REVIEW OF 'THE EVIL GOOD MEN DO'

Published in issue no 13 of European Action

Reviewed by Colin Wilson in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, January 20th 1989

(This was Jeffrey Hamm’s second book, following on from his autobiography, Action Replay. Hamm was a founding member of Mosley’s Union Movement and Oswald Mosley’s private secretary up until the Leader’s death in 1980. The Evil Good Men Do was published in 1988, nearly 20 years ago.)

In the late 1950s I was a famous Nazi - at least according to some of the leftists of that period, such as Kenneth Tynan, Bernard Levin and Philip Toynbee. What they meant was that I had spoken out in support of Sir Oswald Mosley, particularly his idea of a European Common Market. I could deny the ‘fascist’ allegation until I was black in the face; since they commanded more newspaper space than I did, a great many people believed them.
Now, eight years after Mosley’s death, it is becoming possible to discuss him without being accused of wanting to re-open Buchenwald. And anyone who is willing to take the trouble can find out that he was one of the most far-sighted politicians of the 20th century. As a simple and painless way of doing this, I can thoroughly recommend Jeffrey Hamm’s The Evil Good Men Do.
I am not too keen on the title; it sounds like one of those all-purpose soporifics from Shakespeare. In fact, a better title would have been Blunders. For that is precisely what it is about; the appalling blunders made by well-meaning politicians between the First World War and the present day - blunders in immigration policy, in housing, in education, the use of North Sea oil. And a dozen other delicate subjects including Northern Ireland. Hamm writes calmly, almost primly, yet a great deal of what he is saying is dynamite.
Hamm is a Welshman who, like many decent and intelligent people, joined Mosley’s Movement in the 1930s because he saw that Mosley provided a real alternative to the bumbling and incompetence of politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain - the incompetence that led us into the Second World War.
Although he was school-teaching in the Falklands in 1940, he was arrested and interned. On his release he joined the army and fought Hitler. But he is still understandably bitter about the stupidities that labelled him a kind of Nazi, and about the mud that continued to stick even after the war, when Mosley’s most important idea was a European Common Market. Hamm’s autobiography, Action Replay, was a sincere, intelligent and exciting book, and I recommend it to everyone who would like to hear the other side of the story.
Having said which, I have to admit that the second chapter of his new book will give most people apoplexy. It is entitled The Disastrous War and it argues that Britain made a tremendous mistake in going to war with Hitler. It asks the question: Did Hitler regard England as an enemy? - and answers No. Which is undoubtedly true. Hitler had an almost sentimental regard for the British.
It then goes on to point out that Hitler’s designs lay all to the East, in Russia and suggests that it would have been no bad thing if he had smashed Stalinism, and we had sat back and let him do it.
If you can accept this, then you will certainly read the rest of Hamm’s book with admiration. But even if you can’t, it should be no obstacle to admiring Hamm’s acute political intelligence as he retells the political history of our time and points out that British post-war governments have been just as incompetent as those of the ’30s.
You may well gasp with astonishment and outrage at a comment such as: “The war had inadvertently enabled Labour to achieve one of its pre-war objectives: the destruction of the British Empire”. But anyone who thinks this is rightist rhetoric should then read the next page in which Hamm totally justifies his opinion by quoting Attlee, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Gaitskell.
During the last 20 years of his life, Mosley knew he had lost the battle; that even if he grew wings and a halo, he would never succeed in persuading people that he was not a Nazi thug and that his political ideas were intelligent and reasonable.
As I read Hamm’s scathing and witty book, I was saddened by the thought that he is basically in the same position. Yet even if he can only reach a hundred readers who understand the importance of what he has to say, he will have justified the courageous optimism that made him write it.
Colin Wilson

THE EUROPEAN SOCIALISM OF OSWALD MOSLEY

By Dermont Clark

Firstly, let me pay tribute to Sir Oswald Mosley who coined the phrase Europe a Nation, because nearly six decades after the formation of Union Movement back in 1948, and more than 26 years after his death in 1980, we who subscribe to or write articles for European Action are still inspired by his philosophy. Walter Lippman (the American journalist, author and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist) said, “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on”.
Interesting too, that in reviewing the early successes of British Union, Mosley addressing his brother Blackshirts called on them to possess the character of the true revolutionary. They were fighting for nothing less than a revolution in the spirit of the British people and they needed to have within them the character and power to endure, to have loyalty, constancy, manhood and stability of nature.
A previous issue of this publication (number 8, March/April 2007) dealt in much detail with the Conference of Venice in 1962 and the acceptance by those who attended of the need for a National Party of Europe, and how some of the other European parties that had subscribed fully to proposals failed to act and ultimately reverted to their cozy nationalist agenda.
In fact, Mosley had gone further still and called upon members of Union Movement to be European Socialists (he had always denied being of the ‘right’ politically, stating that he was from the ‘left’). In essence then, we have been called revolutionaries and socialists but how does this tie in with our National Party of Europe and the demand to bring about Europe a Nation?
In May 1956, Mosley’s essay ‘European Socialism’ was printed in the German monthly Nation Europa. In that article, European Socialism was defined as “the development by a fully united Europe of all the resources in our continent for the benefit of all the peoples of Europe, with every energy and incentive that the active leadership of European government can give to private enterprise, workers’ ownership or any other method of progress which science and a dynamic system of government find most effective for the enrichment of all our people and the lifting of European civilization to ever higher forms of life”.
Note that both private enterprise and workers’ ownership (syndicalism) are equally acceptable under this plan, Indeed, Mosley’s concept was of private enterprise leading to syndicalism as a natural transition from one to the other. When a private business became too big for individual management or when private enterprise is exhausted, workers’ ownership would be introduced. Today we are used to the idea of a ‘management buy out’ but syndicalism goes much further, vesting the ownership of the business among ALL of the workers in the same way as the John Lewis and Waitrose stores are owned by a partnership of all the staff.
Mosley went on to say that “the state should define the broad boundaries within which industry might operate and should itself only intervene in the event of breakdown. The state should direct not by control but by leadership, not by bureaucracy but by the wage-price mechanism”. In other words, for example, the state says to producers, wholesalers and retailers of foodstuffs that you must only sell people food that is safe to eat and then let them get on with their task. You do not have to define the size and shape of a cucumber and then hire a team of bureaucrats to go around shops and supermarkets to ensure that the cucumbers are not too large or too small or have too big a bend.
On taxation, Mosley said, “The leadership of the state will be exercised by the planned and regulated raising of wages over the whole field of industry as science increases the power to produce”. He then went on to say that wages should reflect a reward for the skill, effort and responsibility taken by the employee.
Mosley saw his concept of European Socialism not as commandments set in stone but as a fluid, changing and developing plan that met the needs of the times. He said, “We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity because science has broken so many bonds and has so greatly enlarged the horizons of men. If men in an age of new facts are prepared to find new policies to meet them, they are natural companions, provided of course that we hold together that all-important spiritual kinship. We must think again, then act most strenuously, and on a greater scale than ever because we have greater possibilities, First comes the idea and the union of the spirit. All else follows!”.

THE MYTH OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

By Robert Edwards

"Anyone who knows how difficult it is to keep a secret among three men - particularly if they are married - knows how absurd is the idea of a worldwide secret conspiracy consciously controlling all mankind by its financial power; in real, clear analysis". Oswald Mosley

Conspiracy theories are sometimes the product of a far too vivid imagination. It has been said that the poet and the paranoiac find connection where the logical mind finds none. But when the truth is thrust under one’s nose, the palpable stench of duplicity and corruption turns theory into reality very quickly. This is the case with that shadowy cabal known as the Bilderberg Group. You can talk of UFOs or even fairies at the bottom of the garden in justifiably sceptical terms ... but, believe me, the Bilderberg Group is very real.The Bilderberg Group’s first meeting took place at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, at the end of May 1954. Meeting annually, the group consists of bankers, industrialists and politicians, mainly from Europe and America. Included are representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ... as well as military leaders. Their debates are held in secret and are not reported in the world’s press. According to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who attended that first meeting, “The hotel was ringed by security guards, so that not a single journalist got within a mile of the place. The participants were pledged not to repeat publicly what was said in the discussions”. This is in total variance to the nature of the recent gathering of the G8 leaders in Edinburgh, where even public protests were accepted as legitimate activity. And the deliberations of the G8 leaders were reported openly and freely on a daily basis.The Bilderberg Group, on the other hand, is a supra-national “government” manipulating the global economy and establishing monetary rates around the world. It even selects the political leaders who it deems fit to rule and targets those that it wishes to be removed. Again, Prince Bernhard clarified the modus operandi of the group with, “It is difficult to re-educate people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body”. So why the secrecy when G8 meetings are voluntarily placed under the public spotlight to the point that they become a mere diversion from the Bilderberg heavy mob?This year, in May, the Bilderbergers met behind the fortified and heavily protected walls of the Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Überfahrt in Rottach-Egern, Munich in Bavaria. These venues vary from year to year.There was a blanket ban on reporting the event. This was made easy to apply through the presence of many newspaper proprietors and their editors from around the world, Bilderbergers to a man. These are the men who decide what you read and what you do not read. From the list of participants we have the editor of Le Figaro, the publisher of the Austrian Der Standard, the boss of Axel Springer AG, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, the deputy editor of Die Zeit, Norman Pearlstine of Time Inc, the editor of Newsweek International, the United States editor of The Economist, the senior correspondent of the International Herald Tribune and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. Previously, Bilderberg Group meetings have been graced by the presence of Gerald Levin of Time Warner Inc and Norman Spector of the Jerusalem PostThe May meeting in Rottach-Egern was too uncomfortably close to the G8 meeting in June but its significance is far greater than the G8 agenda of tackling poverty in Africa. It is greater insofar that matters to do with imposing a worldwide UN taxation on all people living on this planet were discussed once again. Five years ago, this controversial proposition was on the agenda then but was proven to present a problem when coming to universal acceptance. Nevertheless, here it is again, and if enacted would set a dangerous precedent because the United Nations is a non-government agency (NGA) and part of the new Global Ethic. For the first time it would circumvent national governments on imposing taxation and make a mockery of ideas concerning national sovereignty or independence, which hardly exist even without such an imposition.The world’s moneybags were there ... all the names that evoke all that is implied by the term “high finance”. Goldman Sachs International has a permanent seat at these gatherings, along with the vice-chairman of Rothschild Europe, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Global Investment Holdings, Henry Kissinger (the elder statesman of the Bilderbergers) chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc, the chairman of Nokia Corporation, David Rockefeller of JP Morgan International Council and Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation. From around the world we had the chairman of ThyssenKrupp AG, the president of Siemens AG, the governor of the European Central Bank ... and to top it all with the cherry on the icing, former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, alongside the present incumbent, the former war-monger, Paul Wolfowitz. You could say the proverbial wolves got through the door as opposed to being kept away.A political group within the meeting is particularly influential, best described as the neo-conservatives who had been the driving force behind recent illegal wars. This sub-group includes, of course, the current president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. All the forces of globalism, the new economics of world domination, were out in force in Rottach-Egern for one purpose ... to decide on how the nations of the world will conform to a one-world culture based on guidelines dictated by Washington and Wall Street, New York. Any deviation from these edicts will not be tolerated and the necessary pressure applied, including the threat of war.Most of all, the very existence of this elitist club of very powerful men really does shatter the myth of national sovereignty that certain groups of narrow nationalists believe can exist if, for example, we simply withdraw from the European Union. UKIP and other Euro-sceptics fully embrace the concept of the global free market with scant idea of the predatory nature of those who manipulate the markets and can create pools of mass unemployment at the nod of a head. Their idea of sovereignty simply throws Britain to the wolves of what used to be referred to as international finance but has since evolved into a sinister form of American financial imperialism claiming the entire world as its personal fiefdom. Oswald Mosley warned of the predatory nature of world international competition throughout his political life. He said that countries needed to protect themselves by creating self-sufficient units otherwise unemployment was inevitable as financiers engaged one country against another, each attempting an advantage over the others. Those that did better than others in this system were the ones that kept wages down in order to compete successfully and make a profit. This global system could simply shift industries around the world to where the cheapest labour can be found. It recognises neither national frontiers nor any concept of sovereignty. The entire world belongs to money ... as in the song, “money makes the world go around”. Or should we say, money makes the world dance to its tune?The Bilderbergers represent all that is powerful and influential in the capitalist West, brought together on a regular basis in order to exercise their clout regardless of elected governments and regardless of Twentieth Century notions of national self-determination. Forget Brussels and those irritating bureaucrats who draw up rules on fishing quotas or the vital statistics of a banana. They can be sorted out through reform of the European Parliament. Look beyond all that and truly worry about the issues that affect the entire globe. There you will find the reality of world power, self-serving and without any restraints whatsoever. To those who think that the call for withdrawal from the European Union would preserve some ill-conceived sovereignty that Britain and other nations in the world feel is threatened solely by the EU ... then look at who manipulates the money markets, who lays down the conditions for borrowing from the World Bank and who meets annually to decide the future of the globe.