eurofascism.info

The cause is simple, for we find that “Democracy” is failing all over the world. Before we can set things right, we must understand why “Democracy” has failed. The failure is largely to be attributed to the mistaken belief in absolute individual “liberty,” which has negatived all effective government and deprived the People of their essential freedom.

(Raven Thomson: The Coming Corporate State)

Oswald Mosley, a self-declared fascist, had created a militaristic and anti-Semitic movement in England in the 1930s, dressing his followers in black shirts and staging large-scale rallies in emulation of Hitler and Mussolini. Although never close to being as successful as his idols in Italy and Germany, his party did enjoy a brief period of success in the first six months of 1934.

Lord Rothermere, the owner of the British newspaper The Daily Mail wrote a front-page editorial entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ (see wikipedia, Spartacus Educational) in January that year*:

Timid alarmists all this week have been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps.

Very few of these panic-mongers have any personal knowledge of the countries that are already under Blackshirt government. The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power.

As a purely British organization, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics. They have no prejudice either of class or race. Their recruits are drawn from all social grades and every political party.

Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King’s Road, Chelsea, London, S.W1.

The membership of the BUF grew from 10,000 at the beginning of 1933 to 50,000 in June of 1934. However, success soon turned into failure. That same month, a mass rally was held in London’s Olympia Hall, where Mosley stood at the front on a heightened platform, dressed in the blackshirt uniform of the BUF. Vast numbers of anti-fascists gathered and demonstrated against the meeting. The Blackshirts fought back violently, and the media covered the events thoroughly. Lord Rothesmere’s Daily Mail, once again, supported the fascists:

If the Blackshirts movement had any need of justification, the Red Hooligans who savagely and systematically tried to wreck Sir Oswald Mosley’s huge and magnificently successful meeting at Olympia last night would have supplied it.

They got what they deserved. Olympia has been the scene of many assemblies and many great fights, but never had it offered the spectacle of so many fights mixed up with a meeting.

As these violent clashes were not bad enough PR in themselves, the Night of the Long Knives took place in Nazi Germany. The two events were compared extensively in the media, associating Mosley’s movement with violence, lawlessness and alien powers.

In response, the British Union of Fascists turned increasingly anti-Semitic**.

- Greater even than the stink of oil is the stink of the Jew, Mosley famously noted, and in his book outlining British Fascism, «Fascism – 100 questions asked and answered», he argued for the deportation of Jews, «who as a whole have chosen to organise themselves as a nation within the Nation and to set their interests before those of Great Britain. They must, like everyone else, put Britain first, or leave Britain».

The introduction to Mosley’s book refers to the Jews «shouting for a war of revenge against Germany [...] The Jews who came out of the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer War, and the Great War with vast profit and enhanced prestige». Mosley strongly opposed going to war against Germany in what he referred to as «a Jews’ quarrel».

When the war came, Oswald Mosley was imprisoned, first interned under Defence Regulation 18B and sent to Holloway prison, then living under house arrest from 1943 on.

After the war, however, supporters convinced him to go back into politics. He started the Union Movement, supporting the idea of a pan-European national state as a counterweight to the US and the USSR. He referred to this idea as European Socialism, and portrayed it as «a dynamic and not a static creed, an organic and  continuing development, not a petrified revelation on a table of stone», «a constant advance, not a frigid is, nor, worse still like the policies of the old parties in the present world, a frozen was».

Like Yockey he believed in pan-Europeanism – «Europe a Nation». In reality, the idea was not that new. As Mosley himself pointed out in an essay in the notorious fascist magazine Nation Europa, «the leaders of Fascism and National Socialism, so late as the 1940’s had contemplated some form of European movement which would transcend nationalism. I [...] recall from my own experience the very favourable reception they gave to my own advocacy of a united Europe in an article entitled in English ‘The World Alternative’ which was published in Germany by Geo Politik in 1937».

In the same essay he writes that «what is desirable is a synthesis of the best elements of fascism and of the old democracy to which is added new thinking to meet the new facts of the new age».

As mentioned, Mosley published this essay in Nation Europa, which was the leading neo-Nazi publication in Western Germany, founded by the ex-SS officer Arthur Ehrhardt in 1951.Nation und Europa, as the magazine is called today, is still being published.

Amongst its writers throughout the years a number of the most influential figures of Eurofascism can be found; including Andreas Mölzer of the Austrian FPÖ, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French Front National, representatives of the German NPD and the most well-known ideologist of the socalled nouvelle droite (new right), Alain de Benoist.

Considering the similarities of their ideas, it was not strange that Francis Parker Yockey, having finished his “Imperium” in less than six months, took the unpublished manuscript to London and sought out Oswald Mosley. When they first met in 1947, Mosley had taken up a more careful political tone than before the war, downplaying anti-Semitism. As Martin A. Lee writes, «[Mosley] was a bit wary of Yockey, ‘a young man of some ability’ who had an indiscreet ‘obsession with the Jewish question’, as Mosley puts it. Nevertheless, Yockey ended up working for a brief period as an organizer for the Union Movement’s European Contact Section, enabling him to cultivate ties to an underground neofascist network throughout the Continent».

The younger man only left the Union Movement after Mosley punched him in the nose during a quarrel in Hyde Park.

Oswald Mosley stayed in Ireland and Paris throughout the fifties, but returned to Britain in order to run for the 1959 parliamentary elections. His campaign issue was the one issue that was to become the main rally point of Eurofascism: immigration.

Mosley combined calls for socalled assisted repatriation with scare stories regarding the criminality and sexual deviance of blacks.

In a biography of his father, novelist Nicholas Mosley (quoted in Nigel Jones “Mosley“) writes:

There was dad on top of a van again and bellowing; [...] there he was roaring on about such things as black men being able to live on tins of cat food, and teenage girls being kept in attics. And there were all the clean-faced young men around his van guarding him; and somewhere, I suppose, the fingers of the devotees of the dark god tearing at him.

Exploring the post-WWII fascist scene of Europe is sometimes a bit like walking through a labyrint of political parties. Take John Bean, one of the young men who were attracted to the Union Movement early along. He soon grew to be a leading figure in the movement’s East End London stronghold and in 1952 was appointed to head a branch in Putney. The next year he left the organisation, and by the time Mosley was standing on the roof of vans in 1959, Bean had already set up the National Labour Party together with Andrew Fountaine. After joining forces with the
White Defence League this party was to become the first British National Party.

Other figures in this first version of the BNP included John Tyndall and Colin Jordan, who soon set up the Nationalist Socialist Movement – an openly Nazi organisation.

By that time, John Tyndall had already left the organisation, partly because Jordan had married Tyndall’s former fiancée. And Bean? His BNP went on to cofound the National Front. Another cofounder was A.K. Chesterton, a former admirer of Mosley, who had been the editor of Blackshirt, BUF’s official newspaper, and also had been involved with the pre-WWII Nordic League **, «an association of race-conscious Britons», «[at the service of] ‘those patriotic bodies known to be engaged in exposing and frustrating the Jewish stranglehold on our Nordic realm».

As the National Front faded away towards the end of the 1970s, Bean disappeared of the political radar. He did not resurface until he joined up with Nick Griffin’s second British National Party, a party founded by the already mentioned John Tyndall in 1982.

Bean has been editing the official monthly magazine of the BNP, Identity. In one article (the original seemingly no longer exists online, but a copy is found for instance here) he writes:

Incidentally, for any cynic who may believe that I have only become «moderate» in my old age, here is another extract from the Special Branch Report: The National Labour Party… held a meeting on 13.6.59 at Queensway, W.2. Up to 70 persons were present to hear John Bean emphasise that the policy of his party was not anti-racial or violent – his party ‘just wanted this country to remain white’. Sorry I was not exactly successful: not enough of your fathers and mothers would listen to me.

It might have had something to do with the National Labour Party using symbols such as the Celtic Cross and the Sun Wheel? Or that they cooperated closely with – and eventually merged with – the openly Nazi White Defence League?

The British National Party of today has succeeded in doing what Nick Griffin has suggested in party publications, «[cleaning] up our act, put the boots away and put on suits». The two-time expulsion from the party of John Tyndall, its founder, can be viewed at least partly in this light.

Tyndall was accused of, amongst other things, issuing a booklist in his own Spearhead magazine which «might cause the BNP to be associated with Holocaust Revisionism, Mosley Fascism, German Nazism and Terrorism». These accusations are in no way irreasonable. Spearhead, which was founded in 1964 and for many years served as the official mouthpiece of the National Front, has spoken of the well-known Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel as «the world’s foremost martyr for free speech» and describes «the ‘Holocaust’ myth» as a «classic example of pseudo-history; its fragility proved by the extreme reluctance of public figures to express any doubts on the subject, the vicious hostility of the Jewish lobby towards anyone daring to question the ‘evidence’ and the rigid censorship of ‘revisionist’ historians by the mass media and major publishers». A few lines later and the anti-Semitism of the 1930s is joined by the anti-Islamic bigotry of today ****:

What passes for Christianity in this country today can only be described as superstitious sociology, a bland doctrine of welfare-mongering with guilt, humility and self-abasement as its cardinal principles. We can only have a contempt for a Church which, in the name of Christianity, facilitates the Islamic occupation of whole neighbourhoods, condones homosexuality, promotes multi-racialism and will forgive everything.

Indeed, it is difficult not to associate the BNP with fascism when the party’s founder is the same man who authored a book called «The Authoritarian State», written in support of precisely that. In the book Tyndall wrote, «democracy drives our youth onto the streets with limitless spare time to fritter away, the Jew comes
forward and seduces them with his cunningly devised amusements, such as comic papers, sex films and rock and roll».

When Tyndall passed away in 2005 the British National Party (in an obituary no longer online, but quoted here) spoke of him as «one of the few [...] willing to stick their necks out to maintain any pro-British political party» in a nation «infected with cowardice». He is said to have had «prophetic vision». Still, the obituary is not without criticism, Tyndall is said to have chosen tactics not offering the best chance of success and of a «1930s mindset [which] left the British National Party under his leadership with an outdated strategy which alienated public support».

The article claims that «this fact was recognised by the wider party and culminated in a change of leadership in 1999. As a result the authoritarian BNP of John Tyndall is no more, having been replaced by a new democratic nationalist BNP».

In reality, the tune has not changed much. In 2005, Nick Griffin wrote on the new music studio of the party:

[...]Are there any budding Mike Oldfields out there? Lyrics encouraging or condoning race-mixing, homosexuality, drugs and similar decadence, and that tired old ‘Oi’ sound, are not required, but if you are making any kind of music that you think may be suitable, please get in touch.

Footnotes:

* The lord had also argued that «all British young men and women [should] study closely the progress of the Nazi regime in Germany [and] not be misled by the misrepresentations of its opponents» in an article in the newspaper 10 July 1933. «The most spiteful distracters of the Nazis», the lord added, «are to be found in precisely the same sections of the British public and press as are most vehement in their praises of the Soviet regime in Russia. They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call «Nazi atrocities» which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence such as are inevitable among a nation half as big again as ours, but which have been generalized, multiplied and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny». Lord Rothermere continues by explaining that «The German Nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements», «Israelistes of international attachments». The lord notably corresponded with Hitler himself, «my dear Führer, everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution to the Czechoslovakian problem. People not so much concerned with territorial readjustment as with dread of another war with its accompanying bloodbath. Frederick the Great was a great popular figure. I salute your excellency’s star which rises higher and higher».

** Originally, this was not a main theme for the BUF. The party even had Jewish members, the later Conservative MP Harold Soref was allegedly one of them. This relative lack of anti-Semitism led another British fascist grouping, the Imperial League of Fascists, to speak of the BUF as the British Jewnion of Fascists.

*** This Nordic League was originally formed as the White Knights of England in 1935, and included William Joyce, who after the war was controversially condemned to death for treason. During the war, Joyce had been working for the German  radio’s English service. His broadcasts, starting with the words «Germany calling, Germany calling», urged the British people to surrender, and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone. Joyce also wrote the book «Twilight over England», comparing the evils of Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the wonders of National Socialist Germany. In the thirties, Joyce had also been heavily involved in the British Union of Fascists, and instrumental in its official namechange in 1936 to British Union of Fascists and National Socialists.

**** This originally read “the anti-Semitism of today”. While my point is that the anti-Semitism of the 1930s can be compared with modern anti-Islamic bigotry, this could be misconstrued to me having a belief that anti-Semitism has been replaced. It has not. Also, one can hardly compare the Holocaust – correctly described by the Israeli foreign ministry as a “unique culmination in the annals of racism” – with the everyday results of modern-day Islamic bigotry. For clarity, I have edited the text.