Union Movement

The Union Movement (UM) was a far-right political party founded in the United Kingdom by Oswald Mosley. Before the Second World War, Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) had wanted to concentrate trade within the British Empire, but the Union Movement attempted to stress the importance of developing a European nationalism, rather than a narrower country-based nationalism. That has caused the UM to be characterised as an attempt by Mosley to start again in his political life by embracing more democratic and international policies than those with which he had previously been associated. The UM has been described as post-fascist by former members such as Robert Edwards, the founder of the pro-Mosley European Action, a British pressure group and monthly newspaper.

Mosley's postwar activity

Having been the leader of the BUF in the 1930s, Mosley was expected to return to lead the far right. However, he remained out of the immediate postwar political arena, instead turned to writing and published his first work, My Answer (1946) in which he argued that he had been a patriot who had been unjustly punished by his internment under Defence Regulation 18B. In it and his 1947 sequel, The Alternative, Mosley began to argue for a much-closer integration between the nations of Europe, the beginning of his 'Europe a Nation' campaign, which sought a strong united Europe as a counterbalance to the growing power of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Leadership

• Oswald Mosley

Politicians and activists

Members

William Joyce: BUF's Director of Propaganda (1934) and Deputy Leader of the British Union of Fascists

(24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946)

Early life

William Brooke Joyce was born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, United States. His father was Michael Francis Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, who had acquired U.S. citizenship in 1894. His mother was Gertrude Emily Brooke, who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, was from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. A few years after William's birth, the family returned to Salthill, County Galway. Joyce attended Coláiste Iognáid, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. His parents were unionist and hostile to Irish republicanism and his mother was a devout Protestant. There were tensions between her and her family because she married a Catholic.

During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce was recruited while still in his mid-teens by British Army captain Patrick William Keating to work as a courier for military intelligence personnel stationed in County Galway. He was also suspected by the Irish Republican Army of working as an informant for the Black and Tans, "which could have had extremely serious consequences in 1920-21." On 14 November 1920, Catholic priest and republican sympathiser Michael Griffin was abducted and murdered by members of the Auxiliary Division, and Joyce was further suspected of being involved in his murder, though " of some involvement in this case [were] never proved". Keating eventually arranged for Joyce to be enlisted into the Worcestershire Regiment, moving him out of harm's way in Ireland by transferring him to the Norton Barracks in England where the regiment was stationed. However, Joyce was discharged a few months later when it was discovered that he was underage.

Joyce remained in England and briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon. His family followed him to England two years later. Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, Merseyside, whom he visited on a few occasions. He then applied to Birkbeck College, London, where he entered the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, he obtained a first-class honours degree in English. After graduating he applied for a job in the Foreign Office, but was rejected and took a job as a teacher. Joyce developed an interest in fascism and worked with, but never joined, the British Fascists of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. On 22 October 1924, while stewarding a meeting in support of Conservative Party candidate Jack Lazarus ahead of the 1924 general election, Joyce was attacked by communists and received a deep razor slash across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth. While Joyce often said that his attackers were Jewish, historian Colin Holmes claims that Joyce's first wife told him that "it wasn't a Jewish Communist who disfigured him .... He was knifed by an Irish woman".

British Union of Fascists

In 1932, Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Sir Oswald Mosley and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for the power of his oratory. The journalist and novelist Cecil Roberts described a speech given by Joyce:

"Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we were electrified by this man ... so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic."

In 1934, Joyce was promoted to be the BUF's Director of Propaganda, replacing Wilfred Risdon, and later appointed deputy leader. As well as being a gifted speaker, Joyce gained the reputation of a savage brawler. His violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-fascist elements head-on played no small part in further politically marginalizing the BUF. After a bloody incident at a BUF rally in Olympia in 1934, Joyce spearheaded the group's policy shift from campaigning for economic revival through corporatism to a focus on antisemitism. He was instrumental in changing the name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936 and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to the London County Council. In 1936, Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop.

Between April 1934 and 1937, when Mosley sacked him, Joyce served as Area Administrative Officer for the BUF West Sussex division. He was supported in the role by Norah Elam as Sussex Women's Organiser, with her partner Dudley Elam, the son of an Irish nationalist, taking on the role of Sub-Branch Officer for Worthing. Under this regime, West Sussex became a hub of fascist activity, ranging from hosting BUF summer camps to organising meetings and rallies, lunches, etc. Elam shared many speaking platforms with Joyce and worked on propaganda speeches for him. One particular sore point for Joyce was the Government of India Bill, passed in 1935, designed to give a measure of autonomy to India, allowing freedom and the development of limited self-government. Joyce harboured a desire to become Viceroy of India should Mosley ever head a BUF government, and is recorded as describing the backers of the bill as "feeble" and "one loathsome, foetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy, hiding behind Jewish Dictators".

Joyce was sacked from his paid position when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the 1937 elections, after which Joyce promptly formed a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League. After Joyce's departure, the BUF turned its focus from antisemitism to activism, opposing a war with National Socialist Germany. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the party from 1933 and an effective fighter and orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities. Unlike Joyce, the Elams did not escape detention under Defence Regulation 18B; both were arrested on the same day as Mosley in May 1940. In later life, Elam reported that, although she disliked Joyce, she believed that his execution by the British in 1946 was wrong, stating that he should not have been regarded as a traitor to England because he was not English, but Irish.

In Germany

In late August 1939, shortly before the Second World War broke out, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. He became a naturalised German citizen in 1940.

In Berlin, Joyce could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley got him an audition at the Rundfunkhaus ("broadcasting house"). Eckersley was the former wife or second wife of the chief engineer of the BBC, Peter Eckersley. Despite having a heavy cold and having almost lost his voice, Joyce was recruited immediately for radio announcements and scriptwriting at German radio's English service. His first broadcast was reading the news in English on 6 September 1939, just three days after the declaration of war between Britain and Germany. On 18 September, he received a contract as a newsreader. After the dismissal of Norman Baillie-Stewart in December, Joyce became the principal reader of news and the writer of six talks a week, thus becoming the station's best-known propaganda broadcaster.

In a newspaper article of 14 September 1939, the radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express wrote of hearing a gent "moaning periodically from Zeesen" who "speaks English of the haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety". Four days later he gave him the nickname "Lord Haw-Haw". The voice Barrington heard is widely believed to be that of Wolf Mittler, a German journalist whose near-flawless English sounded like a caricature of an upper-crust Englishman. However, Mittler only made five or six broadcasts and was quickly replaced by other broadcasters, leading to uncertainty over to whom Barrington had been referring. When Joyce became the most prominent broadcaster of National Socialist propaganda by the end of 1939, the name stuck to him. Joyce himself began to trade on the notoriety of the nickname more than a year later, on 3 April 1941, when he announced himself as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw".

Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin, later being transferred (because of heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg City and finally to Apen near Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of German-controlled radio stations in Zeesen, Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais and Oslo.

Joyce also broadcast on and wrote scripts for the German Büro Concordia organisation, which ran several black propaganda stations, many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain. His role in writing the scripts increased over time, and German radio capitalised on his public persona. Initially an anonymous broadcaster, Joyce eventually revealed his real name to his listeners and he would occasionally be announced as, "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". Urban legends soon circulated about Lord Haw-Haw, alleging that the broadcaster was well-informed about political and military events to the point of near-omniscience. In the summer of 1942 it was decided that he should no longer read the news and, from then on, he read only his own talks in Views on the News.

Listening to Joyce's broadcasts was officially discouraged but was not illegal, and many Britons tuned in. There was a desire by civilian listeners to hear what the other side was saying, as information during wartime was strictly censored. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated six million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the UK. The broadcasts always began with the announcer's words, "Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling". These broadcasts urged the British people to surrender and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone.

The Reich Security Main Office commissioned Joyce to give lectures at the University of Berlin for SS members in the winter of 1941–42 on the topic of "British fascism and acute questions concerning the British world empire".

Joyce recorded his final broadcast on 30 April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. Rambling and audibly drunk, he chided the UK for pursuing the war beyond mere containment of Germany and repeatedly warned of the "menace" of the Soviet Union. He signed off with a final defiant, "Heil Hitler and farewell". There are conflicting accounts as to whether this last programme was actually transmitted, although a recording was found in the Apen studios. The next day, Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces, and on 4 May Wynford Vaughan-Thomas used it to make a mock "Germany Calling" broadcast denouncing Joyce.

Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included writing propaganda for distribution among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS. He wrote a book Twilight Over England promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, which unfavourably compared the evils of Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the alleged wonders of National Socialist Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First and Second Class) for his broadcasts, although he never met Joyce.

On 28 May 1945, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, near the German border with Denmark, which was the last capital of the Third Reich. Spotting a dishevelled figure while they were resting from gathering firewood, intelligence soldiers – including a Jewish German, Geoffrey Perry (born Horst Pinschewer), who had left Germany before the war – engaged him in conversation in French and English, eventually recognising his voice. After they asked whether he was Joyce, he reached into his pocket (actually reaching for a false passport); believing he was armed, Perry shot him through the buttocks, resulting in four wounds.

Execution

Joyce went to his death unrepentant. He allegedly said:

In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the West may the standard be raised from the dust, crowned with the words – "You have conquered nevertheless". I am proud to die for my ideals and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.

"You have conquered nevertheless" was presumably a reference to "UND IHR HABT DOCH GESIEGT", a phrase inscribed on the reverse side of the Blood Order medal. Other sources refer to his having said, "May the swastika be raised from the dust".

Joyce was executed on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39. He was the penultimate person hanged for a crime other than murder in the UK. The last was Theodore Schurch, executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville Prison. In both cases, the hangman was Albert Pierrepoint. Joyce died "an Anglican, like his mother, despite a long and friendly correspondence with a Roman Catholic priest who fought hard for William's soul". The scar on Joyce's face split wide open because of the pressure applied to his head upon his drop from the gallows.

William Edward David Allen: British Scholar, Foreign Service Officer, Fascist Politician and Businessman

(6 January 1901 – 18 September 1973)

Born into, on his father's side, an Ulster-Scots family in London and brought up in Hertfordshire, he was educated at Eton College (1914–1918), where he began to learn Russian and Turkish. He published his first book, The Turks in Europe, when he was eighteen. He was a special correspondent for The Morning Post during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the Rif War (1925).

In the pre-Second World War years, he travelled a lot and conducted extensive research on the history of the peoples of the Caucasus and Anatolia. In 1930, along with Sir Oliver Wardrop, he founded the Georgian Historical Society; the Society published its own journal, Georgica, dedicated to Kartvelian studies.

His mother financed his personal enterprises until around 1935, and also provided a home at Commonwood House, Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, where he and his brothers could bring their guests at weekends: in Allen's case, he wrote later, these would include "bizarre intellectuals, Caucasian philologists and exiled national leaders from the remoter parts of Central Asia".

In 1940–1, he accompanied Orde Wingate on his mission to Fascist-occupied Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and wrote a book of his experiences called Guerrilla War in Abyssinia. On 6 March 1941 the Royal Italian Army division won a victory; what they did know was that a much smaller force opposed them. Wingate set out to fool them in a game of deception: Allen remarked "Perhaps God fights on the side of great hearts and not of the big battalions." The tactic of surprise attacks behind unnerved the garrison at Debra Markos which scarpered in some disorder. He also met and recorded the activities of other Special Operations Executive (SOE) comrades Tony Simonds and Billy Maclean, as remarkable for their informality and eccentricities as their soldierly demeanour.

He wrote with Paul Muratoff (Pavel Muratov) two volumes on the Russian campaign for Penguin Books. John Erickson wrote that they (particularly the second volume) are examples of skilful exploitation of contemporary sources, and even today retain considerable value, including the elucidation of terrain factors.

Allen was an officer with His Majesty's Diplomatic Service from 1943—notably information counsellor at Ankara between 1947 and 1949—until he stepped down and returned to his native Ulster in 1949. There, while living near Killyleagh, County Down, he divided his working time between running the family business (David Allen's, a major bill-posting company) and writing the two major books which he completed during the 1950s: Caucasian Battlefields (1953, with Pavel Muratov), and David Allens (1957, an account of the business and a collective biography of the Allen family). His last book, Russian Embassies to the Georgian Kings (1589-1605), written with the help of the translator Anthony Mango, was published in two volumes by the Hakluyt Society in 1970. He spent his last years living at Whitechurch House, near Cappagh in County Waterford, in the south-east of Ireland.

After his death in Dublin in 1973, his extensive library of books on Georgia and the Caucasus was estimated at £30,000 (worth between £280,000 and £530,000 in 2014). This library is now part of the Indiana University's Lilly Library, which describes it as being 'rich in travel narratives, chronicles and works in linguistics, and [containing] a number of books and some manuscripts in the Georgian language'.

Political career and fascism

Allen stood unsuccessfully in Fermanagh and Tyrone at the 1922 general election, but was elected seven years later on his next attempt, at the 1929 general election as the Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for Belfast West.

He defected from the Unionists in 1931, to join Sir Oswald Mosley's New Party, but did not contest the 1931 general election. He was a friend of Mosley and defended fascist movements, including Mosley's British Union of Fascists, as "the expression of the European will-to-renewal."

It was believed that assertions he was an MI5 informant were false; however, documents now available in the National Archive confirm that he was interviewed by MI5 and gave over information regarding the BUF's funding from Fascist Italy.

Personal life

He was married: (1) from 1922 to 1932, to Lady Phyllis Edith King (1897–1947), the daughter of Lionel Fortescue King, 3rd Earl of Lovelace (1865–1929); (2) from 1932 to 1939, to Paula Gellibrand (1898–1986), once one of Cecil Beaton's favourite models, formerly the wife of the Marquis de Casa Maury and formerly the wife of Ivan Wilkie Brooks; and (3) from 1943, to Nathalie Maximovna (c. 1900–1966).

Speech, 1963: Globalism and Multiculturalism

By Oswald Mosley.

We pointed out, the lines of policy then being pursued, were bound to end in disaster. They talked of what they called ‘multiracialism’, which was simply a universal mix-up. Take humanity, put it in a bag, shake it together, and Heaven knows what would come out. 

They wanted to get rid of what existed. All the little grey people of the world, who hate the beautiful diversity of human development, they always want to get rid of the natural, the noble and the beautiful. They wanted to get rid of it; they wanted to make all nature as grey as themselves. It was their deep instinct. 

We were always opposed to that. We said: no, it won’t work, and it’s undesirable that it should work. We can live in peace and friendship, side by side, in separate nations and separate developments, but we cannot have the mix-up of peoples and races who are widely different and divergent; it will lead to nothing but trouble.

This policy of mixture, what does it really mean? It doesn’t mean ‘freedom’; it doesn’t mean ‘brotherhood’ or any of the cant and humbug which is taught. That is just the mask for some of the vilest forces on earth to exploit the peoples in the future, as they have done in the past. 

Every one of us in this hall was old enough to see before the War, every one of you know what happened; how the financial forces in the thirties went into these backward countries: into India within the Empire, into Hong Kong, into Japan, into China, and exploited these peoples to produce cheap sweated goods, which ruined the great industries of Britain and of Europe, which put Lancashire out of business in the cotton trade, Yorkshire out of business in the woollen trade. And these poor devils of coolies were exploited for a wage of a few shillings a week, for what purpose? To enable the city of London and Wall Street New York to make fatter profits...!

That is why it was done; that was the whole purpose, but with what result? 

China thrown into the arms of Communism, the largest population in the world, simply tossed as a present to Communism, because if you treat people like that, it’s the only possible result. If there’s no one to save them, no one to help them, and they’ve simply been ground into poverty, and sweating and exploitation, what can you expect, except they go Communist as they did, and all these countries which have been exploited, thrown and tossed aside by finance, and now becoming the victims of Communism, so finance seeks fresh fields of exploitation. 

Where do they turn, when the old people are exhausted, when many a poor labourers died of consumption and of other horrible diseases in their sweatshops, or when their exhausted fields of exploitation; where do they turn now? New pastures, new forests, fresh virgin land, and then you erect a Union Jack, or another flag of Europe, and under that flag where you allow these things to happen as we have done in the past, and those poor devils are going to be sweated and exploited in Africa, like the other poor devils in China, India, and Japan. A great new field for sweatshops to be opened up, so that these new industries, which we’re creating in Britain today, will be destroyed as the old industries were: simplified, rationalised machinery, with a few White surveyors, and then the masses of cheap coloured labour, torn off the land and taken into the sweatshops to work and labour and cough their guts out with tuberculosis, until they too are thrown on the scrapheap of the sweatshops. 

Is that worthy of Britain? Is that to be the future of Europe? And is this competition to be organised within our European brotherhood? Bringing in these sweat-fields in Africa, into our Europe civilisation, so that the financial power in one European country can use it against the financial power in another? All the great financial central power of the world, now shifted from the city of London to Wall Street New York, shall be able, on the mass of money, of wealth, and of power, which it brings to it, again and again, to exert its influence in politics, until as you see today, it is childish nonsense to say that a British government rules Britain! It’s nothing to do with British government or the British people! The government of the world is the financial government, the power of money and of money alone!

Irelands Right to Unite

By Oswald Mosley.

What interest has an Englishman in Ireland? The answer is that this Englishman proved his interest in Ireland and friendship for her people when, as the youngest member of the British Parliament, he became Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee which opposed the operations of the Black and Tans and demanded peace with Ireland. We succeeded at any rate in bringing the Black and Tan iniquity to an end, but we were only partially successful in winning peace for Ireland, because the Government of the day dismembered Ireland. The original Tory demand was for a nine county Ulster divided from Ireland, which would have subjected a 65% Catholic majority, to the Protestant minority in those counties. The final “partition” of six counties still included predominantly Catholic areas.

POLICEMAN’S KNOCK

The rule which followed has been a disgrace to Britain. What a bitter irony for the British war-time Prime Minister to advocate the “Union of Europe at the Hague and renunciate as his basic principle “freedom from fear of the policeman’s knock” in a period when the “policeman’s knock” is still the only means by which the Tory Party can maintain its rule in Ulster. For the six Counties are the first Police State in Europe : they have always had arrest and imprisonment without trial.

EQUIVALENT OF 18B

Their equivalent of 18B was not confined to war-time: it is their regular method of government in Northern Ireland. The rounding up of Catholics and holding them in prison without trial through the best- years of their young manhood is a commonplace of this system. Freedom from “fear of the policeman’s knock” indeed. We had arrest and imprisonment without trial in England during the war: we have it still in Ulster today.

For long past it has been my practice not to attack anyone who sincerely and strenuously opposes Communism. I shall not do so now, but I suggest that Europe – cannot be united on a basis of humbug, and that every Englishman is put in that position by the Ulster situation, if he advocates freedom from imprisonment without trial in the Europe of the future. For my part I have always stood for the principle of no imprisonment without trial. If a nation so desires, it can always alter the law to suit the facts of a new civilisation. But no nation has the moral right to imprison any subject who has kept the law and can be charged with no breach of the law.

TWO POLICE STATES

If the Government acts in this way it is guilty of a frame-up and a racket from which no one can be safe. Where is freedom if you say to the individual: “What you did yesterday was perfectly legal and according to law, but we are going to imprison you for having done it.” or alternatively: “you have not broken the law, but we fear you may commit some offence in future, so we are going to imprison you to prevent it.  Under such formulae of mis-Government no-one is safe from gaol and all freedom is a mockery. That was the war-time system in England and it is the present system in Ulster. Soviet Russia and Ulster share the distinction of having been the only two Police States in Europe to last for some’30 years. The first is run by International Communism, and the second by the British Tory Party.

UNION OF EUROPE

The Ulster disgrace must be brought to an end. Now is the time and opportunity to do it, all Western nations should soon have the chance to enter a wider Union of Europe. Admission to that larger community will bring a guarantee against the persecution of minorities which could not exist within the narrow hatreds of smaller societies. A minority of Protestants, of course, does exist in Northern Ireland. They have used their fear of persecution to secure from British Government the means to persecute an almost equal number of Catholics. Both the fear and excuse will be removed on entry to the Union of Europe. The large community of the future can guarantee freedom from persecution to such minorities. No further reason or excuse exists for the separate life of the Ulster State. Therefore, Union Movement affirms the right of Ireland to unite and then, as a united people, to enter the wider Union of Europe.

OSWALD MOSLEY

The State and the Citizen

By Oswald Mosley.

The moral and social law and convention of Britain provide the most startling of all contrasts with the Briton’s strange illusion that he is free. The plain fact is that the country is hag-ridden. In no other civilised country, except perhaps in the United States, has the individual so little freedom of action.

We live on public anarchy and private repression: we should have public organisation and private liberty. We are taught that it is an outrage to interfere with the individual in his public capacity as producer, financier or distributor – though, if he uses his powers badly, his anti-social conduct may damage tens of thousands of his fellow-citizens. But we are taught to interfere with every detail of his private life, in which sphere he can damage no one but himself, or at most his immediate surroundings. A man may be sent to prison for having a shilling bet on a horse race. But he can have a tremendous bet on the stock market, and live honoured and respected as a pillar of industrial finance. He may damage the whole life of the nation in the capacity of capitalist or trade union leader, but he may not even risk the slightest damage to himself by obtaining a drink after the appointed hour!

We are treated as a nation of children; every item of social legislation is designed, not to enable the normal person to live a normal life, but to prevent the decadent from hurting himself. At every point the private liberty of the individual is invaded by busybody politicians who have grossly mismanaged their real business – which is the public life of an organised nation.

It is, of course, a simpler task for limited intelligences to keep public houses closed than to keep factories open. The politician, conscious perhaps of his own limitations, turns naturally to a sphere with which he is more familiar. The result is the creation of a political system which is precisely the reverse of what a political system should be. In the public affairs of national life we have disorder and anarchy: in the private affairs of individual life we have interference and repression.

It is scarcely even anarchy; it is a laughable form of organised humbug, which has made us the mock of every civilised country. The whole system is the child of that same mentality which has transformed Parliament into a bleating of ineffective sheep; which blundered into the War, the Peace, the Debt-Settlement, and the Financial Crisis. It is the by-product of age, struggling with a problem for which it feels itself unequal; and, as such, it is a supreme challenge to youth and realism.

Public Service – Private Liberty The Fascist principle is Liberty in private, Obligation in public life. In his public capacity a man must behave as befits a citizen and a member of the State; his actions must conform to the interests of the State, which protects and governs him and guarantees his personal freedom. In private he may behave as he likes. Provided he does not interfere with the freedom and enjoyment of others, his conduct is a matter between himself and his own conscience.

But there is one condition. The State has no room for the drone and the decadent, who use their leisure to destroy their capacity for public usefulness. In our morality it is necessary to “live like athletes” to fit ourselves for the career of service which is the Fascist idea of citizenship. To all moral questions the acid test is first social and secondly scientific. If an action does not harm the State, or other citizens of the State, and is it leaves the doer sound in mind and body, it cannot then be morally wrong. This test over-rides all considerations of religion, prejudice and inherited doctrines which, at present, obscure the mind of man.

We detest the decadence of excess as much as we despise the decadence of repression. An ordered athleticism of mind and body is the furthest aim of justly enforceable morality. And even for the enforcement of this we would rely on the new social sense, born of a modern renaissance, rather than upon legislation. The law arrests the occasional drunkard; but it does not touch the tippler, the weakling and the degenerate.

In our ordered athleticism of life we seek, in fact, a morality of the Spartan pattern. But this must be more than tempered with the Elizabethan atmosphere of Merrie England. The days before the victory of Puritan repression coincided with the highest achievements of British virility and constructive adventure. The men who carried the British flag to the furthest seas were far from hag-ridden in their private lives. The companions of their leisure hours were neither D.O.R.A. nor Mrs Grundy

Fitness and Happiness We know that happiness, no less than fitness, is a social and political asset. The more gaiety and happiness in the ranks of those who grapple with the tasks of today, the better is it for the achievement of their mission. But all our gaiety of life and happiness in private things must contribute to, and not diminish, our power to serve the State. In practice we are glad to see a man on race course, on football stand, in theatre or in cinema during well-earned hours of leisure; and we do not mind in the least seeing him in a public house or club, provided that he is not there to excess, and does not there squander his health or his resources. In many things the distinction is between relaxation and indulgence. The latter becomes decadence, but the former contributes to healthy enjoyment, which in its turn contributes to efficiency and to service.

Therefore in asking our members to “live like athletes” we do not advocate the sterility of Puritanism and repression. We want men, not eunuchs, in our ranks, but men with a singleness of purpose which they order their lives to serve. Such morality is already accepted within our Movement, and its implications find an organised form. We expect our members to keep fit, not only in mind, but also in body, and for that reason have often been attacked as organising for physical violence. We shall certainly meet force with force; but this is not the motive of these activities. No man can be far sunk in degeneration so long as he excels, or even performs competently, in some branch of athletics. It is a part of the dedicated life of a new movement to maintain that constant training in mind and body which is readiness to serve when the time comes. In our own movement, in fact, we seek to create in advance a microcosm of a national manhood reborn.

Such is our morality, which we claim is the natural morality of British manhood; and from it follows hostility to the social repression and legislation of today, and to every achievement of our hag-ridden politics which is summarised in D.O.R.A. We seek to create a nationwide movement which will replace the legislation of old women by the social sense and the will to serve of young men. Every man shall be a member of the State, giving his public life to the State, but claiming in return his private life and liberty from the State, and enjoying it within the Corporate purpose of the State.

Oswald Mosley

Christ, Nietzsche, & Caesar

By Oswald Mosley.

Our opponents allege that Fascism has no historic background or philosophy, and it is my task this afternoon to suggest that Fascism has roots deep in history and has been sustained by some of the finest flights of the speculative mind. I am, of course, aware that not much philosophy attaches to our activities in the columns of the daily press. However, I trust you will believe that those great mirrors of the public mind do not always give a very accurate reflection, and while you only read of the more stirring moments of our progress, yet there are other moments, which have some depth in thought and constructive conception.

I believe that Fascist philosophy can be expressed in intelligible terms, and while it makes an entirely novel contribution to the thought of this age, it can yet be shown to derive both its origin and its historic support from the established thought of the past.

In the first instance, I suggest that most philosophies of action are derived from a synthesis of cultural conflicts in a previous period. Where, in an age of culture, of thought, of abstract speculation, you find two great cultures in sharp antithesis, you usually find, in the following age of action, some synthesis in practice between those two sharp antitheses which leads to a practical creed of action.

I would suggest to you that in the last century, the major intellectual struggle arose from the tremendous impact of Nietszchian thought on the Christian civilisation of two thousand years. That impact was only very slowly realised. Its full implications are only today working themselves out. But turn where you will in modern thought, you find the results of that struggle for mastery of the mind and the spirit of man. I am not myself stating the case against Christianity, because I am going to show you how I believe the Nietszchian and the Christian doctrines are capable of synthesis.

On the one hand you find in Fascism, taken from Christianity, taken directly from the Christian conception, the immense vision of service, of self-abnegation, of self-sacrifice in the cause of others, in the cause of the world, in the cause of your country; not the elimination of the individual, so much as the fusion of the individual in something far greater than himself; and you have that basic doctrine of Fascism, service, self-surrender to what the Fascist must conceive to be the greatest cause and the greatest impulse in the world. On the other hand you find taken from Nietszchian thought the virility, the challenge to all existing things which impede the march of mankind, the absolute abnegation of the doctrine of surrender; the firm ability to grapple with and to overcome all obstructions. You have, in fact, the creation of a doctrine of men of vigour and of self-help which is the other outstanding characteristic of Fascism.

At the moment of a great world crisis, a crisis which in the end will inevitably deepen, a movement emerges from a historic background which makes its emergence inevitable, carrying certain traditional attributes derived from a very glorious past, but facing the facts of today, armed with the instruments which only this age has ever conferred upon mankind. By this new and wonderful coincidence of instrument and of event the problems of the age can be overcome, and the future can be assured in a progressive stability. Possibly this is the last great wave of the immortal, the eternally recurring Caesarian movement; but with the aid of science, and with the inspiration of the modern mind, this wave shall carry humanity to the further shore.

Oswald Mosley