The Black Shirts

London

When Sir Oswald Mosley’s so-called New Party failed in the last general elections to put into office a solitary candidate, many people made so bold as to prophesy the demise of the Fascist movement in England within a twelvemonth. The idea of Fascism, they said, would never take in this country, regardless of the inroads it had made on the Continent. The Mosley cause was “utterly hopeless.”

Thus it is not a little surprising to find, these many months later, that the movement has grown to the point where it has branches all over the land, plenty of money in its treasury and—most significant of all — huge membership. The movement, whatever else one may say about it, can no longer be described as a mushroom growth, and the time has come when some attempt should be made to estimate its strength.

MORE LIKE ITALIAN THAN GERMAN MODEL

Outwardly the party resembles the Italian model rather than the German one. The shirt is black, not brown, and instead of the Hitler symbol of the Hakenkrenz, Mosley has adopted the Roman Fasces. So, too, with policy. Hitler’s program was an extraordinary hotchpotch of contradictions, impossible to understand unless the reader remembered that Hitler was exploiting a mass of class and national hatreds—hatred of the Jew, hatred of the “war profiteer,” of the financier and the “internationalist capitalist.”

Mosley’s policy bears no trace of this hysteria, and indeed, compared with the Nazi program, it looks uncommonly staid and severe. Apart from the “reform of Parliament,” Mosley preaches the ideal of the complete corporate state, a regulated economic life, and an observer will notice how subtly he has stolen the thunder both of the Left and the Right.

BUT MOSLEY’S TACTICS RESEMBLE HITLER’S

It is not, however, the actual program that is important, but the methods used to get it across, and here Mosley is more like Hitler than Mussolini. Like Hitler, he has learned all the popular Socialist jargon, and there is no one in England who knows how to play on the vague suspicions of a working-class audience better than he does.

But he is more concrete than Hitler, whose whole object is to fill his audience with a vague sense of injustice, and thus to work them into a passion. Mosley seriously argues his case. He speaks with great sincerity—indeed, it is absurd to suggest that he is “insincere”—and he has the art of illuminating his argument by a sudden brilliance of phrase.

His one fault as a speaker is that he is still too inclined to be clever at the expense of his opponents—a habit that amuses an audience but does not convince it.

STILL LACKS POWER OF SIMPLIFICATION

Mosley is particularly like Hitler in his sense of the dramatic. He has not yet shown the power of simplification that Hitler has: For instance, anybody can draw the Hakenkreuz, but few people can draw the Fasces. But in the art of creating an atmosphere, of managing the spotlight, Mosley has nothing to learn, and in a Fascist movement this is of very great importance.

The party also resembles the Hitler movement in the type it is attracting. No generalization can be very accurate, but it can be said that, as with the Nazis, there is a reactionary wing, composed of violent anti-Socialists, and a revolutionary wing, recruited from the I.L.P. and the Communists.

LEFT WING ADHERENTS ARE STRONGER THAN RIGHT

So far as one can judge, the left wing is considerably stronger than the right, for when Mosley founded the movement he took over with him many disconnected members of the Labor movement. Tremendous headway, too, has been made in the big industrial centers of the north, where many of the unemployed have become disillusioned both with the Labor Party and the Communists. This success in the areas that have remained unshakably loyal to Labor for so many years is the most impressive fact about the Fascist movement. It is not surprising that he has been able to build up a strong organization in Manchester and that today he should be holding a mass meeting in Birmingham Bingley Hall, which accommodates 15,000 persons.