Britain's Fascist Thread: Radio 4

[Serial_Apologist]

That's the name of the programme series, by the way - in case anyone is wondering!

First of 3 episodes, detailing origins and starting this morning at 11am, on Sounds link below

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sbdx

My interest is both personal and political, my father always having expressed unapologetic pride in his dropping out of the Young Conservatives in 1931 to join a sub thread known as the Blue Shirts. "We were very good at breaking up Communist meetings", he would tell me, "I became quite handy with a broken bottle or chair leg". "Why didn't you join the Moseleyites, Dad?" I asked him. "They weren't true patriots, but traitors", he explained, "they put support for Mussolini and Hitler before this country".

[french frank]

Quite a journey, you've had, Serial Thanks for the link.

[eighthobstruction]

Quite a journey, you've had, Serial Thanks for the link.

....yes indeed

[vinteuil]

.

... the founder of the Blue Shirts also had a bit of a journey, ending up in part seeing the error of his ways -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Locker-Lampson#Post-First_World_War_career

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8223551/professor-einstein-with-commander-locker-lampson-gelatin-silver-print-photograph

A really interesting programme, I thought : looking forward to the rest of the series




.

[Frances_iom]

.
A really interesting programme, I thought : looking forward to the rest of the series
.

I thought it was an excellent program - very topical + unfortunately very relevant to the USA situation;
I keep on seeing the malign influence of the same press barons in the WW1 context looking at internment camps + the postwar view of Germans who in many cases had lived in UK most of their life and in many cases had sons fighting for the UK - the company hadn't changed 100 yrs later - recall 'enemies of the people'

[Serial_Apologist]

....yes indeed

To be "fair" to Dad, he did recant to some degree on his views after WW2, recognising that such were readily containerable inside the Conservative Party. Dad wasn't the kind of racist who hated non-white peoples: he just believed fervently that they should have been grateful for the civilisation bestowed on them by the British Empire. When Ghandi the film was shown on TV he told me in shock that he had never known about the Amritsa massacre. My own viewpoint is synonymous with that on the Left which argues that the ruling classes will support representative democracy as the preferred system of popular legitimacy whenever possible, with its eye on "timely" reform and away from real power, and only fall back on fascism as a last resort of an embattled capitalism facing possible extinction. Italy, Spain and Germany offered ample examples in the 1930s.

Dad reserved his bitterness for Peron's nationalisation of the Argentine railway network, into which my grandfather had poured most of his savings, regarding this as "socialist theft of the most evil kind as it was an attack on working people around the world": he had come to see fascism as just another form of left wingism - after all, didn't it call itself "national socialism"? It made no difference telling him that a lot of people describe themselves as Christians! To Dad's "credit" (ahem) he did invent Thatcherite de-nationalisation and Reaganomics decades before the advent of Sir Keith Joseph. The best in people was forged in struggle for survival, the battle against inborn slothfulness - some were obviously just born to rule, and Dad exemplified this in never letting up on an argument and admitting being in the wrong. One of his favourite words was "pusillanimous"! Wasn't this the lesson of The Blitz Spirit? I expect this will be gone into in the next part of this series.

It goes almost without saying that a lot of ideological "softening up" has to take place to prepare populaces for best of worst available options. In the wake of Yalta, dependent of course of the balance of forces at stake (viz China), this idea has been constantly borne out by the attitudes and strategies adopted by leading nation states in the West towards any country posing a threat to capitalist rule - from Cuba by way of Chile to January's far-right assault on the Capital in Washington: the latter representing a sort of dress rehearsal for any "eventuality". In the end parliamentary democracy can be dispensed with when necessity demands. It will be interesting to observe if the series covers this.

[eighthobstruction]

....you would certainly have had interesting discussions had you both sat down to watch Adam Curtis together...

[Serial_Apologist]

....you would certainly have had interesting discussions had you both sat down to watch Adam Curtis together...

To which you would have been welcomed, eighth!

[vinteuil]

.

... such a good series. Programmes like this, and Tim Harford's ones on statistics, restore some faith in the seriousness of the BBC at its best.

Why is this kind of seriousness to be found on R4, and (seemingly) so seldom on the ever-more-infantilised R3?

.

[gradus]

To be "fair" to Dad, he did recant to some degree on his views after WW2, recognising that such were readily containerable inside the Conservative Party. Dad wasn't the kind of racist who hated non-white peoples: he just believed fervently that they should have been grateful for the civilisation bestowed on them by the British Empire. When Ghandi the film was shown on TV he told me in shock that he had never known about the Amritsa massacre. My own viewpoint is synonymous with that on the Left which argues that the ruling classes will support representative democracy as the preferred system of popular legitimacy whenever possible, with its eye on "timely" reform and away from real power, and only fall back on fascism as a last resort of an embattled capitalism facing possible extinction. Italy, Spain and Germany offered ample examples in the 1930s.

Dad reserved his bitterness for Peron's nationalisation of the Argentine railway network, into which my grandfather had poured most of his savings, regarding this as "socialist theft of the most evil kind as it was an attack on working people around the world": he had come to see fascism as just another form of left wingism - after all, didn't it call itself "national socialism"? It made no difference telling him that a lot of people describe themselves as Christians! To Dad's "credit" (ahem) he did invent Thatcherite de-nationalisation and Reaganomics decades before the advent of Sir Keith Joseph. The best in people was forged in struggle for survival, the battle against inborn slothfulness - some were obviously just born to rule, and Dad exemplified this in never letting up on an argument and admitting being in the wrong. One of his favourite words was "pusillanimous"! Wasn't this the lesson of The Blitz Spirit? I expect this will be gone into in the next part of this series.

It goes almost without saying that a lot of ideological "softening up" has to take place to prepare populaces for best of worst available options. In the wake of Yalta, dependent of course of the balance of forces at stake (viz China), this idea has been constantly borne out by the attitudes and strategies adopted by leading nation states in the West towards any country posing a threat to capitalist rule - from Cuba by way of Chile to January's far-right assault on the Capital in Washington: the latter representing a sort of dress rehearsal for any "eventuality". In the end parliamentary democracy can be dispensed with when necessity demands. It will be interesting to observe if the series covers this.

Reading this reminded me that a school friend told me that his father had been a Blackshirt, his Dad certainly looked the part right down to the hair style and moustache but seemed perfectly unexceptional to me. In the sixties Brixton was daubed with 'Mosley Speaks' on walls all over the place and in my memory it seemed to more or less coincide with Billy Graham crusading at Earls Court and (I think) Highbury, to save us all from sin. Hmm...