We Fight Fascists by Daniel Sonabend

Author:Daniel Sonabend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Having dismissed the Nazis’ crimes in such glib fashion, Mosley had to offer his own solution for the problem of Europe’s Jews. In his 1938 polemic Tomorrow We Live, he had rejected the Jewish claim of a homeland in Palestine and suggested instead moving all Europe’s Jews to Africa. By 1947 he had changed his tune slightly and, acknowledging the right of the Jews to live in Palestine, he suggested a partition of the region and Jerusalem under ‘supra-national authority which will afford Christian, Arab and Jew impartial access to their Holy Sites’.27 Although this proposal was virtually the same as the one the United Nations subsequently voted on, there was one substantive difference. Mosley recognised that even without enraging the local Arab population, Palestine could not play host to all Jewish people, and so he proposed Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) as a country in which the remainder of the Jewish population could be settled. Mosley supported a Jewish state only because he believed it had been proven quite impossible for Jews and Christians to live alongside each other without friction and disruption.

Mosley’s anti-Semitism was catnip to the faithful, but the greater part of his book failed to live up to the hype. The Alternative was meant to lay out a roadmap to a glorious fascist future, but the central idea of Europe-A-Nation was a strange new concoction that failed to inspire Mosley’s base. Although many fascists might have rooted for the Axis powers in the war, they were still patriots at heart; and while they might have felt strong fellowship for fellow whites around Europe, they still believed first and foremost in the greatness of Britain. Even devoted Mosley loyalists later conceded that ‘Europe-A-Nation’ never achieved ‘quite the same zeal as the BU’, and in 1950 Raven Thompson told Mosley it lacked a ‘strong psychological appeal for the membership’.28

Not all fascists took against it – lifelong Mosley devotee Jeffrey Hamm was a fan – but on the whole Europe-A-Nation found its most enthusiastic readers on the continent. The Alternative became an influential work of pan-European fascism, with the German-language version outselling the English original.

Even if Europe-A-Nation did not inspire the fascist faithful, it was at least an idea that most could get their heads around. The same could not be said for Mosley’s concept of the idealised fascist leader, which he called the ‘Thought-Deed Man’.

He is the hope of the peoples and of the world. His form already emerges from this thought, in an idea which has derived from both theory and practice.29

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