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

Would Fascist Oswald Mosley Have Treated the Windrush Migrants Better than the Tories?

Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, tried to get back into British politics after the War. He’d been interned during the War, but still wished to return and lead a far right party. His new outfit was simply called the Union Movement, and Mosley desperately and vehemently denied that he would have been a collaborator had there been a Nazi invasion, and that he wasn’t a racist or anti-Semite.

There’s footage on YouTube of an interview he gave on British television in the 1970s, from the same programme, I think, which the late, great antipodean TV critic, Clive James, reviewed in his column for the Absurder. Mosley’s interviewer asks him frankly about anti-Semitism and his attitude to the Jews. At this, Mosley gets visibly angry and starts to deny that he is or has been any such thing. This is interrupted by a working class bloke in the audience, who stands up to remind him that the ordinary working people of this country saw him off, and his mate Hitler during the War, and they’ll see him off again. It’s been suggested that if the Nazis had invaded Britain, Mosley wouldn’t have collaborated with them because he would already have been shot by Special Branch as a traitor. As for the anti-Semitism, it has been claimed that Mosley genuinely didn’t hate the Jews and the BUF only turned towards anti-Semitism from a mixture of opportunism, the anti-Semitism of some of it’s rank and file and Mosley’s subordinates and advisers, and as a reaction to the hostility to the movement from the Jewish community. More recent research suggests that Mosley may already have been anti-Semitic, and I don’t doubt that if somehow he had seized power and made Britain an ally or satellite or Nazi Germany, he would have cheerfully collaborated in the Holocaust.

Some of Mosley’s post-War political views are laid out in his 1961 book, Mosley – Right Or Wrong? The book’s arranged as a series of questions on issues like the Empire, international relations, race, industry, the economy, trade unions and so on. Section 13 is on the ‘Colour Question in Britain, Immigration, The Racial Question’. In it, Mosley tells the reader what he intends to do about non-White immigrants. His solution is compulsory repatriation, but he claims he won’t be inhumane, because those deported will have their fares paid. He also intends to avoid criticism from Britain’s Black colonies by making sure Britain buys their products and helps their economy rather than their competitors’. This means, for example, that he would buy sugar from Jamaica rather than Cuba. Question 116 in this section asks the wannabe dictator how he would deal with coloured students and and coloured immigrants, who have been here a long time. Mosley’s reply is that he would continue to allow coloured people to come here for their education and that they would be made welcome. As for non-Whites, who have been resident in Britain for a long time, he states that those,

who have been good citizens and have developed roots in this country will also not be sent away. For this reason we propose that all coloured people of this character who came here before the last war, should be allowed to stay, if they wish. They are too few to create any serious problems. And on the whole they have been good citizens of Britain. (p. 118).

You can compare that with Tweezer’s and the Tories’ deportation of the Windrush Migrants. They’d been resident here for a similar length of time or more than the non-White immigrants Mosley was talking about. They also had a guaranteed legal right to remain, which Tweezer as home secretary illegally removed. It may therefore seem possible from the above passage in which Mosley states he’d let some non-White immigrants remain, that he, a horrendous Fascist, would also have respected the Windrush immigrants rights to remain.

In fact I doubt very much that he would. The history of Fascism shows that they can’t be trusted and that however moderate and respectable they appear, the reality is always dictatorship, brutality, violent repression and mass murder. Fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini were able to win power partly through propaganda and carefully tailoring their message to their audiences. If Hitler was speaking in a very traditionally left-wing, working class district, he’d stress the anti-capitalist strand of Nazi ideology. When campaigning in a traditionally right-wing, anti-Semitic area, he’d attack the Jews. Mosley and the other Fascist and Nazi groups were presented with the problem after the War that Europe had had enough of it. The British people had seen and fought against its horrors and weren’t going to tolerate its revival. Hence Mosley’s attempts to present himself in a more moderate light. He states at one point that he dislike the word ‘racist’ because it implies that one race is superior to another, which he rejects. Well, he might have done, but that won’t stop anyone reading him coming to the conclusion that a racist was precisely what he was. I don’t doubt therefore that if by some miracle of medicine Mosley had lived on and been in power a few years ago, he would have deported the Windrush immigrants like Theresa May and the Tories.

What is alarming is not that he would have done – you’d expect it from a Fascist leader – but that Mosley could sound more moderate and tolerant in some respects than the leaders of the modern Conservative party. Or if he doesn’t, then he doesn’t sound that much more extreme, either.

And that should show you how much trouble we’re in, and how much the Tories are moving to the extreme right.

Newspaper Review of Tony Greenstein’s ‘The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton’

Yesterday I came across a review from 2012 of Tony Greenstein’s The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast in the Brighton Argus. Greenstein’s a veteran socialist activist, and an opponent of all forms of racism. This includes the Zionists’ massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, for which he has, like so very many others, both Jewish and gentile, been smeared as an ‘anti-Semite’.

Greenstein refers to the book to support his own, very evident commitment to fighting all forms of racism and racial injustice, including the bitter anti-Semitism of the British far right, in an open letter he published in his blog on Sunday to the leader of Brighton council, Councillor Warren Morgan. Morgan had smeared Greenstein as a Holocaust denier in a statement linking Greenstein to Miko Peled. Peled is the son of an Israeli general and fierce critic of Israeli barbarity to his country’s indigenous people. Peled spoke at a Labour party fringe meeting, organized by a Jewish Labour party organization committed to ending the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians. Peled had stated in his speech that everything – ‘even the Holocaust’ should be up for debate. So Morgan insinuated that Greenstein was a Holocaust denier, and demanded his expulsion from the Labour party.

Greenstein replied in his letter with the following statements, noting that Peled was just defending complete academic freedom, and certainly did not deny the Holocaust, whose victims included members of his father’s family. He goes on to cite other incidents, when he was previously smeared with the same accusation, citing his book as evidence that he most certainly isn’t anti-Semitic, and explaining his opposition to Zionism.

All that Miko Peled was doing was to say discussion about the Holocaust is legitimate free speech. To twist this into support for Holocaust denial is a prime example of how anti-Semitism has been weaponised by supporters of Zionism and the Israeli state. It demonstrates your contempt for those who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime – Jewish and non-Jewish.

Unlike you I am Jewish. Unlike you half my father’s family was murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. For you to use the Holocaust, of both Jews and non-Jews, up to 5 million of whom also died in the Nazi concentration camps, as a cheap political device in order to gain a political advantage over your opponents in the Labour Party is despicable. If anyone in Brighton Labour Party is anti-Semitic it is you and your followers.

It is noticeable that you and your political soul mates have nothing to say about racism against the Roma, yet proportionately just as many Roma died in the camps as Jews. Racism against the Roma today is far higher than that against Jews today but it isn’t so politically advantageous.

As you well know I have often been the recipient of this vile Holocaust denial propaganda, as evidenced by the Argus article of 16th October 1993 as well as physical attacks by fascist groups such as the National Front. A cursory search of the Argus archive would turn up numerous articles e.g. Adam Trimmingham’s review of my book ‘Fighting Fascism in Brighton’ I confess that in 40 years of opposing fascism and racism in Brighton and Hove your name has never once come up.

My reasons for opposing Zionism and the Israeli state are the same as my opposition to fascism and racism in Britain and Apartheid in South Africa. Your use of the Jewish Holocaust for transparently cheap political purposes is contemptible.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/open-letter-to-lying-leader-of-brighton.html

In the rest of the article he explains the background to the smear. Basically, it’s more of the same intriguing by Progress and the Zionists to cling on to power anyway they can. Morgan is a member of Progress, the Thatcherite entryist group in Labour. The fringe meeting addressed by Peled, at which Greenstein was present, not only condemned the maltreatment of the Palestinians, it also demanded the expulsion of the seriously misnamed Jewish Labour Movement. This was formerly Paole Zion, and is the sister party to the Israeli Labour Party, which has and remains one of the chief instigators of the Palestinian’s oppression. The meeting was organized by Jewish Voices for Peace, and nearly everyone, according to Greenstein, with the exception of Ken Loach, was Jewish. And Loach himself is not, by any stretch of the imagination, anti-Semitic. In the 1990s he directed a film, Perdition, about the Zionists’ collaboration with the Nazis in the deportation of the Jews to the death camps in Hungary.

Not that this stopped the Right making the habitual smears of anti-Semitism. Guido Fawkes repeated them on his blog. In fact, Fawkes has no business calling anyone a Fascist, or words to that effect. Way back in the ’80s or ’90s he was a member of a Libertarian organization on the fringes of the Tory party, which invited one of the leaders of the Fascist death squads then massacring the people of El Salvador, to come as their guest of honour.

Adam Trimingham’s review of Greenstein’s book is interesting for the perspective it gives on the very strong opposition to Mosley and his thugs in Brighton. Mosley and Lord Haw-Haw, the Anglo-Irish traitor William Joyce, both tried speaking there on several occasions, to be seen off by local Labour party supporters, Jews and other anti-Fascists. In one incident in 1934 when Mosley tried speaking at the Dome there, the electricians setting up the sound system wired it up to the office of the Labour councilor, Nick Cohen. When Mosley tried to launch into his rant, Councilor Cohen pressed a button, and the would-be British Mussolini was drowned out by the sound of the Marseillaise.

That didn’t stop Mosley and his stormtroopers from trying again. And each time they faced opposition, including violence, to the point where the town was a no-go area for them. The last time Mosley tried to speak there was just after the War, when he was trying to launch his Union Movement. This resulted in the Battle of the Level, when local people, included Jewish ex-servicemen, weighed in against them. This included many retired Jewish gents, who beat them up with their umbrellas and walking sticks. They were successful, and Mosley never returned. His own Fascist movement had been in decline before the War, and the battle against the Axis effectively finished it off. He emerged from the war disgraced and with whatever remained of his former popularity in ruins.

The formation of the National Front in the 1970s led to more battles, as they tried to demonstrate in Brighton. A committee was formed to combat them. This suffered from some division, with some members arguing for a more moderate line, with Israel another bone of contention. But they nevertheless succeeded in ensuring that any Fascist meeting or rally was met with determined opposition. And that includes the Fascist March for England the year the review was published in 2012.

The review can be read at: http://www.theargus.co.uk/magazine/nostalgia/pastpresent/9728304.Fighting_fascism/?ref=rss

Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Semitic Rhetoric: The Same Today as Just After WWII

I’ve been reading Dave Renton’s article on the police and Fascist and Anti-Fascist street demonstrations in the years 1945-51 in Lobster 35. Renton’s one of the leading lights of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and has contributed a number of pieces to Lobster over the years. The article is about the way the police acted to protect the meetings of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement from anti-Fascist protests and demonstrations when it was founded just after the Second World War.

What struck me is that while the police have done much to root out the culture of racism – I’ve got friends and family in the police, who are very definitely not racist – some of the xenophobic rhetoric from the Fascists themselves remains strikingly unchanged. For example, Renton quotes an anti-Semitic comment from the area where Mosley started campaigning again as saying that the reason there was so much infant mortality was because all the hospitals were full up with ‘alien’ refugees. It reminded me very strongly of some of the comments made about the Health Service being placed under similar pressure from immigration. The only difference is that in the early post-War years, the refugees were people displaced from their European homes by the War. Now, they’re likely to be Syrians fleeing the War there, as well as other asylum seekers from around the world.

Hope Not Hate have put up a piece listing the 1,530 extreme Right-wing candidates around the country standing for the elections on Thursday. This includes not just members of the Fascist Right, but also UKIP, who are doing their best to stoke up xenophobia and have provided a home for members of the Nazi Right, despite Farrage’s protests and policies to the contrary. Let’s make sure that they don’t win.

Fascist Leader Mosley Wrote for Daily Telegraph

Oswald Mosley, Baronet, Politician and wannabe British Fascist Duce. Also Telegraph journalist.

Reading through Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985, I found this interesting snippet about the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Interned as a threat to national security during the War, Mosley was effectively a pariah afterwards. His attempt to launch a new Fascist party, the Union Movement, to succeeded the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists failed, and he ended up moving first to Ireland and then to France. He was partly rehabilitated with the publication in 1968 of his autobiography, My Life. He then went on to write the occasional book review for Books and Bookmen and the Daily Telegraph.

Somehow, I am not at all surprised about the latter.