1/7 Sir Oswald Mosley was Hitler's closest UK ally. When he was released from internment in 1943, thirty thousand Britons protested. In NZ, too, there was protest. But Mosley was a part of the British establishment, which had many supporters of Nazism. Mosley soon got a shock.
2/7 Only months after the end of WW2, Mosley began holding rallies & marches in London. But he hadn't counted on the Group of '43, a collection of Jewish war veterans & Holocaust survivors. The UK state was uninterested in stopping Mosley, so the Group turned to direct action
3/7 Last year Daniel Sonabend published We Fight Fascists, a history of the Group of '43. Sonabend shows how WW2 continued on the streets of London, as Mosley held rallies & turned his thugs loose. But the trained fighters of the Group pulverised Mosley's movement.
4/7 The Group broke up Mosley's street parades & hospitalised his thugs. By 1950 the Group dissolved; Mosley had been defeated. He re-emerged in the '60s, when he waged a campaign against black migrants to the UK. A new outfit, the '62 Group, fought him then.
5/7 Many hope the police & SIS will stop our resurgent fascist movement. Both groups have a history of taking fascists' sides. The police who fought for apartheid in '81. The SIS was founded to counter the radical left. The cops & the army have been infiltrated by far rightists.
6/7 The bankruptcy of the police & the SIS is shown by the way they failed to stop not only Brenton Tarrant's massacres but a long series of arsons & murders by white supremacists in the '90s & early 2000s.
7/7 7/7 In this covid era NZ has, for the first time in 88 years, a significant movement led by open fascists. There is much to ponder in the story of the '43 Group, & in their direct action against fascists.
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