WHY THEY ATTACKED MOSLEY'S MEETINGS

Published in EA No 17, September/October 2008

by Robert Edwards

BBC Radio 4 hosts the ‘Archive Hour’, a series of hour-long programmes that deal with issues of a politically contentious nature and, essentially, within living memory.
As part of the series, ‘A Rage In Dalston’ was broadcast on Saturday, April 19 at 8pm, which was an attempt at justifying one of the worst conspiracies to commit serious violence against a body of people simply and solely because they held different views. The 43 Group was formed in 1946 for one purpose and that was to attack supporters of Oswald Mosley and to ‘wipe them out’. It was thuggery pure and simple.
Andrew Roberts, an Establishment historian and author, wrote in the Daily Mail of April 15, “The 43 Group regularly broke the law in their struggle and their veterans are proud to have done so. Their philosophy was simple: attack all fascists. Armed with clubs, razors, bricks, knuckledusters, broken bottles, knives and everything except guns and bombs, the 43 Group tracked down fascist meetings to quash them”. But Roberts was not condemning this hate-fuelled campaign of extreme violence ... he was condoning it.
Towards the end of his Daily Mail article he wrote, “A Rage in Dalston is a fine tribute to the small but committed group of Britons who took direct - if undeniably illegal - action against the bacillus of anti-Semitism”.
The 43 Group was overwhelmingly Jewish in membership and used the Holocaust as an alibi in order to justify its violent activities, initially aimed at former Blackshirt Jeffrey Hamm’s British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, then holding regular outdoor meetings in Ridley Road, Dalston. Along with the Mosley Book Clubs, the League took a distinctly pro-Mosley position in its campaign to assert itself as a legitimate and patriotic group of ex-servicemen emerging in the post-war era.
Before the programme was broadcast, the Daily Mail published this letter from Calvin G. Poole of Cumbria, in response to Roberts, on April 18, “As a historian, Andrew Roberts is a bit naïve in praising criminal attacks with ‘razors, bricks, knuckledusters, broken bottles and knives’ against supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley and his followers were no more responsible for Nazi wartime concentration camps than their socialist opponents in Britain were for Stalinist death camps in Russia. His entirely legal post-war Union Movement advocated the unity of Europe against communism and it is ridiculous to accuse its speakers of hatred for verbally retaliating against organised gangs trying to slash their faces”.
The programme itself was sickening in its glorification of a blood lust on the part of a group of psychopaths who were, in point of fact, early Zionists rather than the ‘Britons’ of Andrew Roberts’ mythologising. The intensity of this terrorist activity was almost mirrored in the cold-blooded campaigns against the Palestinian people at that time, which to this day use the same moral blackmail of ‘anti-Semitism’ against those who dare criticise this kind of criminal behaviour.
All the ‘witnesses’ in this radio programme were Jewish thugs and it was emphasised in the course of the commentary that no one ‘from the other side’ (Friends of Oswald Mosley) would agree to take part. In hindsight this was perfectly reasonable given the bias of the entire broadcast. A leading member of the Friends of Oswald Mosley confided that there would never be any further co-operation with the BBC given its persistent record of defaming Oswald Mosley, including a mock trial of him in the pages of the BBC’s History magazine in which he was ‘voted’ the most evil Briton of the Twentieth Century by a man-hating feminist academic.
It would be a demonstration of the most blinded naivety to suppose that mainstream academia in this country and around the Western world would treat Mosley with anything other than complete demonisation. Such is the depth of prejudice whenever Mosley is discussed within the liberal/leftist political Establishment ... the most illiberal of such generic institutions.
Perhaps the most stomach-wrenching anecdote on the BBC Radio 4 programme came from a 43 Group thug who boasted how he spotted a middle-aged Raven Thomson on the platform of a moving bus in London. With Raven’s back turned to him the cowardly thug related how he gripped the safety bars of the bus and used both his feet to kick the former Blackshirt off the moving bus and then looked back to gloat over Raven rolling severely injured in the gutter with Raven’s daughter screaming over him soon after. That he could have killed Raven did not disturb this vile piece of near-humanity.
Undoubtedly for his celebrity value, Vidal Sassoon was roped in to give his glamorised account of his participation as a youthful 43 Group gangster. The aging crimper was as remorseless as the would-be murderer of Raven Thomson. In Sassoon’s own words, “It was a miracle that no one was killed”, which tells us a lot about the severity of the 43 Group attacks. Sassoon later fought in Israel’s ‘War of Independence’ when entire villages of innocent Palestinians were massacred without mercy.
Who can miss the irony of these sanctimonious ‘victims of anti-Semitism’ acting out the bully-boy tactics they so love to attribute to Mosley’s men, quite unjustifiably it must be said? Yet the totally illegal attacks upon individuals who supported Mosley have been raised up by the BBC as a morally superior crusade aimed at justifying mutilation and attempted murder simply because the perpetrators were Jewish and the victims being deemed ‘fascists’ or ‘anti-Semites’. There is an obviously twisted and bent logic or morality there.
The real reason that the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, then later from 1948, the embryonic Union Movement, were the victims of this violent conspiracy was not the claim by one 43 Group thug that fascists were on street corners shouting, “Not enough Jews were burned in Belsen” (highly improbable) but that they had a new message for post-war Britain.
Mosley had delivered a detailed outline of his post-war policies in his book, THE ALTERNATIVE, published in 1946. The Mosley Book Clubs were distributing the Mosley Newsletters (the young man in the foreground of the League meeting [pictured above] holds these up for sale) and old hands like Raven Thomson were publishing booklets on syndicalism and other serious issues under the Raven Publications imprint.
There was no anti-Semitism or other expressions of hatred in any of this literature because, as always, Mosley had a serious and constructive message for the British people and his followers and supporters rallied round him for those policies because they knew he was right. The quarrel with the Jews was a pre-war issue, Mosley had said, because some Jewish interests wanted war with Germany and British Union opposed war. This no longer applied after 1945.
The 43 Group, on the other hand, wanted to revive the old animosities and adopted the razor and the cosh as its main expressions of political argument. It had nothing constructive in terms of ideas beyond murder and grievous bodily harm.
Although over a thousand British Union members were rounded up in 1940 to be interned without charge or trial under Defence Regulation 18B, many others enlisted in the armed forces of the Crown at that time, with many dying for their country. Traitors like William Joyce had left the Mosley movement a few years before the outbreak of war and the number of those stupid enough to be duped by the POW camp lectures of John Amery, induced to join the tiny British Free Corps, was so miniscule as to make them more of a joke than a real threat to anyone except themselves.
All the evidence points to Mosley’s supporters being quintessentially British and patriotic and that the vital interests of Britain determined their position in favour of a negotiated peace in 1940. It also determined their willingness to go to war for their country after the failure of their peace campaign. The moral correctness of this can no longer be disputed. Yet the lies and the smears continue long after so many patriotic members of the Mosley movements have passed on, long after all the years of selfless struggle and sacrifice, simply because they loved their country and followed a vision of hope that only a man like Mosley could articulate and project. The mainstream media with the full weight of academia in Britain can never be relied on for the objective truth. That is why we should never collaborate with them. The BBC’s ‘A Rage in Dalston’ only served to reinforce and confirm that position.