The Mosleys
Sir: Neither Mr Gorden (14 May) nor Mr Forbes (30 April) seems content that Mosley's. pre-war policies were different from those of the Germans. Their lengthy diatribes amount to complaining that he should have joined in the anti-Nazi protests over 'anti-semitism'. It is certainly exorbitant to expect a politician even of his wellestablished prescience to denounce unimagl inable war crimes long before they occurred, but possibly your correspondents have a point —which applies equally, however, to the Labour leader Attlee who was scarcely well-known for crusading against the 'church-burners' of Republican Spain, or to the Conservative leader Churchill who was never troubled by 'racial discrimination' in the British Empire. The despicable bullying of some Jews on occasions in pre-war Germany should have been admitted and condemned more often by the Mosleyites, just as the wholesale extermination of 'enemies of the people' in Soviet cellars and camps should have evoked more criticism from left-wing Jews at the same time. The universal impartiality of President Carter on 'human rights' is a welcome novelty among statesmen.
Mosley's meetings and press support had been under pressure from certain quarters long before he had campaigned against the organised boycott of German trade which the Daily Express (24 March 1933), for example, described as an international Jewish declaration of 'war on Germany'. Mosley sought peaceful co-existence with Hitler, whom we met on only two occasions, the last being fully two years before the Kristallnacht outrages which were not defended by the British Union. Far from any 'idolatry' of Hitler, Sir Oswald's rare public references to him were noticeably restrained, unlike the accolades from the Liberal leader Lloyd George and other visitors impressed by Nazi social achievements. The Mosleys"personal friendship' was in a superior moral category to the advertised relationship of our previous Prime Minister with Communist chieftains like Kosygin after large-scale Soviet atrocities and aggressions.
Robert Stanton Liskeard, Cornwall
Previous page
