"My father...said that they were a Jewish plot to take over the world."
BBC Radio 4's Archive Hour programme last Saturday, 19 April had a fascinating episode about the anti-fascist (and anti-anti-Semitic) 43 Group battling Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF; amalgamated with Jeffrey Hamm's British League into the Union Movement [UM] in 1948) in the streets of London after World War II: "A Rage in Dalston".
The show may be listened to here until this Saturday, 26 April, at 2000 GMT (which I believe is 1600 EDT).
For a Pink Floyd fan who obsessively listened to The Wall in his younger days (and obsessively watched the Alan Parker-directed movie Pink Floyd's The Wall at the midnight movies) and was appalled by the Oswald Mosley Meets Enoch Powell fantasies of Pink toward the end of the album/movie ("Waiting For the Worms," etc.), it was chilling to listen to audio recordings of the fascist rallies-cum-street riots of the late 1940s.
I had no idea that Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, was an anti-fascist fighter in 43 Group and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
I also had no idea that at least some of the street fighters in London whose weapon of choice was the straight razor advocated slashing an opponent across the tokhes -- the Yiddish origin of the word "tush", synonymous with "heinie", "bum", "arse" -- rather than the face. Reportedly one wily veteran said that slashing an opponent across the face was just for the movies.
And I found this comment from a (supposedly) former fascist alarming and amusing in almost equal measure:
"Then my father found out that [Jeffrey] Hamm had converted to the Catholics, and that was it. My father detested Catholics for some reason, and said that they were a Jewish plot to take over the world."
Considering that some far-right Catholics have themselves played no small part in the history of Western anti-Semitism -- certain monarchist clerics have pointed to the Freemasons as being a front for a sinister Jewish cabal who fomented the French Revolution, for example -- this suspicion that the Catholic Church is itself a front for a group of "perfidious Jews" is richly ironic, and risible.
Speaking of Enoch Powell, one could do far worse than to listen to BBC Radio 4's "'Rivers of Blood', The Real Source" programme, which is a one-hour investigation of the origins of Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech of 1968; I first heard it a couple of months ago, but it was re-broadcast this past Sunday, 20 April, as part of Radio 4's year-long series of programmes looking back at the tumultuous year of 1968.
The show may be listened to here until this Saturday, 26 April, at 2000 GMT (which I believe is 1600 EDT).
For a Pink Floyd fan who obsessively listened to The Wall in his younger days (and obsessively watched the Alan Parker-directed movie Pink Floyd's The Wall at the midnight movies) and was appalled by the Oswald Mosley Meets Enoch Powell fantasies of Pink toward the end of the album/movie ("Waiting For the Worms," etc.), it was chilling to listen to audio recordings of the fascist rallies-cum-street riots of the late 1940s.
I had no idea that Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, was an anti-fascist fighter in 43 Group and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
I also had no idea that at least some of the street fighters in London whose weapon of choice was the straight razor advocated slashing an opponent across the tokhes -- the Yiddish origin of the word "tush", synonymous with "heinie", "bum", "arse" -- rather than the face. Reportedly one wily veteran said that slashing an opponent across the face was just for the movies.
And I found this comment from a (supposedly) former fascist alarming and amusing in almost equal measure:
"Then my father found out that [Jeffrey] Hamm had converted to the Catholics, and that was it. My father detested Catholics for some reason, and said that they were a Jewish plot to take over the world."
Considering that some far-right Catholics have themselves played no small part in the history of Western anti-Semitism -- certain monarchist clerics have pointed to the Freemasons as being a front for a sinister Jewish cabal who fomented the French Revolution, for example -- this suspicion that the Catholic Church is itself a front for a group of "perfidious Jews" is richly ironic, and risible.
Speaking of Enoch Powell, one could do far worse than to listen to BBC Radio 4's "'Rivers of Blood', The Real Source" programme, which is a one-hour investigation of the origins of Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech of 1968; I first heard it a couple of months ago, but it was re-broadcast this past Sunday, 20 April, as part of Radio 4's year-long series of programmes looking back at the tumultuous year of 1968.