Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Postwar Reconstruction of British Fascism (International Library of Political Studies)

by Graham Macklin (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $128.39

  When Oswald Mosley was interned in 1940, how could his followers keep the 'sacred flame' of British fascism alight? Did his arrest kill the movement stone-dead? This meticulous examination of sources including party records, the press, the National Archive and survivors' accounts shows that the Mosley magic - an almost religious experience to his followers - survived, and he was near-canonised by them.In 1948 Mosley formed a new party - the Union Movement (UM) - and the old British-first fascism of the British Union of Fascists gave way to a European fascist super-state, 'Europe-a-Nation', a pan-European fascist force aligned against Russia and America. This 'nation' was based on spiritual and racial values drawn from Mosley's reading of European history, and nurtured by a vast white-ruled colonial empire. But the sacred flame of the new fascism, defined and explained in Mosley's magnum opus, The Alternative , did not survive in that form. As Very Deeply Dyed in Black reveals, Mosley's organisation served as an essential antechamber to later organisations, including the British National Party, which expounded a reversion to British-first opposition to Commonwealth immigration and the rewriting of history, including holocaust denial.In this study of Mosley as leader and individual, Macklin brilliantly demonstrates how Britain's home-grown fascist icon remained a committed, unrepentant fascist and anti-Semite until his final days.