents refused to send their children to mixed government schools. Arab tenants and farm workers were evicted from all land bought by the Jewish National Fund. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of the state of Israel, organised a series of strikes against Jewish employers of Arab labour. The Jewish Agency, which coordinated Jewish settlement in Palestine, sought, with some success, to make itself a state within a state. Until the First World War the Arabs had been the only people living in contact with the Jews who had never persecuted them. The birth of Arab anti-Semitism between the wars was the work not of Adolf Hitler but of the Zionists.

This last statement has to be revised somewhat, as the Nazis sought to exploit Arab resentment against the Zionist settler through the creation of a vicious conspiracy theory tailored towards Islam similar to their own monstrous delusions about the Jews being responsible for the exploitation and enslavement of White Aryans. In their spurious history, the Jews had been conspiring against Islam and the Arab people since the days of Mohammed. It’s completely bogus, but because of the establishment of the state of Israel and its seven-decades long persecution of its indigenous Arabs, has understandably become widespread in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

This page also mentions the way the British tried to contain some of the pressures by limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine by imposing a quota and turning away emigrant boats. This meant returning Jews fleeing Nazi persecution back to their deaths in Germany and occupied Europe. Apparently the policy was to take any illegal prospective settlers to Jerusalem, so they could see it, before returning them to their boats and sending them away. I’ve known elderly members of my church, who were young sailors in the British navy at this time, and they very much did not like what they had been ordered in turn to do to the Jewish immigrants. And in particular this was the use of tear gas against refugees from the Nazi gas chambers. This left them very upset as they spoke about it nearly seventy or so years later.

This whole, shabby affair is another blot on the history of the British Empire.

But the Zionist lobby automatically smears and reviles anyone, who suggests that Israel is an apartheid, racist state which persecutes the Arabs as anti-Semitic. So I’ll guess they’re going to have to smear W.H. Smith now, for what they rightly published back in the 1980s.