Sunday 5 May 2019

How I discovered Fascism

The 1960s were all about 'THE WAR'.  All our parents had been 'In The War', and our teachers, and uncles, and grandparents. And they never stopped telling us about it.

The 'Toy Spitfire Generation'

Which was all very puzzling to an eleven-year-old, just beginning to try to make sense of the world. I was told  that The War was a very bad thing indeed, but also a very glorious thing indeed. The Good People (that's us) had been attacked by the Bad People with their Bad Army, but we had fought them off with our Good Army and won. We had won because we are the Good People, and they are the Bad People, fated by nature to be Bad forever. Which sort of made sense.

Or rather, it made sense until I discovered that some of Our People supported the Bad Army and the Bad People. Which did not make sense
British Union of Fascists, "Rally for Peace", London 1939

So I went to Horwich library and tried to find out what had happened, which led me to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, (1896–1980), sometime Tory, sometime Labour, sometime European Unionist, founded what became the 'British Party' in 1932, inspired by the Italian fascist ideals of Benito Mussolini. He got the fascists some 60,000 members, half the size of today's Conservative Party, and the vociferous support of leading newspapers and intellectuals. What on earth did he have to say to inspire so many to Go Wrong? It must have been powerful and ingenious stuff. We are, after all the clever and intelligent people, not like the stupid 'Them', his arguments must have been brilliant. So I got out his speeches and read them.


Which is where it got even more puzzling. Mosley's speeches - and there are a lot, lot, lot of them - tend to go like this:
"We count it a privilege to live in an age when England demands that great things shall be done, a privilege to be of this generation which learns to say, 'What can we give?', rather than, 'What can we take?' For thus our generation learns there are greater things than slothful ease, greater things than safety, and more terrible things than death.
This shall be the epic generation which scales again the the heights of time and history to see once more the immortal lights -- the lights of sacrifice and high endeavour summoning through ordeal the soul of humanity to the sublime and the eternal. The alternatives of our age are heroism or oblivion. There are no lesser paths in the history of great nations. Can we, therefore, doubt which path to choose?..." (24 March 1935, Albert Hall)
And so they go on, and on. What does this mean? How do you tease 'this is what we are going to do' out of this stuff? It doesn't mean anything at all, does it? Just a load of glorious sounding phrases with words like 'privileged' and 'sacrifice' and 'endeavour' vaguely strung together into sentences.

Only now have I come to realise that this is how the politics of Right work. They don't, for the most part, need to actually promise anything at all. It's like what the psychologist Paul Meehl called the "Barnum effect" - statements which look powerful and personal, but are so vague and general that people can read what they want into them. You can 'dog-whistle-hint' at your preferred ideas, of course, but the ruse of promising absolutely nothing means you get your 'marks' to invent their own politic, which, of course, they heartily agree with.

There are always people whose lives are not going as well as they might have hoped, so you start by telling them how decent and noble they are. Then go on to sympathise with their struggle, how faithful and decent they've been. But, above all, give them the chance to blame their misfortunes on someone else, so give them an enemy.

Choosing the right enemy is critical. Pick an enemy they don't know, so you can decide what is bad about them. And it mustn't be anyone or anything which might 'come round' to your side, because then followers might waste their time proselytising, or even meet the enemy and see humane matches of themselves there. Then you'd have no enemy, and you'd be screwed. So foreigners and homosexuals are a popular choice, or vague out-groups, or distant barely-understood organisations, or even invented chimera - devils, ghosts or witches. Imaginary enemies work better.

The Jews, of course, are a popular choice of enemy. That Austrian bloke actually said (it's in Mein Kampf) that "In the Jew I still saw only a man.. I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith" but then again, we need to give the people "one common enemy against whom they have to fight... intensifies their belief in the justice of their own cause" because "The masses are not in a position to discern where the enemy's fault ends and where our own begins". Trouble is, of course, you have to carry thorough, and we know where that ends.


So, if you want to control people, to get them to laud you, praise you, follow you and (let's be honest) give you money, I'll let you have this one for free. You just need to pop your preferred enemy into the 'them' spaces and you'll be well on the way to leading the chants at your mass rallies and making the trains run on time. Any guesses where I got it?
We are a patient and long-suffering people. But we have been too generous, too open, too honest for too long.
Our country is in serious trouble. And you don't need to look far to see where the problem lies. Life for many of our long-suffering people is hard. Prices have risen, jobs are hard to find. Funny that certain people and assorted hangers-on always seem to do all right for themselves? This must change.
The globalist political class, and international corporations, have been working hand in glove to stifle the free speech of those who dare to disagree. But they cannot silence us any more. We are the only people in this world who truly respect freedom. The fake 'freedom' they talk about is just another word for doing what you're told to do. We won't fall for that.  Do we feel sorry for the ‘bad’ way they say they've been treated? No. Because we know how they lie, cheat and push this silly, false, made-up story of victimhood. We are, and always have been, the peacemakers. The real intimidation and threats of violence come from others. They invented political terrorism. Even when you tell their supporters the truth, they can't understand it. They don't have the capacity to understand real truth.
We are unique in the world in our commitment to peace, despite all their efforts. We are not a warlike people, the world knows that. But when we are forced into war, we can fight like no others, and they should know that too.




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