Some surprise and a good deal of amusement has been caused in political circles by the publication in the Daily Mail of an exchange of letters between Lord Rothermere and Sir Oswald Mosley, purporting to explain their “divergence of ideas,” the Times declared in an editorial today.
“Yet the change in the attitude of Lord Rothermere’s newspapers towards the Black shirt movement, which was lately the subject of almost lyrical advertisements, had not altogether escaped the public notice,” the Times said.
“An end to the daily list of the recruiting offices of the Black shirts; verbatim reports of their leader’s speeches, reduced by rapid stages to paragraphs and then to silence; a sudden irrelevant burst of applause for the Jews; a note of doubt in the salute to Herr Hitler—these had been all the familiar signs of an anxious retreat. Nor were the reasons for this cooling of enthusiasm really misunderstood.
“The truth is that neither dictatorship nor anti-Semitism is an attractive proposition in this country. Even in favorable circumstances they are definitely unpopular and the circumstances were not favorable. The only matter for surprise is that so serious a divergence of ideas, so gravely propounded, should not have been discovered by these thoughtful statesmen long ago.”
“Lord Rothermere has broken with Sir Oswald Mosley and for highly creditable reasons,” the Manchester Guardian said in an editorial. “I have never thought, he wrote to my dear Mosley, that a movement calling itself Fascist could be successful in this country; and I never could support any movement with an anti-Semitic bias, any movement which had dictatorship as one of its objectives, or any movement which will substitute a corporate state for the Parliamentary institutions of this country.” We may heartily applaud Lord Rothermere’s sentiments, the paper said.
“Either Lord Rothermere was guilty of extraordinary self-deception or he vastly overestimated his persuasive powers. He thought he could make Sir Oswald band his men into a nice, well-behaved Tory #giner group.’ He has since heard of Olympia and of another display of ‘the new spirit’ in the Germany of June 30. And, although he is a political eccentric, Lord Rothermere does sometimes put his ear to the ground; his sense of hearing is acuter than his prescience. But who will be next in favor? The niche is vacant”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
