Hurrah for the Blackshirts : Remembering The Daily Mail's Support For Fascism

On January 15 1934, The Daily Mail newspaper ran with the notorious headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” which was written by Viscount Rothemere, whose family incidentally still own the Mail, an article that  celebrated Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF).

Mosley was highly influenced by Benito Mussolini, so much so that members of the BUF were given the nickname of ‘Blackshirts’ as their uniform was modelled on that worn by those belonging to the National Fascist Party in Italy.Mosley’s Blackshirts dressed up like Mussolini’s thugs and saluted like Hitler’s, but theirs was a distinctly English program. The first of Mosley’s “10 Points of Fascism” announced that the BUF was “loyal to King and Country” and its “watch-word… is ‘Britain First.’”

 Mosley himself was commissioned in the 16th Lancers but joined the Royal Flying Corps at the outbreak of the First World War. Injured in a crash in 1915, he rejoined the Lancers and fought in the trenches between October 1915 and October 1916. He joined the Conservatives after military service to become an MP at 22. From the first, he challenged the old guard even within his own party, and was re-elected as an Independent before crossing the House to join Labour where he campaigned on unemployment. With his matinee idol looks and dramatic oratory, Mosley cut a darkly glamorous, radical figure.After the 1931 general election, Mosley toured Europe and it was that particular expedition which drew his attention to fascism. Following his travels, at 34 he founded the New Party, which – influenced by Mussolini – morphed into the quasi-military British Union of Fascists 19 months later in October 1932, with Mosley himself as the leader.

 Lord Rothermere, had launched the Daily Mail in 1896 with his elder brother, Alfred Harmsworth, who was later named Lord Northcliffe. By 1930, they owned 14 daily and Sunday newspapers, and a substantial share in three more.Shortly after Mussolini came to power, Rothermere laid his cards on the table. In an article in the Mail entitled “What Europe Owes to Mussolini,” he expressed his “profound admiration” for Italy’s new leader.

“In saving Italy he stopped the inroads of Bolshevism which would have left Europe in ruins… in my judgment he saved the whole Western world,” Rothermere declared.

His frequent visits to Italy seemed only to further stoke Rothermere’s enthusiasm for the Duce.

“He is the greatest figure of the age,” Rothermere proclaimed in 1928. “Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the 20th century as Napoleon dominated that of the early 19th.” He praised Mosley and the Blackshirts seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs”.

 Rothermere initially believed that Britain was “not suited” to fascism, but a general strike in 1926 and a fear that Baldwin was displaying “the feebleness which tries to placate opposition by being more socialist than the Socialists,” led him to reappraise this view as a new decade dawned.

 The Mail’s enthusiasm for the Nazis would grow as their support in Germany surged.By the 1930 election, when the Nazis’ seats in the Reichstag jumped from 12 to 107, Rothermere was a convert.

“[The Nazis] represent the rebirth of Germany as a nation,” Rothermere wrote in the Mail. The election, he correctly prophesied, would come to be seen as “a landmark of this time.”

It wasn’t hard to see why the Mail’s fawning coverage of the Nazis so delighted the Fuhrer — the paper uncritically reported the butchery of the Night of the Long Knives.

“Herr Adolf Hitler, the German Chancellor, has saved his country,” began its story on the frenzy of extrajudicial killings, and cheered the Nazis on as they trampled the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

When German troops marched into the Rhineland in March 1936, the Mail suggested Hitler had “cleared the air” and warned against “Bolshevik troublemakers.” It offered a glowing report of the Anschluss two years later — penned by Price, who had hitched a ride in Hitler’s convoy as it sped towards Vienna.

 Grateful for this unusual support from the foreign press,gained the Mail exclusive access to publish interviews with Hitler, it also earned Lord Rothermere and his son a place at the dinner table as honoured guests of Hitler himself.Following his meetings, Rothermere believed Hitler — a “simple and unaffected man” and a “perfect gentleman” — to be “obviously sincere” in his desire for peace. “There is no man living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would sooner take,” he later argued. A vicious reactionary anti-semite, Rothermere saw the Nazi dictator as an ally against the spread of (Jewish) communism and backed Hitler's actions to remove Jews from public life in Germany. During the Munich crisis of 1938 his papers urged capitulation to Hitler's demands for the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia (though they did advocate rearmament, just in case). The Mail objected time and again to the admission to Britain of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. 

                                                      Lord Rothermore and Hitler

Under the headline Hurrah for the Blackshirts Rothermore praised Mosley and the Blackshirts seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs”;auding Mosley’s aim of bringing Britain “up to date” by following in the footsteps of Europe’s “best governed” nations, Italy and Nazi Germany. The article urged a similar “revival of national strength and spirit.” Following their proprietor’s cue, staff at the paper began showing up for work wearing black shirts.

Rothermere’s other newspapers also threw their support behind the effort. The Mirror urged its readers to “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand,” and printed the addresses of Mosley’s local recruiting offices. A visit to Germany or Italy, Rothermere assured readers, showed that “the mood of the vast majority of the inhabitants was not cowed submission, but confident enthusiasm.”

The Sunday Dispatch offered free tickets to Mosley’s rallies, prizes for readers who submitted letters on why they liked the Blackshirts, and regular features on attractive female fascists, under headlines such as “Beauty joins the Blackshirts.”

 By 1936 anti-semitic assaults by fascists were growing and windows of Jewish-owned businesses were routinely smashed. Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’  The Daily Mail headline is just one chilling indication of the very real threat Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists posed in the mid 1930s which concluded with a direct call for young men to join Oswald’s party.and  certainly helped boost  the BUF membership considerably, perhaps to as many as 50,000 active members..

 When, on 7 June 1934, Oswald Mosley addressed a tumultuous rally at London's Olympia, his British Union of Fascists seemed on the verge of political acceptability. Yet with its chaos, violence and subsequent condemnation in the press, Olympia marked the beginning of the end for the Blackshirts.

Mosley’s blackshirts had been harassing the sizeable Jewish population in the East End all through the 1930s and a primary focus of its anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiment was Stepney, an East End neighborhood then home to 60,000 Jews descended from families who fled pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as Irish and other immigrant workers. and on 4th October 1936, Mosley planned the BUF’s biggest and boldest initiative yet. His uniformed Blackshirts would march through London’s East End, home to one of the country’s largest Jewish communities. The intention was quite clear: to cause fear and stir up hate. On the day, more than a hundred thousand east enders, of any faith or none, turned out to protect their community. The fascists were forced to retreat in what became known  as the Battle of Cable Street https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/10/remember-battle-of-cable-street-no.html. in which tens of thousands of anti-fascists  battled 6,000 police and 3,000 BUF Blackshirts to refuse the fascists passage through Stepney. Taking their example from Spanish Communists during the siege of Madrid months earlier, they used as their slogan “¡No pasarán” and erected three sets of barricades on Cable Street. Irish dockworkers tore up paving stones and filled the street with broken glass and marbles to defeat mounted police. They did, not pass.

Mosley lost thousands of supporters as people began to make links between what was happening at home and events in Nazi Germany.s the Second World War loomed,.and during the Second World War, the British authorities viewed Mosley as an enemy sympathiser – if the Nazis successfully invaded the UK, it was believed he would head up the regime on home soil – and had him interned, along with his wife. The pair lived together in the grounds of Holloway prison for the majority of the war, before being released in 1943.After the war, Mosley formed the Union Movement in 1948, but his influence had waned.and The Union Movement was eventually dissolved in 1973 after failing to gain significant ground.

The Daily Mail began to change its editorial line and moved away from explicitly supporting fascists and their regimes. But, the racism and xenophobia remained a key part of their  so called ‘journalism’ and has continued through to this day. Rothermere died in 1940 a broken man, desperately disappointed that the great dictator in Berlin had not forged an alliance with London to vanquish Stalin. He was an utterly disgusting human being..

The forces of Fascism are on the rise again, in Europe and around the world.we must continue to resist wherever they are promote and try to come together. Those who daub synagogues with anti-semitic graffiti or defile mosques with anti-Islamic hate or any other communities that suffer abuse or racism, we  must  forever be on the side of those communities, and they will never be given any welcome, and be outnumbered and humiliated by antifascists. Whilst they continue to intimidate and stoke up division with their racist ideology and their  hatred against difference and people marked as socially undesirable. they  will always be met with resistance, their routes blocked by those that seek to defend their communities from fascist violence.

Sill a high-circulation right-wing tabloid much beloved by “Middle England” The Daily Mail still weathers the occasional barbs about its disreputable past whilst creating hate-filled media stories that create a violent culture of hostility towards migrants and refugees. Remember Rothermere was pro-Nazi. The Daily Mail was pro-Nazi. The Daily Mail is the traitors' paper. Never forget, never forgive. Lower than vermin, as Aneurin Bevan once said. 

 

 Daily Mail Poem

I pour scorn on its petty margins
Its distortion of realities silhouette,
The daily shame, should be its new name
Cross out all its lies, we'd be left with empty pages,
Drinking toasts to underbellies of nastiness
It sharpens its pen on bile,
With agenda of spreading hatred
Is enough to scramble your brain,.
A bully that's scared of everything
Its dark heart  distorts reality,
With script of venom and division
In truth, worth nothing at all,
Its pinning sense of intolerance
Is a message I don't want to hear,
A tabloid  rag not fit for the gutter
Full of twisted opinion and bad news
Designed to leave us disheartened,
Don't know how anyone can call it a friend.